The most effective and sustainable way to grow your architecture firm is to invest in its website and digital marketing presence.
This is the only marketing strategy for architects that will allow your firm to consistently get in front of in-market prospects and be able to generate high-quality project leads that turn into paying clients.
Still, many architecture firms completely neglect their website and have no concrete online marketing strategy for generating leads (unless you count hope as a strategy).
This leaves them with no proven lead generation system making it nearly impossible to establish a predictable sales pipeline necessary to grow.
Fortunately, if you're reading this, you likely already understand the importance of digital marketing for architects. This gives you a big advantage amongst your industry competitors.
Whether you're the owner of an architecture firm or work as a marketing professional in-house for one, this article will give you a clear blueprint for creating a marketing system that reliably drives traffic, produces leads, and grows revenues for your firm.
In this article, we're going to detail a proven marketing roadmap for your architecture firm that we've implemented for several of our architecture firm clients already.
By focusing on the 5 key areas of architecture marketing detailed below, your firm is going to be able to put together an integrated marketing system that will generate quality leads like clockwork 24/7/365.
Step #1: Invest In An Architecture Website Capable Of Being A Marketing Machine
When it comes to marketing for architects, your firm's website is its online marketing foundation.
Meaning, this is the first thing you need to focus on and get right before you can even think about any other marketing strategy to promote your firm online.
When done right, your architecture firm's website can be your #1 digital sales tool working 24/7/365 to generate leads and close sales.
Now, why is your architecture firm's website so important?
Simply put, a well-crafted architecture website will help you get in front of more prospects, convert more leads into paying clients, and increase revenue & profits for your architecture firm.
Your architecture firm’s website must be its central online marketing hub where all digital activities revolve around.
Unfortunately, most architects completely neglect their website and treat it more like an online brochure. This mindset completely underestimates the tremendous online opportunity an effective website offers your firm.
And for such a visual industry, many architecture firm websites feature an outdated design that clearly hasn't been touched in years. This is a huge mistake that will ultimately cost them in lost sales and opportunities.
After all - if you were someone looking to hire an architecture firm to design a beautiful new residential home or commercial office building, how could you possibly trust them to do that right if they can't even design an appealing website?
This is why the first step we take when working with a new architecture firm is to completely rebuild their website from the ground up (unless they already have an effective website in place, of course).
The first step in effective marketing for architects is a modern business website that serves as your firm's digital marketing foundation.
A beautiful website will make a big impact on visitors right away. It will show that your firm is a premium service provider that has the experience and expertise to deliver results for its clients.
This is what will allow your firm to establish the trust & authority necessary to keep people on site and eventually convince them to get in touch with you about a project.
If you realize your architecture firm needs a new website and are curious what the process would look like to redesign it, check out the video below detailing our signature web design process.
As we'll discuss in a bit, all of your online marketing efforts must focus on sending traffic to the website with the goal of converting a strong percentage into leads.
But if you don't have a website with great design and a solid conversion strategy behind it, all that time & money will be wasted as people will leave once they leave on the site.
So if you've been struggling to get marketing results for your architecture firm, pull up your website and take a look at it. If it looks outdated and fails to make an impact on you, now you know the root cause of your frustrations.
Step #2: Drive Traffic To Your Architecture Website With SEO
Once you've developed a marketing-focused website, your architecture firm then needs a marketing strategy to drive traffic to it.
Ultimately, your firm's website will only be as effective as the marketing plan you put in place to support it.
SEO is simply the practice of getting your architecture website to rank for relevant keywords related to its services & local market on search engines like Google.
This way, your firm's website will naturally appear as potential prospects begin researching their project and local firms capable of helping them.
In terms of marketing strategies for architects, SEO is going to be a channel where you will want to focus your efforts intensely on.
That's because SEO is what will allow your architecture firm to generate "free" website traffic.
The only cost associated with SEO is the effort you put in creating content and local service pages to rank for your target keywords.
Also, the traffic from SEO is generally very high-quality because it comes from people searching for keywords related to your firm and its services.
This contrasts against something like Facebook Ads - where you can get tons of clicks from unqualified traffic due to a poor targeting strategy (to be clear Facebook Ads can be extremely effective and we do run them for some of our clients - you just need to know what you’re doing).
Finally, an SEO campaign can serve as a protective barrier around your architectural marketing strategy.
That's because it generally takes a fair amount of time and consistent effort to rank for these keywords. Because of that, it would take months if not years for a competing firm to compete with you in SEO.
Not a bad protective barrier if you ask us.
Overall, SEO is the best marketing channel for architects when it comes to driving traffic.
Now, effective marketing for architects doesn't rely on just one channel. Your firm needs a diversified strategy.
In the next few sections of this article, we'll detail other marketing channels to focus on to round out your architecture firm’s digital marketing strategy.
