Architects in general have a tendency to underestimate the importance of marketing in creating and running a successful business. Even those who claim to understand the role of marketing in acquiring clients and building relationships, they often fail to fully utilize its potentials. Principals of small architecture firms often get caught up in trying to keep their practices afloat and end up treating marketing as a luxury that they will be able to afford once they achieve stability, thus missing the true role of marketing as being a catalyst for growth. Architects need to apply marketing to their practices from the onset and treat it with the same amount of dedication as they do with their floor plans, sections and 3D models of their building designs.

Marketing is a complex discipline, but its fundamentals can be broken down to a few simple concepts. As long as you keep these in mind at all times, your marketing efforts will be more successful, and easy to analyze and adjust. You need to be able to answer these three relatively easy questions and communicate them effectively to your audience:

Who are You?

In order to define your place in the industry and your target demographic, you need to determine who you are and what you do. Vague phrases about quality services, multidisciplinarity and “cutting-edge design” on your About Us page will not provide any useful information on what your company actually does. What do you stand for? How is this vision reflected in your office culture, design, and the type of projects you take on?

What Need Do You Fulfill?

Answering this requires you to formulate a value proposition. A value proposition explains how your service or product can help to solve your client’s problem and must be formulated in a concise and clear way, showing concrete results where possible. Even if you offer great value, if you fail to communicate it, your business will not attract new clients.

How are You Different?

Being able to differentiate yourself from your competition is a huge advantage. This is not easy, but your efforts have to go beyond mere sound bites. It can be achieved either by simply offering services in a more organized, client-oriented and reliable way, or by creating a unique, game-changing product or service.

Once you can answer these three questions, your marketing efforts basically filter into four-step process:

1. Attracting potential clients
2. Converting visitors to leads
3. Closing the deal
4. Cultivating relationships

These steps may seem straightforward, but there are several schools of thought on how to apply them. With the recent widespread adoption of social media and online tools, marketing has expanded to exciting new ways that architects can engage with and build an audience, and then successfully convert them to leads.

Today’s users have much more control of their media, and this has leveled the “marketing playfield” by offering businesses the opportunity to organically reach audiences by using relatively affordable channels and winning them over with engaging content. This phenomenon has introduced the concept of  “inbound marketing,” which contrasts with the traditional “outbound marketing” in almost every significant way.

Before coming to a verdict as to which is better, let’s see what each entails:

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing includes traditional advertising practices, cold calling, email and newsletter blasts, sponsorship, and word-of-mouth referrals, to name a few. It is generally known as an interruptive marketing practice that has become less effective in the last few decades. Spam protection tools and blocking techniques, along with the development of new communication trends through social media, have empowered users and limited many of the elements of outbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing embraces new media tools, and promotes creating and sharing content that appeals to specific demographics. Publishing the right content at the right moment is at the core of inbound marketing. It focuses on building communities and relies on organic search traffic. It uses blogs, social media, calls-to-action and landing pages to convert visitors to leads.

Data is also an important element of inbound marketing as it uses surveys and social monitoring to find out where your target audiences are and what they want.

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Most architecture firms will not have to choose between inbound and outbound marketing. Despite hyperbole from proponents of both concepts, they actually work best in combination. You will probably need to keep sending out newsletters and press releases, publishing in magazines, and attending seminars and conferences. However, inbound marketing will allow you to track your return on investment (ROI) more easily, and thus build your reputation. Just remember, there is no single marketing solution that works for everyone.

To learn more about how some of the leading architecture firms use social media, networking, blogging and other marketing tools, check out Archipreneur’s book on new business models for architects, “The Archipreneur Concept”.

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Fortunately, it’s not the only path to attracting new projects. In fact, the most effective business development strategies for architects involve more time spent on proactive relationship-building (before the project is made public), and less time on responding to RFPs and RFQs, which are available to anyone.

