Marketing Agency for Architects
What We Can Achieve Together
Acquire More Clients
We use methods such as thought leadership content, campaign optimization, lead management automation and brand promotion to help you acquire more clients.
Increase Client Share
We apply best practices such as nurture marketing campaigns to stay top of mind with your clients, increase client share and improve client lifetime value.
Improve Client Retention
Engagement methods such as social media marketing and content marketing keep clients informed and keep customer retention high.
A Digital Marketing Agency for Architects
To grow their business, many architects have relied on relationships, referrals and repeat clients. It’s a mostly passive approach that is effective but not scalable. It also contributes to the new business feast or famine cycles.
To do better, it’s important to have a digital marketing strategy that creates awareness, attracts new clients, nurtures existing relationships, and builds trust in your brand.
Marketing for architects is different than other industries. It must support relationship-based selling. It must focus on the brand, people and services in ways that convey interest and curiosity. It should reflect the architect’s work products. Marketing for architects is more visual, conceptual, creative, innovative and aspirational than other industries.
The overarching goal of marketing for architects is to reach and engage target audiences, build brand recognition and trust, and drive more business to your firm.
Architects position themselves as trusted advisors. They are essentially selling expertise and experience. And many times, it’s less about selling and more about educating.
But to do this in a way that achieves consistent results requires systemic and repeatable methods.
To do it well and at low cost requires marketing best practices.
A Best Practices Approach
To help our clients acquire more clients, we adopt a strategy based on a mix of 9 professional services best practices.
Marketing program recommendations without supporting data are just opinions. The Pandesix Growth Framework is built on evidence-based best practices and backed by industry specific benchmark data.
Rather than generic marketing programs, we deploy programs optimized for buyers of architectural services.
Some programs that work particularly well when aided with best practices are shown below.
Marketing Programs That Deliver Big
Marketing can feel overwhelming. It can be difficult to know where to start. So, we start by measuring and ranking programs based on their revenue and profit contributions. Below are some of the programs we assess and implement for our clients.
- A Standout Website
The right website design and user experience will increase visitor engagement and conversions. That means the website must focus on the client first, the brand second and services third.
The website design should be easy to navigate and visually appealing. It should reflect your firm’s brand identity and showcase your portfolio prominently.
It should use high-quality images and videos to demonstrate your design process and showcase your completed works.
It must deliver compelling content that communicates your firm’s brand, expertise, and design philosophy. It should include clear calls-to-action (CTA) that entice buyers to contact you and begin a dialogue.
It must be intuitive, responsive, mobile-friendly, and optimized for search engines.
Building an impressive website need not be a daunting task. If you know what it should do, an experienced website professional can create it in a relatively short period.
And here’s the upside. Most professional service company websites achieve less than a one percent visitor to lead conversion rate. Websites that include the above best practices often achieve a 3 percent or higher conversion rate. When you consider the volume of website visitors, that 3-fold increase results in a steady pipeline of new sale opportunities.
- Brand Development
The 4 Ps of marketing for architects are position, professionals, portfolio and process. Position is essentially your brand.
We help clients create or reinforce a strong brand identity. That’s essential to stand out in a crowded marketplace. It also positions the firm’s executives as thought leaders and crafts messaging that creates confidence for buyers.
This is another marketing program that can be performed quickly if you apply a proven process and best practices.
The upside here is that if done well, over time, your brand becomes your most valuable company asset.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that prospects find you online when searching for services that you deliver. It improves the position of your website in Google and other search engine results pages.
SEO is an organic strategy, meaning that once set up and nurtured, you don’t need to procure search ads or other investments to keep attracting visitors to your website.
SEO best practices for architectural websites include using buyer keywords in website content and including a local SEO or geo-focus for buyers in your general proximity.
When done right, the firm will be discovered by significantly more high-fit buyers.
- Content Marketing
This method uses content, such as web pages and blog posts, to educate and inform prospects and customers. This is a top method to position the firm’s staff as thought leaders.
Best practices include content that addresses the pain points and challenges of your target audience. That may include practical solutions, proven processes, unique methods, case studies or professional advice.
Regardless of content type, it should be developed in a way that positions the firm’s executives as experts and problem solvers.
These programs work best when content is aligned with the buyer’s purchase cycle. But the buyer’s interests change as they make progress toward selecting a firm. That’s why content must be designed for each stage of the purchase process.
When creating content for clients, we include additional best practices such as incorporating story telling techniques and embedding multimedia elements, such as images and videos that showcase your portfolio. We also focus on creating evergreen content, which is information that remains relevant for long periods of time.
- Campaigns
There are many types of campaigns. Inbound, outbound, email, pay per click and digital ads to name a few. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Each delivers different results. To make sense of it, we apply our industry benchmarks to prioritize those that drive the biggest financial uplift.