But if you want to learn more about how you can develop an SEO strategy for your architecture firm, then you need to check out our in-depth guide linked below that walks you through a step-by-step process for developing a world-class SEO campaign.
Read: The Ultimate SEO Guide for Architecture Firms
Step #3: Start Generating Project Leads Fast with Google Ads
SEO is a tremendous long term marketing strategy for architects that your firm can't afford to ignore.
The one downside with SEO is that it can take between 6 - 12 months to see results (although we always aim to get results for our clients much sooner).
Because of that, an effective marketing plan for architects must have a component designed to get leads right away.
That's why the next step in effective marketing for architects is to develop a digital advertising campaign via Google Ads.
This is the perfect complement to your SEO strategy because Google Ads lets you bypass the hard work & time investment of organically ranking for your target keywords.
With Google Ads, you can simply target keywords you'd like to rank for and you will show up as a sponsored result at the top of Google.
And best of all, you only pay when someone actually clicks to go to your website.
Overall, Google Ads is an excellent way to get leads quickly and efficiently for your architecture firm. It's a great complement to your SEO strategy, and it can help you start generating leads right away.
Step #4: Create Quality Content That Supports Your Firm's Marketing & Sales Efforts
They say content is king, and when developing a marketing strategy for architects that saying still holds true.
Consistent content production is a non-negotiable part of marketing for architects that can't be ignored.
This content can take many different forms such as blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts or lead magnets (our personal favorite).
The main point is that this content needs to be focused on helping your architecture firm's marketing and sales efforts.
Coincidently, you do this by creating helpful content aimed at answering questions and solving problems your prospects are likely facing. This is a key concept behind an inbound marketing approach for architects.
For example, if you're a firm that specializes in green architecture for commercial businesses, then you could produce a blog post on the top 5 going green can help businesses save money & improve the environment.
Or if you're targeting residential clients, you could produce a video on how to evaluate architects before hiring one to remodel your home.
By creating quality content that supports your marketing and sales efforts, you'll be able to achieve a few important things:
- Attract more website visitors that are interested in your services
- Establish trust, authority, and likability with your target audience
- Increase brand awareness & stand out from the competition
- Nurture project leads into paying clients
We recommend regular content production of blogs & videos to stay top of mind with your target audience, establish your firm's expertise, and ultimately build relationships with prospects that will make closing sales much easier going forward.
We also believe that any good marketing for architects strategy should include gated content such as a "lead magnet".
A lead magnet is simply a highly valuable resource that people must exchange their name & email address in order to access.
Getting a high-quality lead magnet is what will allow your architecture firm to see concrete results from its digital marketing efforts.
Because once you have their email address, then you can leverage email marketing to automatically nurture and stay in touch with your prospects.
Step #5: Nurture & Convert Leads with Email Marketing
Did you know that the marketing channel with the highest return on investment is email marketing with an astounding 4,200% ROI according to Hubspot?
Email marketing is an incredibly effective marketing tool for architecture firms for a few reasons.
First, email marketing is a great way to stay top of mind with your prospects.
If your firm regularly sends out valuable content, you'll be sure to keep your brand in front of them. And they'll be more likely to think of you when it comes time to hire an architecture firm.
Second, email marketing is a great way to nurture leads into paying clients.
By providing valuable content on a consistent basis, you'll be able to build a relationship with them. Once you've done that, closing a sale becomes much easier.
This is especially important when it comes to marketing for architects, as with many high-priced projects sometimes the sales cycle can take months to complete.
Now to take advantage of email marketing, you need to build an email list. That's why we believe the lead magnet is a critical marketing asset for architects.
Simply putting up a "subscribe to our email newsletter" banner on your site is not an enticing offer and will result in very few sign ups.
Rather, by creating a very specific lead magnet that solves a specific problem for your audience will produce a steady rate of sign ups that results in your architecture firm having a quality email list of in-market prospects.
Once you've built up this email list, you will have a direct communication channel with in-market prospects.
As long as you continue to send quality content to that list, sales will inevitably follow.
How To Implement This Marketing Strategy For Architects
Marketing for architects can be a challenge, but with the right mindset and strategies in place there’s no reason why your firm can’t achieve tremendous online success.
The five steps we've outlined in this article are a great starting point for any architecture firm looking to increase leads through digital marketing.
Now, if you're looking for a clear action plan for implementing what we've detailed here, you need to check out our Growth Marketing Playbook for Architecture Firms.
This incredibly valuable resource will walk you through the exact steps you need to take to build a highly-effective website for your firm and then implement the marketing strategy necessary to ultimately generate leads.
So if you want a clear guide to set up the exact marketing system for architecture firms we’ve detailed in this article, click the banner below to download our free resource.
