Is your architectural firm drawing in as many clients as you would like?
With around 3 billion users around the globe active on social media, digital marketing offers the opportunity to connect with vast audiences.
But how do you find the right online audience for your message? And what message should you communicate?
Here are seven tips on digital marketing for your architecture firm.
Keep an Eye on the Competition
Identify your key competitors. Maybe you are competing with other local architecture businesses, or perhaps there are national firms that you should be aware of.
Run competitor checks on a regular basis to see what marketing campaigns they are running. Try and gauge their effectiveness. Monitor your own trade in relation to their campaigns.
Although marketing should be proactive rather than reactive, it is often beneficial to know what messages your competitors are using in their marketing, how they are communicating this, and their reach.
Know Your Demographics
Who uses your services as an architect? And who would you like to use your services?
These are two questions that are fundamental in creating a successful digital marketing campaign for your architecture business.
If you don’t know the answers to the first question, then it’s time to start paying attention.
Keep information on your clients. If you can find out information about their ages, genders, professions, earnings, location, and family size, you can get a clear picture of who your services are mostly used by.
If you have an audience that you would like to appeal to, carry out market research to uncover the reasons that your current marketing is not converting this demographic.
Understanding your target demographic will be essential for marketing with social media.
Target the Right Audiences
Once you understand your existing demographic, and that of the people that you would like to reach with your digital marketing, you can start using targeted marketing with social media.
Targetted marketing on sites like Facebook allows you to focus your advertising on particular audiences that match your demographics.
Consider the message that you are communicating. Is it right for the audience? Are your posts going out at the right time? Wednesday and Thursday lunchtimes are the most popular time for users logging on.
Know when your demographic is online and make sure you are posting.
Use Your Visual Strengths
Ever heard the expression “show, don’t tell”?
Architecture is a visual medium. It stands to reason that you need to use visual marketing platforms. Make use of your key strengths, the product that you are trying to sell.
Head for visual platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest to engage prospective customers through the use of images and videos.
Spend time developing your following and reach on at least one of these social platforms.
Engage users with interactive content that prompts them to comment or share. Contests and quizzes are great ways to expand your reach.
Link Up With Influencers
If you want to extend your reach, connect with an influencer.
49% of consumers rely on influencer recommendations. Influencers are not just influential; they are powerful. Influencers have loyal followings who have place a lot of trust in their recommendations.
Find the right influencer for your business. Find out about the makeup of their demographic and what type of following their posts reach. Make sure that your target demographics align.
There are influencers that work across a variety of platforms. Home and lifestyle bloggers could generate great traction for your business by posting architecture blogs linking to or promoting your services.
Instagram influencers can inspire audiences with captivating images.
Make good use of PR firms that specialize in connecting brands with influencers. For popular blog owners, find organizations that run blogger outreach programs that seek to match your brand with several different blogs at a time.
Improve Your Website
Your website is the shop window of your architecture firm. It draws people in to learn more about your products.
Create a quick-loading, user-friendly website that provides a great visual representation of your work along with all of the necessary information about your services. You could use 3D visualization to really bring your work to life.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must for any website. SEO increases the potential for higher Google rankings. Being on the first page for search terms relating to your architecture niche and location is vital in generating leads through organic searches.
It is very rare that anyone will ever use a website that they found on the second or third pages of the search engine results page.
You can improve your SEO through keyword optimization, improving your page load speeds, and creating a strong backlink strategy that uses internal links to create connections between all of your pages for easier browsing.
The inclusion of an architecture blog on your site can help you to generate traffic. While using local SEO techniques such as getting your business registered with business directories will help you to the top of the search engine results page for potential customers in your area.
Hire a Digital Marketing Company
If you have someone in-house who has the marketing skills to promote your business, great. Many companies don’t have that luxury.
If the workload involved in communicating with customers is too great and will impact on your ability to carry out your architecture work, outsource it.
There are countless great digital marketing companies out there who can promote your business across a range of different platforms. Get in touch with a few that seem to understand your specific business niche.
Ask questions, and get a feel for how they can help you. It is crucial that you are a good fit for each other.
What Are Your Tips on Digital Marketing?
What have you had the most success with in terms of promotion for your architecture firm? Let us know your top tips on digital marketing.
Be sure and explore the other articles on the blog to help you build your business.