Extracting, capturing and communicating knowledge from project team members are fundamental responsibilities of an architecture firm’s marketing department. LS3P, an architecture, interiors and planning firm, has honed these processes over the years to drive its success, elevate its marketing efforts and provide greater value to its clients.
In this episode of “Spill the Ink,” Michelle Calcote King interviews Katie Robinson, LS3P’s chief marketing officer and a principal in the firm. They discuss the firm’s marketing evolution, including how Katie helped refine LS3P’s knowledge management efforts and the positive effect it had on the firm’s departments. They delve into conversations about how to engage subject-matter experts in marketing efforts as well as podcasting, social media, career development and artificial intelligence.
Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn
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Who is Katie Robinson and what is LS3P
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How to engage busy architecture professionals in marketing efforts
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How LS3P captures and leverages employee knowledge
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Why LS3P centralized its data and information in a custom dashboard and how it streamlines communication across the organization
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How architecture marketing is evolving
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The role of social media and technology in today’s marketing landscape
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The importance of career advancement opportunities for marketing professionals
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What is LS3P’s approach to artificial intelligence
About our featured guest
Katie Robinson joined LS3P, an architecture, interiors and planning firm with offices throughout the Southeast, in 2004. She serves as a principal and the firm’s chief marketing officer, playing a pivotal role in driving the firm's practice and business processes. With a keen focus on supporting the firm's vision, Katie works closely with the Executive Committee to ensure comprehensive support across marketing, knowledge management and strategy.
With her extensive expertise in marketing and communications, Katie has spearheaded a transformative journey at LS3P, turning the marketing department into a dynamic creative agency. Under her guidance, the team has excelled in managing both internal and external communications while offering responsive and proactive marketing and creative services. Katie's strategic leadership has been instrumental in the successful creation and implementation of innovative marketing collateral and brand management strategies, with a specific focus on fostering brand trust.
Beyond her contributions to marketing, Katie assumes a vital role within LS3P's business team. Her responsibilities extend to leading the knowledge management efforts within the firm, collaborating closely with the practice team members to prioritize data collection on all projects. Notably, she was instrumental in the establishment of LS3P's pioneering Data Manager Program in 2013, which has solidified her position as a leader in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. Katie's acute understanding of the profound connection between knowledge and creativity enables her to bridge the gap between data-driven insights and exceptional design.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by Reputation Ink.
Founded by Michelle Calcote King, Reputation Ink is a public relations and content marketing agency that serves professional services firms of all shapes and sizes across the United States, including corporate law firms and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms.
Reputation Ink understands how sophisticated corporate buyers find and select professional services firms. For more than a decade, they have helped firms grow through thought leadership-fueled strategies, including public relations, content marketing, video marketing, social media, podcasting, marketing strategy services and more.
To learn more, visit www.rep-ink.com or email them at info@rep-ink.com today.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Katie Robinson: I will tell anybody in leadership the key to success is hire people far more creative and smarter than you are.
[00:00:09]: Welcome to "Spill the Ink," a podcast by Reputation Ink, where we feature experts in growth and brand visibility for law firms and architecture, engineering and construction firms. Now, let's get started with the show.
[00:00:27] Michelle Calcote King: Hi everyone. I'm Michelle Calcote King. I'm the host of this podcast, and I'm also the principal and president of Reputation Ink. We're a public relations and content marketing agency for professional services firms, including architecture, engineering, and construction. To learn more, go to rep-ink.com.
We're going to continue our series talking to architecture firm CMOs. And we're going to just kind of dive into a discussion with one of the leading CMOs at a regional firm about what they're getting right, what are some of their challenges, how you go about building a thriving marketing department.
So yeah, I'm excited to jump into that. Our guest today is Katie Robinson. She's the principal and chief marketing officer at LS3P, an architecture, interiors and planning firm. Welcome to the show, Katie.
[00:01:14] Katie Robinson: Thanks so much for having me, Michelle.
