This article was originally published by Archipreneur as “How to Grow Your Architecture Firm Through Marketing.”

Marketing is not simply an expense reserved for already established architecture firms. Small businesses in particular can benefit from a smart marketing strategy by aligning their operations with some of marketing’s most basic premises and concepts.

Architects in general have a tendency to underestimate the importance of marketing in creating and running a successful business. Even those who claim to understand the role of marketing in acquiring clients and building relationships often fail to fully utilize its potential. Principals of small architecture firms often get caught up in trying to keep their practices afloat and end up treating marketing as a luxury that they will be able to afford once they achieve stability–thus missing the true role of marketing as being a catalyst for growth. Architects need to apply marketing to their practices from the onset and treat it with the same amount of dedication as they do with their floor plans, sections and 3D models of their building designs.

Marketing is a complex discipline, but its fundamentals can be broken down to a few simple concepts. As long as you keep these in mind at all times, your marketing efforts will be more successful, and easy to analyze and adjust. You need to be able to answer these three relatively easy questions and communicate them effectively to your audience:

Who are You?

In order to define your place in the industry and your target demographic, you need to determine who you are and what you do. Vague phrases about quality services, multidisciplinarity and “cutting-edge design” on your About Us page will not provide any useful information on what your company actually does. What do you stand for? How is this vision reflected in your office culture, design, and the type of projects you take on?

What Need Do You Fulfill?

Answering this requires you to formulate a value proposition. A value proposition explains how your service or product can help to solve your client’s problem and must be formulated in a concise and clear way, showing concrete results where possible. Even if you offer great value, if you fail to communicate it, your business will not attract new clients.

How are You Different?

Being able to differentiate yourself from your competition is a huge advantage. This is not easy, but your efforts have to go beyond mere sound bites. It can be achieved either by simply offering services in a more organized, client-oriented and reliable way, or by creating a unique, game-changing product or service.

Once you can answer these three questions, your marketing efforts basically filter into four-step process:

1. Attracting potential clients
2. Converting visitors to leads
3. Closing the deal
4. Cultivating relationships

These steps may seem straightforward, but there are several schools of thought on how to apply them. With the recent widespread adoption of social media and online tools, marketing has expanded to exciting new ways that architects can engage with and build an audience, and then successfully convert them to leads.

Today’s users have much more control of their media, and this has leveled the “marketing playfield” by offering businesses the opportunity to organically reach audiences by using relatively affordable channels and winning them over with engaging content. This phenomenon has introduced the concept of  “inbound marketing,” which contrasts with the traditional “outbound marketing” in almost every significant way.

Before coming to a verdict as to which is better, let’s see what each entails:

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing includes traditional advertising practices, cold calling, email and newsletter blasts, sponsorship, and word-of-mouth referrals, to name a few. It is generally known as an interruptive marketing practice that has become less effective in the last few decades. Spam protection tools and blocking techniques, along with the development of new communication trends through social media, have empowered users and limited many of the elements of outbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing embraces new media tools, and promotes creating and sharing content that appeals to specific demographics. Publishing the right content at the right moment is at the core of inbound marketing. It focuses on building communities and relies on organic search traffic. It uses blogs, social media, calls-to-action and landing pages to convert visitors to leads.

Data is also an important element of inbound marketing as it uses surveys and social monitoring to find out where your target audiences are and what they want.

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Most architecture firms will not have to choose between inbound and outbound marketing. Despite hyperbole from proponents of both concepts, they actually work best in combination. You will probably need to keep sending out newsletters and press releases, publishing in magazines, and attending seminars and conferences. However, inbound marketing will allow you to track your return on investment (ROI) more easily, and thus build your reputation. Just remember, there is no single marketing solution that works for everyone.

To learn more about how some of the leading architecture firms use social media, networking, blogging and other marketing tools, check out Archipreneur’s book on new business models for architects, “The Archipreneur Concept”.

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By Stella Cinzia, Leonardo Ramondetti, Marco Lagamba & Francesco Montesoro. Image Courtesy of Bee Breeders

Detailed descriptions of the winning Bee Breeders‘ Tokyo Pop Lab proposals have been released. The competition brief called for a new program for studying and producing pop culture media in Tokyo. Drawing from a wide range of international pop culture history, entrants were encouraged to investigate the migration and evolution of pop culture across the world over time, and examine the relationship of culture and architecture. 

