Having a good website and making regular social media posts are just the first steps in digital media marketing these days. Maintaining and raising awareness of your practice is an essential task in attracting clients’ interest, but it can only go so far if no attempt is made to convert that interest into new business.
Architects’ websites have improved dramatically over recent years, moving from being top of everyone’s never-ending list of things to do to becoming a practice’s gleaming shop window. Instagram, Pinterest and blogs have all become tools of the trade and everyone appears to be increasingly digitally savvy.
In tandem with the rapid rise of social media has been the development of what is known as ‘inbound marketing’. This is a strategy for attracting potential customers to your content, using software tools to track that interest, then converting the interest into leads and ultimately into new customers.
It can be an appealing alternative to ‘outbound’ marketing efforts such as cold-calling and direct mail/email, especially for sales-averse architects, and also allows small practices to compete head-on for leads against the largest firms at relatively little expense.
Daniel Nelson from October Communications will be explaining how inbound marketing works in a CPD presentation on how to ‘Get smart about digital marketing’ at Guerrilla Tactics 2018: Expanding Practice: Navigating the architecture of planning, procurement and property, which takes place at the RIBA on 13–14 November 2018.
‘In the old days, architects’ PR could be summed up by getting press coverage and standing back. But press coverage no longer has the power it used to have and its impact is in any case very scattered. In the digital age the emphasis shifts to getting people to engage with you online, tracking their interest in your business and targeting them – ideally at the individual level, if you can get people to identify themselves,’ says Nelson.
He works with design companies and architects and helps them generate content that will pull people in: blog articles, advice articles (on topics such as getting planning), white papers and eBooks, and even podcasts featuring satisfied clients.
Inbound marketeers seek to maximise the visibility of content by using keywords to optimise material for search engines and getting links onto other websites and social media platforms. Nelson always gets Google Analytics running on practice websites and encourages people to pay for Google AdWords.
Click-throughs on websites can be tracked and analysed to see where the interest is coming from at the postcode level, but the real goal is to get people to identify themselves by offering their contact details in return for content.
Nelson has been working recently with a practice that found it had been generating interest in Dulwich, a relatively high-wealth area of South London. In response they are now actively targeting potential clients in Dulwich via content generation that should get picked by anyone looking online for an architect from that target area.
The term ‘inbound marketing’ was first coined by HubSpot, which offers its own suite of software tools to assist with digital marketing. It promotes a four-stage approach: attract; convert; close; delight.
Most architects are familiar with ‘attract’, suggests Nelson, but have no systems in place for any follow-through. One tried and tested method of getting results, he asserts, is to find out what people are looking for on websites and then actively target that group with what they want, then analyse the results to see what works and what doesn’t, before repeating the process.
Many of the tools used in inbound marketing to convert interest into sales leads, which are logged and analysed – and logged again even if not successful (with all the reasons why) – will be familiar to commercial sales teams, but not necessarily to architects. This is the point, argues Nelson: architects should be actively selling themselves to new customers, rather than basking in the interest they have generated under the false impression that the marketing job has been done.
Thanks to Daniel Nelson, Director, October Communications.
By Neal Morris. This is a Professional Feature edited by the RIBA Practice team. Send us your feedback and ideas
RIBA Core Curriculum Topic: Business, clients and services.
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Posted on 25 October 2018.