[00:01:16] Michelle Calcote King: I called you all a regional firm, but I don't know if that's correct. How would you describe the firm?
[00:01:21] Katie Robinson: Absolutely. We are a regional firm. Some of our clients and projects take us beyond the Southeast, but our commitment truly is to this area, which is why our 12 offices are lumped throughout the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. It truly is where our heart lies.
[00:01:40] Michelle Calcote King: Fantastic. Well, tell me a little bit about yourself first. How'd you get into architecture marketing?
[00:01:45] Katie Robinson: I fell into it by chance. I was living in Atlanta straight out of college and working for a publishing company. And it was a very exciting industry. It was the paper industry, so really good content. They moved their operations over to Brussels, Belgium. So, I was looking for a job and back then we didn't really have Google to search. So I got the phone book out and found architecture and found that a wonderful firm, TBS in Atlanta was hiring for a marketing coordinator. So, I kind of stumbled upon it by chance and was lucky enough to get hired there and join their team. So, that's how I kind of found my way into this industry.
[00:02:34] Michelle Calcote King: Love it. It just kind of stuck. I tell my employees some of those stories about before the internet. I can tell there's always this look of disbelief on their face.
[00:02:42] Katie Robinson: I know. It's like this just glaze and it's like, "Really?"
[00:02:47] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, we had to do things differently back then.
Tell me about your department. I think I saw on your LinkedIn profile, you kind of talked about turning the marketing department into a dynamic creative agency. So if you can kind of describe for me the team you've built and the specialties that you have in-house.
[00:03:03] Katie Robinson: Of course. This is my favorite thing to talk about because my team is amazing. I will tell anybody in leadership, the key to success is hire people far more creative and smarter than you are, and then you look really good. And that's what we've built with the marketing team here.
I'll kind of back up. When I first started with the firm in 2004, we had two offices at the time. So we've grown from 2 to 12. Marketing existed, but we were really very reactive in marketing. You know, "Here's a proposal. We need to do it," and that was pretty much it. I think we had a two-page website, no social media, obviously then.
So, my career with LS3P has been interesting because none of the positions that I've been in existed before I was able to show there's a need for it, "Let's try it and let's evolve." So what's happened is I've been able to also build different marketing positions along the way. We used to be very office-centric where there was a marketing individual, we call them coordinators at the time; we've since ditched that title because we don't like it. But in different offices, and they would basically do the responsive stuff, the proposals and interviews. And then if there was an ad that needed to be done, we would throw that together, but there really wasn't a focus on building brand trust and brand awareness or even proactive marketing in general.
We made a small step in around 2015 by putting together a communications team that started to push some of these efforts. But, honestly, it wasn't really until 2020 when we decided to make marketing a firm-wide team instead of office-specific that we really saw a huge change. We did that in the beginning of 2020. The buy-in wasn't great because the office leadership was like, "This is my marketing person. I don't know." Then we all went home to work during the pandemic.
[00:05:17] Michelle Calcote King: Right.
[00:05:18] Katie Robinson: So it was actually perfect timing. Something we thought would take us a year or so to get buy-in had almost immediate buy-in because your person wasn't local anymore.
[00:05:28] Michelle Calcote King: Right. Right. You kind of had to think less in that way. You had to put your framework that way.
[00:05:34] Katie Robinson: Absolutely. Absolutely. And what we found was we had such great collaboration amongst our team members. We were able to put lane processes in place so when you worked with anybody in marketing, you knew what to expect. It was the same process for everyone. That also helps us jump in and help one another and pick up. You know, if somebody gets pulled away for an emergency of any type, somebody can swoop in and help. So we did that and then it kind of helped us to escalate the offerings that we were able to do within marketing. So our group created sub-teams. We have individuals who were really passionate about video and podcasts; individuals passionate about design award submittals; individuals that really like to do booklets and layouts and story crafting, and things like that. So we developed these sub-teams where our marketing specialists can jump in and out. And so they can build their skills; they can do what they're passionate about; they can have a break from all those responsive efforts, the churn and burn of our industry. And then it started escalating from there. We had an individual in the firm, within the marketing team who was very interested in doing experiential graphic design. So now our department offers experiential graphics. So we're able to work with the practice team members, be a little bit billable, which is also nice.
