How do you build a content strategy that actually supports sales?

Katie Robinson (00:02) I always say whenever you launch any sort of data program, make sure you record where you start, and that way you can show the progress to really show the type of impact that it had. And then it just trickled into other things. I was selfish because I was looking at it from marketing standpoint. I want to make it easier for me to do my job. But then eventually our in-house counsel was like, I can use this data for renewing our professional liability insurance. And when we started bringing in all of this data, we actually found that our premiums decreased because we were more accurately reporting on our work. So the benefits went far beyond just my needs in marketing. which was really amazing to see as well. Ben Ard (01:07) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Katie. Katie, welcome to the show. Katie Robinson (01:12) Thanks so much. Ben Ard (01:13) Katie, I'm excited. You have such a cool story and that's really relatable to today's subject. What we're going to focus on really how you look at content and knowledge and how those worlds tie together. But before we dive into the subject and kind of get into everything, let's get to know you. If you don't mind sharing your background for the audience, that would be awesome. Katie Robinson (01:33) Of of course. Well, my name is Katie Robinson. I am the Chief Marketing Officer at LS3P, which is an architecture firm, interiors and planning, primarily in the Southeast with 12 office locations. And I oversee both the marketing departments and what we call our knowledge management departments here at LS3P. And this is my 21st year here. So really have grown up in this firm. And I come from more of a analytics, economics, education background, but found myself in the world of architecture and just completely fell in love with bringing the built environment, telling those stories of how they came to be and how people interact with the spaces. And then also coupling it with how the buildings perform from a data standpoint and how can we take that knowledge to make the buildings better, our environment better, and just crafting it all into one story through marketing. And that's what I love. That's why I am so fortunate to have both of these teams under my umbrella to be able to really capitalize on having that knowledge, having that data to tell the story. Ben Ard (02:47) love that. That's amazing. And the fact that you've been at the same group for 21 years have grown with them. mean, we were talking before we clicked the record button, the firm has seen incredible growth and I'm sure you've played a very active role in that. And the pride and knowledge of like you've played this cool role in seeing something develop and grow in each new office and every new project. I'm just so jealous of that. think a lot of people crave that. So that's so cool that you get to see that. But you also have seen this progress on all sorts of fronts, like talk about tribal knowledge. I'm sure you have all of it, right? And there's all sorts of good things. So what we're going to focus on today, and here's kind of the working title. It's a little bit longer of one. So bear with me the partnership between marketing and knowledge management and how that connection shapes strategy content. and influence inside a firm. So what I'm really intrigued by is when you first started, you were looking for knowledge, data, statistics, information you could use on marketing. Where did you go to find that? And how did you kind of start to develop that knowledge management program? Katie Robinson (03:58) tell this story often because I love it. When I first started at LS3P and I was putting together proposals, I literally sat on the floor in a marketing closet with these huge three ring binders packed full of project data. And when I was putting together maybe a proposal for a new high school, I would go through and try to find all of the past high schools in those locations or I would try to piece together things from different spreadsheets I found on the various locations we were saving them. Or I would go bother people over and over and over, project managers, the CEO, anybody to say, hey, what can we use to submit for this proposal? And so it really was a ⁓ fun time because I learned a lot by looking through all of that information. But also it was very frustrating because we had such substantial projects in our portfolio and I knew we were only telling half the story. And that's when I started to really take a look at it and say, where could we store this information? And my first kind of aha was Excel, know, because that was probably one of the most useful programs that we had back then of just. bringing together all of the different spreadsheets that I could find to try to track the data. But I was still finding that I was getting really frustrated because it needed to be easier. We needed to be able to fully tell that story. And so that's when I really started leaning into a database system that we happen to have already, because we used it to do our financials, we used it to do our time sheets. And there were all these glorious fields in there about project data. cost, square footage, who worked on it, and they just weren't being used. And that's when I kind of raised my hand. This conversation started probably about 2008 and said, hey, can I play with this? Can I take some of this information I'm finding on the floor in the marketing closet and put it into digital format and then see what we could do with it of pulling reports and. That was kind of our first ⁓ entry into the knowledge management world. And I got tremendous support by other business team leaders. Obviously the architects were all for it because they're like, if you could just stop asking me that same question over and over, it's a win for me. So go ahead. So that's how we kind of started with just what can we collect? How will we use it? Because if we weren't going to use it, we weren't going to ask for it. And then how does it tie to everything? How does it tie to more compelling proposals when we're chasing work? More compelling proactive marketing material that we can show beautiful pictures of our projects, but then also back it up with data. So that was kind of our first entryway. It literally started