In challenging established typologies of pop culture, proposals exhibited a wide range of ideologies. Successful submissions were chosen for their nuanced depictions of pop culture, clear representation, and coherent agendas for the new laboratory’s program.

Take a look at the winners of the Tokyo Pop Lab competition after the break.

First Prize: Attilio de Palma, Andrea Longo & Enrico Nicli / Italy

By Attilio de Palma, Andrea Longo & Enrico Nicli. Image Courtesy of Bee Breeders

The success of the first place proposal lies in its clarity of massing combined with a strong formal and conceptual position in response to the brief. The project consists of two large cubes placed in opposing corners of the site, lifted above the ground plane, and rejoined with an elevated walkway. One cube contains the mass media research component of the program and the other holds an undefined space of “manifesto” and experimentation, represented by an inflated red balloon waiting to pop. This cube is adorned with two-dimensional imagery in the form of full-height fabric tapestries, obscuring the container behind an ephemeral veil of fluctuating media. At grade, a concrete wall separates the sidewalk from a public courtyard/gallery and other public program. From the street this wall only allows views of the binary cubes, generating the sense of a separate and inner world.

Importantly, the project does not restrict pop culture to a particular form or a particular moment in time, but rather seeks to create a generic space and empty architecture, perpetually inflating with the exploration and representation of mass media and pop culture. The stripped-down but well-articulated construction of steel and concrete allows the project to successfully navigate the minefield of contemporary and traditional pop iconicity, deftly avoiding expected representational tools. Through its massing and tectonic assembly, the proposal takes a stance on the role, power, and ephemeral nature of the consumed image, keying in on the “manifesto” as the cultural appropriation and critique of the never-ending cycle of production and consumption.

Second Prize: Stella Cinzia, Leonardo Ramondetti, Marco Lagamba & Francesco Montesoro / Italy

By Stella Cinzia, Leonardo Ramondetti, Marco Lagamba & Francesco Montesoro. Image Courtesy of Bee Breeders

The second place entry is distinguished through its definition and organization of public program and social activity. Diagrammatically, the project can be described as a civic pavilion, interrupted variously by hoisted volumes of discrete, localized activity. Below and in-between these floating volumes, urban life extends seamlessly into the building, perhaps resembling most closely the precedent of a colonnade or piazza. Through an open, and carefully considered plan, the scheme establishes an urban, public forum for popular culture.

The project uniquely inverts the traditional model of a contained exhibition space by distributing media throughout the primary public space — the circulation surrounding the differentiated volumes. Within each of the distributed volumes, academic functions including classrooms and a lecture hall, are contained. Rather than assume a singular or limited expression, the proposal establishes a forum to exhibit, celebrate, discuss, and debate, the ebb and flow of popular culture in its various forms of expression through thoughtful programming of public space.

Third Prize: Alina Kvirkveliya & Sacha Gengler / Switzerland

By Alina Kvirkveliya & Sacha Gengler. Image Courtesy of Bee Breeders

The chosen third place winner is notable for its clarity in thought and purpose. The project is organized around three conceptual and programmatic elements, including a distorted cube, an adjacent parterre replica from the Palace of Versailles, and a nested, infinite white void. Discrete yet cogent, the project oscillates between these elements, describing through architecture a critical, reflexive position of popular culture as a social phenomenon.

The project’s enclosure and signifying form is singular and definitive. A moderately inflated cube adorned by a glazed membrane produces a distorted reflection and interpretation of the building’s surroundings — of both the city, and local popular culture as it were. Occupying the other half of the site, the replicated Jardin de Versailles is overshadowed. Through juxtaposition, the inflated cube and Baroque replica provoke a striking statement concerning the contrast between popular and elitist culture — the former a phenomenological reflection of the immediate present, the latter a reference to historic propriety. The interior is anchored by an exhibition room, materialized as an infinite white void and described as a canvas for individual, cultural expression. Collectively, these three elements describe and thereby accommodate the dynamism of popular culture, a byproduct of social reflection, historic legacy, and individual expression.

News via: Bee Breeders

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