[00:07:02] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, neat.
[00:07:04] Katie Robinson: And then from there clients started approaching us saying, "Can you help with our brand?" "Yes, we would love to." So we've really started to model our team more as a creative agency rather than your typical architectural firm marketing.
[00:07:18] Michelle Calcote King: I love that. Marketing is becoming more complex and having the ability to access a variety of specialists I'm sure is incredibly valuable to your firm.
Tell me about the role of thought leadership in your firm.
[00:07:32] Katie Robinson: Well, it's essential for, actually, both of my loves because I do lead the marketing group. My brain doesn't know boundaries, so the left side and right side just mesh together a lot. So, I also lead the knowledge management side.
[00:07:46] Michelle Calcote King: Okay. Great. Yeah.
[00:07:47] Katie Robinson: Our Foresight blog that we have on our website, it's awesome. It's a great place where we display our thought leadership, and what's so unique about it is it's voices from all over our firm. From student interns all the way to the CEO. That's kind of, you know, a really fun outlet that we have going on with our website. And right now, I would say, and this is probably not a challenge that's just for LS3P, but I think from our industry alone is capturing that thought leadership, especially from the individuals who are getting ready to start their next journey into retirement, and making sure that we can disseminate all of their knowledge and their expertise. And not only being a leader, but, you know, how they put together a C proposal for a client or you know, wall sections or, you know the little things we don't think to ask people. So how do we, as the knowledge management team, extract that knowledge? And then how do we, as the marketing team, communicate that internally as well as externally? That's kind of the balance that we find ourselves in right now, and I know it's something that a lot of firms within our industry and other industries are looking at as people start looking into retirement.
[00:09:13] Michelle Calcote King: A hundred percent. And yeah, the two go really hand in hand. And I love that you use that term knowledge extraction. I use that all the time. It's basically what we're doing, right? We're really kind of pulling knowledge out of these experts' brains and then as marketers, we think, "Okay, what can I do with all this?" But you've also got that dual approach of, you know, just setting the firm up for the future.
I also saw that you guys have a podcast. Tell me a little bit about that.
[00:09:36] Katie Robinson: We do. We do. We have a podcast that recently launched. I was just joking to our fantastic marketing director, Meredith Ray, how I have not been a guest on the podcast yet. But it's okay. She assures me that I will be invited. But our podcast is called "Human Scale." And it's really fun because it's where we sit down with any and all members of LS3P. And we talk about the different facets of what we do, how we do it, but more importantly, who we are as humans. So you get a little bit of what they're doing in their professional life, but you get a whole lot of what makes them who they are.
So it's incredibly fun. Meredith, who I mentioned, hosts along with one of our practice team members, Patrick Cooley, and they have such a fun dynamic together as well. So, I believe we have three external episodes right now and we've recorded our fourth right now. So it's really fun and it's, as you know from this, it is such a great way to connect with people.
[00:10:43] Michelle Calcote King: It really is. Yeah. I've made so many connections, and the way I position it when I talk to clients about it is it's a new way of networking and making relationships. It's just so focused. There's so many benefits you get from it, but you have a focused conversation versus that, you know, happy hour or networking event where you might not get to have that kind of deep dive with someone. You really get to do that in a podcast in a way that I'm not sure you could do in any other way. And it just helps so much with the way people consume media nowadays. And as marketers, we're always looking to repurpose content, and it's just such a great tool for that, for generating that content.