with me sitting on a floor going through binders. Ben Ard (06:51) love that. And often the greatest things that we do are the things that don't scale. They can't scale, but we do them anyways because they're the right things to do. So as you're building out this database, really transferring this knowledge from these binders into the database, how did you start to get adoption across the company to have other people record knowledge? How did you kind of build that adoption? Cause I do think there's a lot of people today. that are like, man, there's so many good stories in our company. I just don't know how to collect them. How did you start getting the rest of everyone excited about this and actually participating? Katie Robinson (07:27) Sure At the time we were two offices. We were starting our third office from scratch in Columbia, South Carolina. So it was kind of a, it was perfect timing because we were growing, but we didn't have all of those pain points yet of growing too fast. And I would love to say that the adoption was really hard because when I talked to so many different companies and firms about knowledge management and data management, they're like, I just don't know where to start. It's so overwhelming. And I guess I was just naive at the time. And I was thinking it really isn't that hard. need, we need the data anyway. But since I happen to be doing a lot of proposals in the K-12 education world, I started there. I started with the K-12 team. And we took a look at our past years of experience, which at the time that was the main part of LS3P's portfolio was education. And we decided to take like 10 or 20 projects and just see what we could collect. And it was primarily me. And then I got a collection of kind of emerging professionals early on in their career, not quite registered yet to assist on it. And we basically said, let's give it six months. Let's see how much we can collect on these projects in six months. And we ran a report before we started because it's really important to be able to track your progress. And within about three months, we happened to get another proposal in for an elementary school renovation and addition. And it asked a question of, you know, how many similar additions have we done in the past 10 years? So I ran another report and our experience almost I think it went up by about 80 % of what we would have reported to what we actually had because we started with this data. That quick example buy-in across the boards, everybody was like, yes, that's awesome. This really has legs. And so that's when we started thinking, okay, who's really going to collect this data? Ben Ard (09:08) Mm. Katie Robinson (09:26) And so our first thought was obviously the project managers, because they know it and they're not busy, you know, doing project management or Ben Ard (09:31) Yeah. Katie Robinson (09:32) drawings or anything like that. But I will have to tell you for several years that actually worked. You know, they were the ones with the most intimate knowledge of the project. So it worked for about two or three years, but it didn't have the progress that we hoped for. That's when we went back around 2013 to those emerging professionals and we were like, OK, There's more to this. And that's when we formally launched our data manager program. So every project that we have has a role on it as a data manager. It's not an overhead role. It's a billable person on the project and they're working on the project. They may be helping with the drawings. They may be doing red lines, but they're intimately familiar with this project. And they started collecting the data with training and putting it in to the database. And what we found was Within the first about five years of us doing this, we went from having about 20 % of data on our projects to over 95 % at the end of the year, which was huge. But then the other benefit that we started seeing was these emerging professionals, they were advancing faster in their careers because they had access to things they used to not have access to. Owner agreements, consultant agreements, learning directly from the project manager about cost per square footage and all of the different elements that go into the project. So it was really a happy accident that also this mentorship angle came into play as well. And some of our early individuals who were consistently data managers on projects, they're now in leadership roles within their different markets, which is really amazing to see. So that was just kind of an added benefit. So it really scaled. quickly and naturally because when people can see how easy it is to access information and the really cool part is we track time because you we are a billable industry. The first thing people are going to say is utilization rates you're going to kill us. We found that it had about a point one percent. Affects on utilization and that is it for the entire year. Ben Ard (11:27) Mm-hmm. Katie Robinson (11:40) So it's a really easy lift. Data managers spend about 20 hours a year putting data into their projects, and that's all. So showing those statistics too, I always say whenever you launch any sort of data program, make sure you record where you start, and that way you can show the progress to really show the type of impact that it had. And then it just trickled into other things. I was selfish because I was looking at it from marketing standpoint. I want to make it easier for me to do my job. But then eventually our in-house counsel was like, I can use this data for renewing our professional liability insurance. And when we started bringing in all of this data, we actually found that our premiums decreased because we were more accurately reporting on our work. So the benefits went far beyond just my needs in marketing. which was really amazing to see as well. Ben Ard (12:31) I love that. That's amazing. So you took this opportunity, collected the data, built the database system basically from scratch, from a closet full of binders, developed it, showed the direct impact. I love that story about the elementary school project to show, hey, look how big of an impact it made on just one project. Imagine this for everyone all the time. So now you're sitting in a position where you have knowledge management, you have data, you have access. How does that unlock marketing strategy, marketing