Best practices include precision campaigns targeted to the company’s ideal customer profile (ICP). The messaging must integrate the client’s challenges with the firm’s solutions. The offers must be highly specific and demonstrate compelling benefits. When correctly done, the firm will acquire more qualified leads at a reduced cost per lead.
- Nurture Campaigns
This technique maintains top of mind awareness with prospects and customers. This type of campaign should be developed pursuant to a theme. It should sequence flights that build upon each other and reach a crescendo effect. When done well, it will increase conversions and customer share. Even better, it will help grow customer relationships. That’s important because customer affinity is one of only four sustainable competitive advantages.
- Social Media Marketing
Social networks are a growing information source for many professional service buyers. They are also an ideal channel to showcase your portfolio and engage with your target audience.
Some best practices include behind-the-scenes back stories, glimpses of the design process, and visual effects that promote memorable moments of interest.
Well done well, your architectural firm will expand the brand, boost engagement with your target audience, stay top of mind with your existing clients, and acquire new leads and new projects.
Any program selected for our clients uses our marketing best practices to achieve top quartile results. Our programs are validated by field research, implemented with a prescriptive framework, measured with purpose-built analytics, and fully leverage technology automation. And because they are data-driven, they can be modeled to show investment, cash flow impact, time to value, and payback.
Here’s How our Process Works
Every client and project are unique. But most benefit from a prescriptive framework that delivers predictable results. Below is a summary of our marketing framework that we adapt for each client engagement.
01. Rapid Diagnostic
Any strategic project starts with an assessment to learn what's holding the company back. A full and accurate diagnosis gets past symptoms, surfaces the root causes and gets to an accurate prescription.
If you fail to accurately or completely identify the biggest obstacles, it’s likely you will then fail to pursue the most efficient path to achieve your goals. You wouldn’t want your doctor to prescribe medicine before a diagnosis. The same applies to your business.
02. A Marketing Strategy
Starting with a thoughtful marketing plan is the key to achieving significant and sustained financial results.
We identify and prioritize your goals in SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound) terms. That allows us to craft a marketing strategy that meets your goals in the least time, cost and risk.
A marketing strategy creates focus and prioritization. It's a precursor to everything that comes after. Great execution won't get you very far if your strategy is wrong.
03. A Go-to-Market Plan
This is an integrated plan that puts into motion the best programs to meet your goals.
Most companies will benefit from an optimized mix of programs. We create an execution Blueprint to clearly show the highest impact programs and how they will collectively deliver the company’s goal.
04. Agile Execution
We apply agile sprint-based execution for speed and results.
Agile execution accelerates time to value, applies systemic execution to delivers predictable results, and reduces risk.
It’s also business outcomes focused. For example, the first agile principle is to ‘begin with clarity of the outcome and let it guide every step of the journey.’
05. Technology Automation
We apply software technology to bring information, automation and scale to operations. The right MarTech is the facilitator of consistent delivery, the replacement for manual labor, the process automation for faster results, and the top tool to realize cost savings.
06. Performance Analytics
Clear objectives set the vision and create the roadmap. But rigorous execution measured with the right key performance indicators (KPIs) direct the path to success and the realization of results.
That’s why we instrument our programs with real-time KPIs. This allows us to know what’s working, what’s not and intervene with swift course corrections to remedy deviations.
A Unique Digital Marketing Agency for Architects
Three things make us a different type of digital marketing agency for architects.
- We are industry experts. Our clients’ vision what their clients cannot. They co-create dream projects. We do the same for our clients. We don’t incur up front time to learn about the industry. We don’t need to perform experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t. We have developed buyer insights, customer intelligence and repeatable programs.
- We are a revenue-focused marketing agency for professional services companies. Our efforts target measurable business outcomes. That includes things like increasing client acquisitions, customer lifetime value and customer retention. We don’t dilute our focus by getting sidetracked with activity and vanity metrics. The results we deliver are shown in top line revenue and bottom-line profit.
- We don't operate by guesswork. We use industry data, performance benchmarks and best practices that collectively forecast reliable results. It's a data-driven process that transforms measurable objectives into business outcomes.
A Call to Action
If you want to step up the growth of your architectural or design company, we have some options.
Consider our one-day Professional Services Marketing Workshop. At the end of this day, you will have the data-driven insights, proven framework and templates to accelerate your journey.
Or we can work as an extended member of your team. Our services will accelerate your recognition, reputation, and reach. We can help you attract targeted buyers and convert them into new customers.
For professional help from a specialized digital marketing agency for architects, contact us to schedule an introductory call with one of our expert consultants.