You know, one of the challenges we run up against, especially in a professional services firm, and the reason I transitioned to this is because I think podcasts are a great way to do it, is getting your busy architects — so these are the fee earners, these are people that are billing clients who participate and share their knowledge and be part of the thought leadership. What have you found some ways to engage them, and that kind of gets them involved in ways that integrate with their work life well?
[00:11:54] Katie Robinson: So this is like the million dollar question, right? If anybody had an easy button for this, they would be set on. We're a participant of the Large Firm Roundtable through the American Institute of Architects, and I serve on the marketing subcommittee of that group. This is a conversation we have all the time with my peers in other large firms. And it's the hard one, you know, because you do need the practice team members. And it's not only that you need their time for the proactive stuff and to do things like podcasts, maybe some videos and things like that. You need their time for the responsive stuff, like letters and scopes of work for projects and pursuits. So it's a delicate balance. I think what we've been able to do really successfully is the fact that, as I mentioned before, we do have processes in place.
[00:12:48] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah.
[00:12:49] Katie Robinson: We also have a lot of pre-existing information that we can pull from; a really extensive text library, for example. So when we do need to engage the expertise of some of our practice team members, they're not starting from scratch. We're giving them something.
I think also remembering that it doesn't necessarily have to be so polished. I mean, we want everything to be perfect. We're perfectionist in marketing, but, you know, having just a casual conversation like we're having right now that you can record and then extract tidbits from later is fine. It doesn't have to be set up in a studio somewhere with perfect lighting and perfect sound and everything.
Taking those opportunities to have just those casual connections with some of our subject matter experts, and then taking it and saying, "Okay, what can we do with it?"
[00:13:47] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah.
[00:13:48] Katie Robinson: You take a little bit and make a lot. You know, what little tidbits can we pull? Is there a Foresight article in this? Is there maybe an extended podcast in this subject? Maybe we can just write a social media blog on the content. Or is it just internal? You know, so trying to make a lot from a little definitely helps.
I think another thing that is really important to do is explain the "why" to the practice team members and and the billable folks of why we're doing this. You know, a lot of times the reason we're asking for their expertise is because we want to position them to be speakers at industry conferences or conferences our clients are attending. We want to help get them published. So, essentially, we want to help you advance in your career, but you got to help us by telling us what you know.
[00:14:44] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, you're speaking my language with all that. I think, especially with AI emergence, I think the more human we can get, the better people are going to be craving that more and more. So, when you're talking about, it doesn't have to be polished, it can be this kind of conversation, that's what I love about podcasting. There's not this pressure. There's not a, "Hey, write an article, you know, that looms over your head." It's really sitting down and talking about things you know for a half an hour. But I do think, we talk a lot about the skillset of knowledge extraction. You know, that is a real skillset that I'm sure your team has. We shouldn't overlook that, but that's a real key. Like you said, things like showing them that you're not asking them the same information twice. You've done your homework, you're repurposing it, educating them, all those things. So, I love that.
The other thing I want to make sure and ask, cause you've said, a vital aspect — this is in your bio — is the firm's custom dashboard that serves as the communications and data hub for the firm. Tell me a little bit about that.
[00:15:44] Katie Robinson: A long time ago, we developed a LS3P Dashboard, and essentially we did this because at the time there was not an internet solution that we felt really served our needs in terms of being a one-stop-shop for resources, but also allowing us to communicate with one another and share the knowledge that we were collecting. So we created our own. Essentially, the benefit that came from that is it really helped to propel our knowledge management efforts within the firm because if you create something like that, you better have content for it or it's just going to become static.
[00:16:23] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah.
[00:16:23] Katie Robinson: So for a number of years, our dashboard has been amazing. We're actually in the process of converting to a new internet system that is developed for our industry, and we're really excited about that. But, again, what the dashboard taught us is the importance of things like strategic reporting in order to make really sound decisions about the future of our firm. Sharing resources, like codes. "Where do I go to find codes?" "Well, you go here." So people aren't spending their time reinventing the wheel over and over. And then we have a lot of project data that we have gathered through our data manager program. We put it in our database, but we needed a place to be able to kind of disseminate it, and what does this really mean, you know?
