Barbour ABI’s Report Is a Wake-Up Call. Now Let’s Fix the PR Disconnect
Barbour ABI’s latest report “The Case for Marketing Investment in the Built Environment” speaks to my heart. We absolutely need to raise the game and make sure that marketing – and specifically from my perspective PR and comms – are seen as an investment, and an investment for the long term.
No great shock there, especially coming from a PR & comms consultant. But what the report does show is there’s still a long way to go if we’re going to break down the old school approach to construction marketing and dispel this image of a “boys club”.
Data deep dive
The task at hand becomes so clear when you look at the data behind the question: “What has the biggest impact on winning work for your business?” Network and relationships came out top, closely followed by digital presence. Thought leadership, events and trade shows, and PR & media coverage sit at the bottom of the pile.
Two things really got me scratching my head about this:
Why are we talking about thought leadership and PR and media coverage as separate entities?
Why is there still this misalignment that investing in PR and comms is going to provide a quick fix for sales leads?
Let’s start with the first conundrum.
Connecting the dots
A key component to any good PR campaign or activation is having something unique to say, a perspective that adds real value to your audience. That is thought leadership. The two should work hand-in-hand, not sit in separate boxes on a survey chart.
Thought leadership gives PR its substance. It’s the proof that your business has expertise, experience, and insight worth sharing. PR, in turn, amplifies that voice, getting it seen, heard, and trusted in the right places. Media coverage is the metric that sits behind it all. When they’re aligned, they create a powerful feedback loop: insight fuels visibility, visibility drives credibility, and credibility attracts opportunity.
When will it end?
The second issue is the one that gets PR practitioners scratching at their skin. The lingering expectation that PR and comms can deliver a quick hit on sales. That’s not how reputation works.
Brand awareness, building trust, and establishing authority are a slow burn. Add in the long buying cycles and group decision making that exists across the built environment, and you’ve got to be committed for the long term. Yet too often, PR budgets and outcomes are judged on the same timescales as short-term lead-gen campaigns.
The irony is that the strongest leads often do come from reputation-led activity, from the brand awareness, credibility and trust that PR and thought leadership build in the background. It’s just that those wins are harder to attribute on a spreadsheet.
If we want to change the perception of marketing in construction, we have to stop separating the tactics and start showing how they connect. It’s all part of one ecosystem.
There’s lots to be optimistic about in this report and its very existence puts this debate firmly on the table. But we need to start the change now. Because if we don’t start connecting the dots now, we’ll be having the same conversation in another five years and by then, we’ll have fallen even further behind.