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”.

The post How to Grow Your Architecture Firm through Marketing appeared first on Archipreneur.

Most architects enter the profession with little to no knowledge on how to implement a smart marketing strategy. This is one of the reasons marketing is often neglected by AEC businesses.

An archipreneur could take advantage of this knowledge gap. Architects can build on their existing skill set to become savvy marketers.

Throughout our architectural education, we are taught to be problem-solvers. We present our project in front of juries, clients and peers. We deploy strategies for effectively researching topics. We can analyze the data we find. We can deliver detailed designs. Marketing, then, is just a natural extension of these skills.

Here we’ll cover the basics how you can start out with marketing. Keep in mind that many clients think of architecture services as a cost and not a value. This should be the starting point for all your marketing efforts: clients are interested in added value. Your job is to communicate that value as persuasively as possible.

A lot of new companies start out with ‘tactical experimentation’. That means throwing all kinds of content out at broad demographic categories and seeing what fits with which demographic best. This is not a good approach.

More often than not, this approach results in excessive money spending and companies not being sure of how to untangle the statistical evidence they receive.

The solution: Figure out your:

• Company’s mission
• Target audience
• Value proposition
• Situation
• Marketing infrastructure.

Then use that information to guide your tactical experimentation.

#1 – Mission

‘We stand for quality’

‘We are a multidisciplinary, award-winning firm, cutting-edge…’

‘We undertake a variety of projects’.

You’ve heard them all, but none of these taglines helps anyone in understanding what your company actually does. Superlatives are meaningless without useful information as to the ethos of your company.

Differentiating yourself from your competitors is not easy, but your efforts have to go beyond these sound bites. Your mission shouldn’t be taken lightly. It is responsible for the ‘About Us’ section on your website, your logo design, color scheme, types of projects, office culture and letterheads, among others.

#2 – Target Audience

If you want to attract the right customers, it’s essential that you develop a target audience profile. Use your analyzing skills here. You can start to build a profil by answering the following questions:

• Are you offering your services to businesses or individuals?
• To what age group do they belong?
• What’s their social status?
• Are they conservative or liberal?
• Where are they located?
• Which social media channels do they use?
• What is their likely family situation and lifestyle?

One great way to tap into a ‘ready-made’ group is to try cohort marketing. Cohort marketing targets people within a demographic of shared experiences and interests. The Internet is a fantastic resource for finding these groups, for example in LinkedIn or Facebook groups.

#3 – Value Proposition

This is the part of your marketing strategy that can help you really stand out. A value proposition explains how your service or product will help solve a customer’s problem.

How is that different from your mission statement? Your value proposition communicates how your offer will positively change a method of work or an activity for your clients.

Let’s re-establish: If you offer great value but are not doing a good job of communicating it, you will not attract clients.

Your value proposition should be the first thing that visitors will see on your company’s homepage, and should be written in clear and simple language.

A great value proposition should closely reflect your target audiences’ desires. The best value propositions are clear and concise, promise concrete results, and explain how your services are unique. They highlight:

• Why your clients should pay attention to you and not your competitors,
• Why they should subscribe to your email list, and (most importantly of all)
• Why they should hire you.

#4 – Situation Analysis

Analyze your company’s current situation as comprehensively as possible. Take a critical look at its weaknesses as much as you do its strengths. Think about how you have set up your organization and business model, and how they respond to the external influences and threats you have defined.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your mission statement and how attractive is it for your clients?
• Would you invest in your company?
• Who are your competitors?
• What are they doing that’s unique?
• Are there (m)any potential investors?
• What are the most promising opportunities for growth?
• How can you improve your services to better fit the market?
• Which markets accommodate the type of service(s) you provide?

#5 – Create a Marketing Infrastructure

Architects are used to preparing exhaustive documentation about projects, designs and construction processes. The same rigor has to be applied to your marketing efforts.

In order to keep track of the most successful marketing efforts that have brought in clients, you will need to create project and client databases, along with photo galleries of your work.

Creating a well-organized marketing infrastructure is the best solution for companies that cannot yet afford to hire expert marketers and lay the foundations for future marketing strategies.

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All that being said, there is no single marketing solution that works for everyone. There is a marketing strategy for each archipreneur, because each has his or her own story. And marketing, at its most basic definition, is simply telling your story – to your market.

Every potential client starts their search with a clear vision of what they are looking for. They have created their own story for what they want and for who they are looking. Your goal is to replace their story with yours.

Finally your story, told at meetings, in interviews, by the way you communicate with clients on the phone, in email and on social media – in short through every point of contact you have with the world, online and off – becomes your brand.

How are you telling your story?

The post How Architects Can Use Their Existing Skill Set to Become Savvy Marketers appeared first on Archipreneur.