[00:17:09] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah.
[00:17:09] Katie Robinson: So we were able to put in, and again, that's where I'm able to totally geek out on all of the knowledge management, data and analytics side, but then also say, "Okay, we're sending this to a group of creatives. It needs to be marketed in a way that creative individuals are going to be able to absorb it."
[00:17:29] Michelle Calcote King: Well, and I think that becomes even more important as a lot of people are remote, you know, with the inundation of information nowadays. You know, you kind of have to, you have to take information, make it very digestible for really anyone, make it very visual, so that's critical.
I'd like to talk about architecture marketing as a whole. So you've been in this for a long time, what have been the big changes and what changes are you kind of looking toward or anticipating?
[00:17:57] Katie Robinson: Yes. I would say proposals are getting more complex. The questions that they ask are getting a little bit more difficult to answer. A lot of it is Database, which is nice to be able to have that at our fingertips.
Competition is also a lot steeper and especially in the Southeast. We have a lot of the national firms making their way into our backyards, which is great. We partner with them often. We love them. But it still is a different level of competition.
[00:18:32] Michelle Calcote King: Sure.
[00:18:32] Katie Robinson: The benefit of that is it's allowed us to see we can do this. We can compete with these national firms. We can step up our game. It's taught us the importance of brand awareness, but also the importance of relationships. And we've developed those among 60 years of business.
[00:18:51] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah.
[00:18:52] Katie Robinson: So, I would say from a responsive effort, it is just the complexity and the amounts of efforts that we're chasing. For the proactive, you know, social media is all the rage still. It's not going to go away. And it's really been fun to watch, especially over the past five years or so, how our social media presence is so much more targeted. We have an external engagement sub-team. They are fantastic at figuring out which type of posts are going to get the most engagement and reach the most people. But they look at it, not only from a reaching the clients, but reaching possible recruits and future team members, which is just as important. So it's really interesting to see the role that social media is playing in our industry.
And, obviously, you've hit the nail on the head. Things like podcasts are just such a thing that if you would have asked me even just two years ago, "Would we be doing this to help advance marketing in our industry?" I would say, "No. Absolutely not."
[00:20:00] Michelle Calcote King: I know, right? Yeah, I resisted it for a while too. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:20:05] Katie Robinson: So, I think that, you know, by embracing the trends, embracing technology, we are able to advance our industry in terms of marketing.
What I hope to see more firms, and I think a lot of firms are going in this direction. What I would love to see them promote a little bit more in terms of marketing is also the importance of career advancement for the marketing team members because while we have chosen to be in the architecture industry under that umbrella, I think a lot of firms don't really think, "Oh yeah, they're building their careers, too. So maybe there should be some paths and options for them." So I would love that thinking to twist a little bit. And it's beyond marketing. You know, you're talking about your HR, your technology teams, your convenience teams, everybody who works behind the scenes. It is really important to advocate for them and remember that we're growing our careers here, too.
[00:21:06] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. There's a woman in the legal industry who runs a recruiting firm and she coined this term called "revenue-enablers." So she calls marketers revenue-enablers, and I thought, "That's so smart," because her point was that, you know, while the marketing people within professional services firms might not be billing and generating revenue, they're making that possible and they're supporting it, and so it's such a critical function. And I love that framing of the issue because I think, yeah, that marketing people can often feel, you know, less than, or treated less than, or just not, like you said, you're within a firm where the career path isn't as defined. So, I love to hear that.
Do you see any big trend on the horizon that you guys are looking at and saying, Oh, we gotta keep an eye on that?"
[00:21:51] Katie Robinson: Well, I'll tell you something we need to keep an eye on, whether it's a good one or a bad one, I don't know, but that's AI.
[00:21:58] Michelle Calcote King: I feel like it came out of nowhere, right? Yeah.
