SOCIAL MEDIA ZEITGEIST

In the quieter moments of Saturday morning I watched a very, for want of a better word, “American” webinar delivered by Linkedin’s B2B Institute, a think-tank set up five years ago to offer support to the platform’s users. Among the hammy delivery and set-piece jokery, actually more tolerable than it sounds, there were some interesting nuggets of business development wisdom that are in tune with my own. It is worth layering them over the architectural model to see how it translates.

In architectural marketing and communications, most of my time has been divided between direct pitching – lining up potential clients and projects – and building brand awareness. Boiled down, these are the two essential activities necessary to grow an architectural business. But what proportion of effort and resource into each is the most effective?

Lead generation is clearly key to short term growth. Without that constant churn of projects, you will soon come unstuck – cash flow is king. But our friends at the B2B Institute will tell you that without building your brand – which means creating an element of recognition and understanding in what you do within your potential markets, and distinguishing yourself from your competitors, there may be limited potential for long term growth.

In other words, talking to the market as an amorphic whole, is as important as talking to individual potential clients. Actually, the evidence suggests that for long term success, around 45% of your marketing activity should be brand building, and 55% lead generation to create balanced B2B business development for short and long-term growth.

No-one is saying that lead-generation is not important, in essence it does the job of capturing existing demand for your services, but it doesn’t create demand. Putting effort into building the recognition of your studio may seem like a slow long game, but it puts the pieces into place for the future.

B2C or B2B?

Despite the fact that some of the smaller architecture studios may see the see themselves as fitting into the Business to Consumer (B2C) category, they are providing a commodity to a wider range of potential domestic clients – house extensions, conversions and residential refurbishments – I would argue that the service you provide is best suited to understanding it in terms of Business to Business (B2B) marketing. Your potential new domestic client is an “organisation”, not a consumer picking house extensions off the shelf, or ordering them online. They should be treated in the same grouping as a public or commercial client.

Do not see yourself as the provider of a commodity to consumers, that is the first rule of architectural marketing.

The simple reason for this, is that you do not need to shift thousands of units to grow. You need a relatively small, but regularly paced quantity of good clients – and your marketing strategy should be planned to ramp that up to create the kind of future growth that you are looking for.

Brand building for architects

Luckily, there are many established methods for building brand identity within the architectural sector – no matter what size of company you are, and whatever niche design markets you are working within. Some rely on persuading outside organisations of your worth – the press, or awards programmes. There are opportunities to speak at events, if you have developed a design portfolio or way of working that is engaging for others. There are festivals, exhibitions, panel discussions, and targeted campaigns to align yourself with.

There is also advertising, something that many architects have been reticent to acknowledge, as they often see themselves as the deliverer of culture, as much as buildings and assets. An artist wouldn’t pay advertising rates to promote themselves would they? Well, many of them do. Advertising is a wide topic, and we can review this in more detail in a future article. Needless to say, if done smartly and in the right places, advertising or sponsorship can help to build your brand.

And of course, luckily for the contemporary architectural studio, you have been gifted a method of controlling your own brand development, through your social media channels. To do this successfully only takes good practice, great content development, and your own time and enthusiasm for the task.

We will be talking about social media for architects a lot at Beedier, and we hope you will find the research, tips, and case studies that we present in the coming months and years useful.

Developing your ‘share of voice’

Here we will use a bit of ‘marketing speak’ to describe an approach – you have been warned. A company’s ‘share of voice’ represents the success of their brand building strategy within their specific market. For a small practice delivering residential extensions across one region, then that represents the success of your branding in compared to direct competitors in the same area. For a big architectural practice that specialises in large mixed-use developments, your share of voice represents potential client awareness of your organisation and projects, compared to your competitors that are designing these projects too.

This is why competitor analysis is so important to your marketing strategy. You need to understand how your share of voice compares to your competitors. Are they louder than you, and is what they are saying more convincing? If so, then you need to step up to keep up. The good news is, you now have an excellent tool to help you work out who your competitors are, and how much noise they are creating. The Beedier Social Media Zeitgeist list will help you here.

The marketing professionals at the B2B institute have boiled down your future potential for growth, enhanced by your brand building strategies using a simple formula. Your Excess Share of Voice (eSOV) represents how much louder you are than your competitors. And your potential growth is equal to your eSOV minus your current market share. Of course, this equation just exists to illustrate the concept, so don’t go trying to work it out exactly! The important thing to remember is that growth doesn’t appear in a vacuum. You are competing in a market.

Lead Generation – existing loyal clients, or new acquisitions?

Perceived wisdom tells us that focussing on our existing client base to generate new project work is the most pragmatic and gets the best results. This is perhaps because the work that goes into getting new projects through existing clients is minimal – an easy win. In fact 60% of businesses believe that developing existing customer loyalty is the best way to growth. The research data tells us something else.

IPA data tells us that B2B business development strategies that primarily focus on existing clients have the least potential for growth and are much more likely to result in slumps. Those that focus primarily on new acquisitions fair better, but the best strategy is to gain more reach by pushing both existing customers and new acquisitions simultaneously.

And of course, on reflection, this is just common sense. Your existing customer base is liable to churn and change, as individuals retire, client priorities develop, and so do markets. Projects from your current list of loyal clients are most likely to diminish, so you will need to replace them over time, and expand the list.

But how do you generate more leads for architectural projects?

This is possibly the biggest question that everyone is asking themselves, including our clients. It very much depends on your niche, specialism, experience with existing markets, and home base. In a nutshell it can be through active networking, focused advertising, new consultant collaborations, word of mouth, public tendering, and competitions. All of these methods have their own risks, with different opportunities for success. We will discuss lead generation for architects in more detail in a future article. Keep reading!

Robert Woodburn Park reviewed and interpreted the B2B Institute’s report, The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing: Empirical Observations on B2B Effectiveness. Click here to download the full report for yourself.