Award-winning AEC marketing connects creativity, strategy, and measurable results to move the firm’s most important priorities forward.
Each year, Zweig Group’s Marketing Excellence Awards offer a snapshot of how AEC firms are approaching marketing. The 2026 winners have been announced, and their campaigns reveal how leading teams are responding to changing business priorities, audiences, and expectations.
Why the awards are a window into the industry
The awards recognize individual campaigns, but taken together, the entries reveal much more.
They show which challenges firms are trying to solve, where teams are investing their time, and how expectations for marketing are changing. Winning campaigns may support recruitment, client engagement, market expansion, internal alignment, or the launch of a new service.
Marketing teams are increasingly involved in priorities that extend well beyond communications, and the strongest campaigns make that contribution clear.
Three things award-winning firms consistently do differently
1. They connect marketing to the firm’s strategy
The strongest campaigns begin with a clear business objective.
That may mean entering a new market, attracting a specific type of employee, strengthening client relationships, repositioning the firm, or introducing a new service. The team understands what the firm is trying to accomplish and builds the campaign around that goal.
This gives the work a clear purpose. The audience, message, format, and channels are chosen because they support the objective, not simply because they’re familiar or easy to produce.
A campaign can be polished and generate attention without contributing much to the business. Award-winning work makes the connection between the marketing effort and the firm’s larger priorities easy to understand.
2. They combine creativity with a clear understanding of the audience
The best campaigns find a distinctive way to communicate with the people they’re trying to reach.
Creativity may show up in the concept, storytelling, design, format, or choice of channel. It doesn’t need to be expensive or complicated. It needs to make the message more relevant, memorable, or persuasive.
That takes more than a strong visual idea. The team must understand what the audience values, what will earn its attention, and how it prefers to receive information.
Campaigns often lose focus when internal stakeholders become concerned with everything the firm wants to say. The best teams make deliberate choices. They simplify the message, choose the right format, and carry the central idea consistently across every part of the campaign.
3. They set goals and use results to improve
Award-winning campaigns explain what they were intended to accomplish and whether they worked.
The right measures depend on the goal. A firm may track engagement, website traffic, leads, event registrations, proposal activity, recruitment results, employee participation, or revenue. What matters is setting the goal before the campaign begins and choosing measures that relate to it.
Measurement helps demonstrate the value of the work, but it also helps teams make better decisions. They can see which messages connected, which channels performed well, and which tactics deserve more investment.
Without that discipline, firms can keep repeating familiar activities without knowing whether they’re producing meaningful results.
The same qualities appear in Zweig Group’s broader industry research, although the data suggests many firms haven’t fully turned them into consistent practices yet.
The 2025 Marketing + Business Development Report found that 94% of marketing leaders participate in their firm’s business planning process, which helps explain why the strongest campaigns are so closely tied to business priorities.
At the same time, only 56% of firms reported having a formal marketing plan. Marketing leaders may have a seat at the table, but many firms still lack the goals, responsibilities, budgets, and processes needed to turn strategy into consistent action.
The median firm-wide marketing budget was nearly $430,000, raising the stakes for disciplined planning and better decisions about where those resources go.
Why benchmarking matters
Awards show what excellent work can look like, while benchmarking helps firms understand how their own practices compare.
Without outside data, firms tend to measure progress against their own history. They compare this year’s budget with last year’s or today’s team structure with the one they’ve always had. Those comparisons may show internal change, but they won’t reveal whether the firm is keeping pace with the industry.
Benchmarking adds context to decisions about staffing, budgets, technology, planning, and measurement. It can confirm where a firm is performing well, identify gaps, and help leaders decide where additional investment could have the greatest impact.
Participate in the Marketing + Business Development Survey
Zweig Group’s 2026 Marketing + Business Development Survey helps build that broader industry picture.
By participating, firms contribute to a clearer understanding of how AEC marketing and business development teams are structured, funded, managed, and measured. Participants receive 75% off the final report, which they can use to compare their practices with similar firms.
The 2026 Marketing Excellence Award winners show where the industry’s best work is headed. The survey helps firms decide how their own approach measures up.
 |
Mailena Urso is chief marketing officer at Zweig Group. Contact her at murso@zweiggroup.com. |