[00:22:02] Katie Robinson: Every industry will say the same thing, you know. I mean, just small things like ChatGPT, it's very interesting and incredibly terrifying all at once. You spoke earlier about still the desire for that human connection, and my hope is that still wins out in the end. Although, how we're approaching it is try not to be quite so terrified of it coming, but embrace it without letting it take over our relationships.
[00:22:37] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, we're kind of, we're doing the same. We're dipping our toe. We're kind of, you know, seeing where it can be valuable. Yeah. You know, there's just so many concerns about confidentiality and all of this is just a lot to get your head around, but I'm the same way. You've got to embrace it. You got to see where it's going to fit. I mean, people were saying the same about social media and Google, you know, 20 years ago, so, or whenever. I think social media is actually younger than that. But yeah, now look, it's just a part of our daily lives and just a part of how we work. So, yeah, I think it's just kind of, we've all got to figure this new one out and it keeps us on our toes.
Before we end, and these always go a lot quicker than I thought, is there anything you'd like to share, an important lesson you hope our listeners take away or anything we've talked about that — that we haven't touched on that you'd like to share?
I know it's a big question, but I always like to leave on it. Yeah.
[00:23:31] Katie Robinson: So I can share one of the biggest lessons that I've learned—
[00:23:34] Michelle Calcote King: I would love that. Yeah.
[00:23:35] Katie Robinson: —in not only this industry, but I think in life and in general is the importance of observing and asking questions. And I think a lot of times, especially as we're coming up in our career, a lot of individuals see asking questions as a weakness, but it is such a tremendous strength. To be able to really sit back, observe what people are doing, and then asking just really specific questions about what they're doing, how did they get here? It's so important. I tell individuals, too, if you're in the office and not working remote, take your headset off. Listen to the conversations that are going on around you because you've can learn so much.
When I first started here about a year and a half after I started, I had a really great opportunity because our CEO at the time, Tom Penney, needed some graphic assistance for an upcoming internal meeting with the shareholders. And I thought that was so cool. You know, here I was, I'm new to the firm and I get to see what the shareholders are talking about. It was really interesting. And so I started working side-by-side with Tom on that, as well as in other internal meetings, and I was absorbing all of the things that they were saying, but then I was questioning it. You know, I was questioning, I was talking to our finance person about the financials, cause you know, I had three whole classes in accounting, so obviously I knew what I was doing. But just understanding what is a utilization rate? Why does it matter? And, you know, asking all of these questions that had nothing to do with marketing. I was able to learn so much about our industry and how business worked. When I did start to really build in my career, I was able to connect them and say, "Okay, well, marketing can actually help you, Finance Group, because you're having to explain finances to a bunch of creative people, let us help you with that. So I would say just that was probably the biggest thing that I learned was that asking questions is not a sign of weakness. You know, vulnerability isn't a sign of weakness and that's the way that you can truly grow as a person and also grow in your career.
[00:25:55] Michelle Calcote King: That's really important advice. It's something I tell my team all the time, too, especially when you work in these expertise-driven industries. You're working with people who have very deep knowledge in a particular area, so it's really critical that you ask questions cause the more you know about their challenges and their knowledge, the better you are as a marketer. So, agree with that a hundred percent.
Well, thank you for sharing that, and thank you for joining us. So we've been talking to Katie Robinson of C3PO—no, just kidding—LS3P. And Katie, if people wanted to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do so?
[00:26:31] Katie Robinson: Sure. They can send me an email. It's just KatieRobinson@LS3P.com. So it's pretty easy. Also LinkedIn. Use social media.
[00:26:39] Michelle Calcote King: Yes. Good one. All right. Well, thank you so much.
[00:26:42] Katie Robinson: Awesome. Thank you.
[00:26:45]: Thanks for listening to "Spill the Ink," a podcast by Reputation Ink. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click "Subscribe" to get future episodes.
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