From Tools to Mastery: What We Learned Across Four Sessions
Posted by [email protected] on Jun. 1, 2026 / Event Recap / Subscribe 0
From Tools to Mastery brought together five experts across four sessions to tackle the skills that make AEC marketers more effective: building a strong brand, working smarter in InDesign, collaborating with operations, and getting more mileage from your content. Whether you attended all four or missed a few, here are the highlights.
Session 1 | Understanding and Building Your Brand
David Lecours, LecoursDesign
A brand is more than a logo or color palette; it’s a series of small gestures made consistently over time. David walked the group through the process of understanding (auditing), building, and protecting your brand, suggesting that firms audit their brand every 3-5 years to see if any adjustments are needed.
- Use a competitive audit to find your white space. Map five competitor firms against 10 criteria (positioning, services, reputation, color palette, etc.) to uncover where you can differentiate.
- Interview both your fans and critics. Many valuable insights come from relationships that didn't work out, whether it's a client who hired another firm or a candidate who declined an offer. Keep interviews anonymous and deliver findings collectively to protect those interviewed and ensure you get honest information.
- Define your positioning: "We do X for Y" + 3 Uniques. X is your flagship service, Y is your primary client sector. Then identify three things that collectively differentiate your firm. You can share one or two individually with a competitor, but all three together should be yours alone.
- A good brand name should be memorable, meaningful, and evocative. It should be easy to say, spell, and remember. It should differentiate you in your market, and ideally hold meaning. In AEC, founder-name firms and acronyms are common but carry real downsides: they're hard to scale, difficult to transition, and rarely stick with people who don't already know you.
- Use brand personality attributes as a filter for everything you put out. Pick five adjectives a client would use to describe your firm at your best. A tool like Brand Deck (branding.cards) can help your team narrow things down from a large list of attributes. Once defined, use them as a filter to keep your messaging consistent. Does your latest proposal reflect those five adjectives?
- Protect your brand with guidelines and guardians. Whether communicated through a traditional PDF or a digital platform like standards.site, brand guidelines give your team clear rules for logos, colors, typography, and templates. Ultimately, everyone in the firm represents the brand, and thus shares responsibility to protect it.
Session 2 | Design Tools in Action: InDesign for Marketers
Lindsey Gregory & Chabeli Rose Espiritu, WSP
Lindsey and Chabeli walked through a live InDesign demo, building a proposal from scratch to show how an efficient workflow can help marketers meet tight deadlines.
- Build a parent page hierarchy. Create a base parent page with elements that appear on every page (logos, footer, etc.). Then apply the base parent page to all other parent pages so that a single change, like swapping a logo, applies across the entire document.
- Set up paragraph and character styles before you start pasting content. Styles let you format consistently with one click instead of manually adjusting text. Nested styles and GREP styles take it further by applying formatting based on a rule, such as automatically bolding bulleted text before a colon or highlighting placeholder notes carried over from Word.
- Anchor images and callout boxes to your text so they move with the content. If text reflows during edits, anchored objects stay with their paragraph instead of floating out of position. This is especially useful for project photos, callout boxes, and sidebar graphics that need to stay tied to specific content.
- Use Creative Cloud Libraries to store reusable content across proposals. Firm profiles, logos, team photos, infographics, and boilerplate text can all live in a shared library and be placed into any InDesign file with one click.
- Consider the Book feature to split large proposals into section files. This lets multiple people work on different sections simultaneously. Styles can be synchronized across all files from a single source, and the entire book exports as one PDF.
Session 3 | How Marketing + Operations Come Together to Elevate Your Firm
Laurie Lumish, CPSM | Director of Marketing and Business Development, Degenkolb Engineers
Laurie shared how she transformed Degenkolb's marketing function over 20+ years by building relationships with operational partners, using real projects to illustrate why cross-functional collaboration is essential for marketing at the management level.
- Track the right data and your results will follow. You may be able to improve your win rate simply by improving how proposal time is tracked. Working with finance to clean up timesheet entries and pipeline reporting can reveal where the real gaps are and give you the visibility to act on them.
- Build your marketing budget line by line, not from a percentage of revenue. Track every initiative individually, from events and sponsorships to photography and subscriptions. Copy the list forward each year and adjust. When budget cuts come, a line-by-line budget will allow marketing and leadership to work together to determine what to cut.
- Quantify your results in terms leadership cares about. Whether it's the cost per lead on a digital ad campaign or the conversion rate from your careers page, putting financial metrics to your marketing initiatives helps you justify your budget, make the case for changes, and demonstrate business impact. An ROI calculator can help you do this at the initiative level.
- Design training programs around four learning styles and multiple delivery channels. Whether you're rolling out a new CRM or teaching seller-doers how to use LinkedIn, your audience includes visual, auditory, reading, and hands-on learners. Deliver training through multiple channels and build in repetition. Degenkolb's CRM launch required 400 hours of training, and weekly office hours afterward were what finally drove adoption.
- Insert yourself into decisions that affect your brand, even if they don't look like marketing. Laurie leads Degenkolb's real estate program because office design directly shapes employee experience and brand perception, and she weighs in on timesheet codes because they affect how easily she can pull CRM and proposal data. If a decision touches how clients or employees experience your firm, marketing should have a seat at the table.
Session 4 | Content That Works Harder: Repurposing and Amplifying Your Message
Chanel Sonego | Director of Marketing, COAR Design Group
Chanel shared how she approaches content creation at COAR Design Group with a simple rule: don't create anything unless it can be repurposed across multiple channels. A single project story can fuel a social post, a website case study, a proposal narrative, an award submission, an email announcement, a recruiting highlight, lessons learned, and much more.
- Define your narrative before repurposing. Start by identifying what type of story you're telling: the why behind the project, what made your approach different, or the impact it had on the client or community. These become the storytelling building blocks that anchor everything you create.
- Use a story arc to structure your content. Chanel shared a six-step framework: foundational knowledge (your project data), the challenge, the innovation, the impact, the strategy, and the human element (content that educates, entertains, or inspires). Building your source story with this arc makes it much easier to pull from later when adapting for different channels.
- Amplify means adapt, not duplicate. Different platforms require different formats, tones, and levels of detail. A proposal narrative reads differently than a LinkedIn post, which reads differently than an internal newsletter. Rather than copying and pasting the same paragraph everywhere, repurposing content means reshaping the same core story to fit the audience and channel.
- Make content sustainable with simple workflows and shared ownership. Content should not live solely with marketing. When project teams contribute photos, data points, testimonials, and lessons learned along the way, marketing has the raw material to tell stronger stories faster.
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