content? What do you do with that on a marketing team to like get full advantage of that information now? Katie Robinson (13:10) Sure, sure. It's so incredible the impact that it has on marketing. ⁓ Ben Ard (13:15) ⁓ I'm sure there's plenty of marketers that are like, I'm so jealous right now. Katie Robinson (13:20) Right? Sorry guys, you can do it too. But I think the biggest impact that it has is once this program was up and running, the amount of time it took us to do some of our efforts decreased so much. And instead of saying, well then we can decrease the number of marketing team members we have, we flipped the script on that. We were like, okay, we have been really reactive in our marketing over the years. We want to be proactive. We want to get in front of the client before they have a project. We want them to know us. And so along this journey as well, as we were building knowledge management in the firm, we were also kind of restructuring marketing. So in 2020, we moved from a typical architectural industry marketing structure to operating like a creative agency. within an architecture firm. So I often joke that LS3P is a marketing agency. We just happen to do architecture. I'm not sure the architects appreciate that joke though. But it was really nice because we weren't having to spend as much time going and asking for data before we could finish a proposal. We had time to take a step back and think about what proactive materials can we put out into the world, whether it's social media or podcast or video. to really be in front of those clients. So when they get a proposal from us for work, along with 30 other proposals in front of us, we stand out. We wanted to make sure that we were using the, not just the data we were collecting in that, but also throughout this time, we really started collecting the knowledge in people's heads that don't fit nicely into a field in our database and really lean into that as well of. how can we take our team, which is our most cherished asset that we have, how can we take our team members and position them in front of clients, have them speaking at conferences that our clients attend, have them published? A lot of architects are introverts. So sometimes this format, like podcasts, is a little bit easier for them to swallow than standing on a stage and presenting. But really, because we had this data, we had a lot more time to invest in the pre-positioning. And we didn't have to go outside to another agency and pay for that. We did that all in-house with our amazing marketing team. So I would say that was probably the biggest benefit. And we've also seen a lot of competition come to the Southeast in forms of other architecture firms. And they're much larger than we are. And we have to make sure that we... compete, we can stay relevant. so the pretty portfolio in a handshake doesn't win you the jobs like it used to about 10 or 15 years ago. You have to show the data behind it. And I think clients are expecting that, which is really beneficial to us because we do have that part of the story as well. And it's also allowed us to retain a lot of our marketing team members because if you think about I have to do a proposal and I have to chase down 20 different architects for information and then they're probably not going to be there and then I'm going to miss my deadlines and it's very, very stressful. They have this platform, they have the access to information. So it allows us to be able to kind of reduce that stress level that a lot of AEC ⁓ marketing teams face now. So tons of benefits to it. Ben Ard (16:49) I love that. That's amazing. Well, Katie, we are almost out of time. These episodes go by so quick. I love the story. I think it's a great message to marketers to figure out how to consolidate your knowledge, put it in on place, and then take advantage of that proactively using that for marketing. And that way you don't have to be a reactive kind of situation. Katie, going through this process, again, from binders to a full database, all of that fun stuff, any words of wisdom or advice from lessons you learned along the way that could help expedite or make this process easier for people kind of embarking on it in some stage of the journey? Katie Robinson (17:29) This is always my favorite part. Yes. Make friends with every department in your firm. I don't think that our knowledge management program would be as successful if we tried to do it in a bubble. So I had a lot of conversations with Insight, with our legal counsel, with technology, with the practice team members of all levels, our CA staff, every entity, our people team to just ask them what do you need, what do you report on, what surveys do you do? It helps to gain that support system behind you, which is great, but it also gives you a knowledge of the business side of the firm, what it takes to be successful, and how this data can impact multiple entities. So my first part of advice would be gather your friends, make sure everybody is on board. Communicate it often, make sure everybody in the firm knows what you're trying to do, even before you do it to kind of tease people with the possible outcomes. Use fake data if you need to show them what impact it could have at first. And then the other part of advice I would have is don't wait for it to be perfect. I think so many companies and firms want to do some sort of data management program. but they feel like they have to get it perfect before they launch it. And if you don't have a big database, start with Excel. Start with a shared Excel file, throw it out there and see what you can get and just start somewhere. Ben Ard (18:54) Love that. That's amazing. Katie, well, thank you so much for the insights and everything you shared today. For anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you? Katie Robinson (19:04) You can look me up on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn profile is just under Katie Schroer Robinson. So if you just look that up, you can find me and then also on our website LS3P.com. Ben Ard (19:16) And we will link to Katie's LinkedIn profile and LS3P's website in the show notes below so everyone can go down there, click on those, connect and follow. Katie, thank you so much for the insights and the time today. I really do appreciate it. Katie Robinson (19:30) Of thanks for having me.