Below are 9 strategies that can help you define a good business development approach to get you ahead of the competition and win more clients and projects:

#1 – Identify the ideal project, and then work backwards

What are the ideal projects for your firm? Who are the people who can lead you to them? Do some research into their social environments and find ways to meet them there. The best projects or partnerships occur through direct commissions via a personal contact. Make the personal connection by networking in the same places that your ideal client spends time in. If you haven’t already, start thinking of everyone in your rolodex as a potential client, collaborator, or lead to new information; it may just be that the person who may lead you to the next job is someone you already know.

#2 – Export your design as portable, and shareable objects

Several companies design books that showcase their projects. Rather than make the book simply a portfolio, make the book a design object itself. Your design philosophy should be manifested in any tangible object (books, business cards, etc) your company produces, so that whenever you meet a potential client, you can offer them a small sample of what makes your firm so great. Follow up with well-designed emails, and be sure that your website is clear and easy to understand. The worst is for a client to be turned off by a slow or complicated website.

#3 – Follow up

Always make sure to have business cards on hand. And after you receive a handful of business cards at networking events, be sure to enter them into your email list. Additionally, stay in contact through periodic, personal emails. If you want to send out occasional updates with a mass mailing service, be sure to ask if they’d like to be included in the mailing list.

#4 – Turn your firm into a brand

Become an expert in a specific area of design. Determine the expertise available in the office, and the kind of projects your firm would like to be known for. Perhaps it’s environmental (like SITE and HOK) or urban design (Gehl Studio), master plans, residential, cultural, or civic. There needs to be something that potential clients can associate with your firm’s name. If you want to be more of a generalist, then make “process” and “philosophy” your brand (like Grimshaw). This way you will be known for creative solutions and high quality design. What can you provide that’s unique to only your firm? Figure that out and use to brand yourself. Then you will successfully promote and market your firm.

#5 – Create brand ambassadors at your company

Create a company culture that reflects your firm as approachable and fun to work with. Make sure there is fluid communication within the office so that when architects are traveling, they are comfortable discussing information about the firm , spreading the company’s vision, and creating new business contacts.

#6 – Organize an open lecture series at your firm

Organize an open lecture series at your firm where you can invite anyone to your office and provide an opportunity to introduce your firm to a new audience. Better yet, make the lectures have nothing to do with architecture, but about something your firm believes in. This will make your firm more approachable and will also show a different facet to the practice.

#7 – Book as many speaking opportunities as possible

You never know who is in the audience. It’s a great way of reaching multitudes of people at the same time. At a school, you may find that you’ve attracted more students who want to work for you, but you may also catch the attention of a developer who is teaching a class at that school who may want to speak with you about a potential opportunity.

#8 – Grow your online presence

More so than booking lectures, it’s one of the best ways to reach large audiences and catch the attention of many potential clients around the world at the same time. Think about maintaining a blog on your website to publish frequent updates and also use Instagram and Twitter to boost your online presence. Instagram especially is quick and visual, so architects can “seduce” clients with beautiful images. Especially when that relates to their design aesthetic without having to spend so much time. The ROI (Return on Investment) on that is better than on any other platform. Because it reaches so many people without much effort. With Twitter, you can retweet articles about your firm, drive people to your blog, or post updates and images as well.

#9 – Network with colleagues

Other firms and industry professionals are great resources for staying on top of trends and new developments. Rather than considering other firms as competition, consider them as potential partners on future projects; the combined, complementary expertise from each firm can only help to strengthen a business proposal. Additionally, keeping good relations with other firms may also lead to information. For example, about new projects that you might not have known about before.

Generating new business opportunities involves both marketing and communications, but most of all it involves nurturing relationships. As long as you can continue networking effectively and keep your contacts talking about you, then your firm will most likely pop up during conversations about new projects. And as long as your name continues to pop up, and you proactively pursue new information, the more likely it is that you will be included in shortlists and be receiving direct commissions.

What other effective business development strategies for architects would you recommend?

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