Inbound marketing for architect firms involves educating potential clients, building trust by promoting yourself as thought leader and instigating conversations when people are ready to talk. In short, you give them as much help as you can before they are serious about choosing a firm. But how does all this groundwork actually help you? Carry on reading.
If you were thinking about buying a piece of land to build your dream home on, are you likely to call up your local architect (because everyone knows their number) and say, "right I want a house designing, where do I sign?"
No, didn't think so. You aren't going to be anywhere near that stage for quite a while, especially when it's such a big amount of money and such an important decision. And this is why your marketing efforts may not be bringing in new business. If you aren't producing helpful content, you won't appear in anyone's online searches as part of their home development journey and stand no chance of developing precious brand recognition with top-of-the-funnel leads.
By producing helpful content, you encourage Google to recognise your online reputation and prioritise prioritise your website in search results. Whether leads simply Google "architects near me" and choose the first result on page one, or start conducting their own research on housebuilding trends and techniques, you want to be producing content that ticks those boxes.
The more relevant and helpful your content is, the longer leads are likely to browse, and the more likely they are to share the content with others. This in turn increases the content's importance according to Google's algorithms, which push it even higher up in future search results.
It's like the opposite to a vicious circle, a virtuous circle if you would.
First thing's first, you need to think about how and where people start when selecting an architect. What questions are they asking, what questions aren't they asking because they haven't even thought of them, and what information are they looking for?
Think about what questions you get asked frequently, what frustrates your customers, what they are always shocked to learn... and then produce content to support them.
You can produce different kinds of content to serve this purpose, such as SEO-optimised blogs, highly engaging video content and easy-to-digest infographics. After this, your aim is to keep their attention and continue delighting them. You could do this by sharing positive customer reviews, relevant case studies, in-depth guides or blank planning templates.
Overall, your aim is to gently guide them towards trusting you, rather than expecting them to guide themselves through the entire buyer journey all by themselves.
A really important part of inbound marketing for architects, or for any sector come to think of it, is tracking activity and measuring returns on investment.
We suggest setting up smart goals so you have firm results to work towards and an informed idea of expected results. That way, you can quickly see what you need to do in order to achieve more.
I'll give you a real life example and work backwards.
Let's say after 6 months of consistent work, you hope to close 4 new projects a month. In order to achieve this, you will need to identify 16 sales qualified leads from the 60 people who downloaded your "Checklist to requesting planning permission." These downloads were the result of 300 total blog views, following the production of 6 blogs a month and a social planner of 60 posts a month.
Within each stage of the journey, you can analyse what is working well, where you can make improvements, and whether your projections are likely to be accurate. This is a fairly simplified example, but you can begin to see the inner workings of inbound marketing for architects who want to grow their business.
As with many things, consistency is key. To be constantly looking to serve your customers, potential leads and people who just want to know more about the industry you love. Best case scenario, you land a new client. Worst case scenario, you become an industry thought leader.