Marketing Tips for Architecture and Engineering Firms

Increase Profits with Attraction Marketing Tips to Grow Your Architecture and Engineering Firms

There are not enough hours in the day to manage, design and market your Architectural design and construction practice let alone grow the firm.

The Marketing Director is struggling to stay on top of all the sales proposals; the Principals are orchestrating the design teams. The right content attraction marketing partner can make all the difference.

Content Branding Solutions has created Five (5) practical attraction marketing solutions for your firm to use to reposition yourselves at the top of the market.  

1. Invest in a Website with Form, Flow, and Function 

Use your Architectural philosophy and background to create or refresh your unique website.

Your website is your portfolio to the world, your 365/24/7 General Sales Manager, and prospecting machine. Potentially it will be your client's first impression of your firm. So, how does it compare to your competition?

No SSL Certificate! If you do not want to be listed by Google, don’t bother with the SSL Certificate. If you are ready to be a powerhouse, the knowledge experts, this is the first place to begin. 

Is Your Marketing Director Overrun with Proposals? Get Them Expert Support to Help Meet Today's Challenges!

2. Many Parts Make A Successful Prospecting A&E Construction Industry Website

SEO. Think of it as your materials library indexing system. Or the Dewey Decimal System used throughout the world for library book classifications. If you have no SEO, they will not find your portfolio of work.

A Snapshot of What Makes Up Your SEO?

• The Meta description is a one-sentence description of your specialties and core income generating services, including the targeted states and cities for your services
• Meta Keywords persuasively reinforce your meta description in your content and are search engine keywords 
•  If you have a great portfolio, you need to optimize your images, so they load as fast as possible
• Image description, core service area description, location, and company name.
• Device friendly and mobile responsive. Your website must display properly on any device. Does your website pass Google’s mobile-friendly test? Find out here: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly If not you need to refresh it.

You Can Not Ignore Mobile Marketing! Global Digital Future in Focus 2018. - (Martin, 2018)

Key takeaways

1.      “Smartphone usage has doubled in the past three years...”

2.      “Mobile now represents 7 in 10 media minutes.” In other words, “69% of all digital media time is spent on mobile.”

3.      And, “Nearly 1 in 8 U.S. internet users are now mobile-only.”

4.      Your website should scale for all devices

Firms, Copywriters, and marketers who understand mobile marketing will position themselves for success.  

So let's drill down to detail

Meta description

Get the meta description right with great content that is keyword rich, and you are well on your way to developing great organic SEO. 

For example, a one-sentence Book description. FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley – An ambitious, misguided, science student creates a human from cadavers, then abandons the creation, who then kills everyone in creator’s life.

An example Meta description. SQUARE UPON THE HYPOTENUSE a 30-year-old Denver, Colorado-based architecture, planning, and urban design firm specializing in healthcare, research, science, & technology buildings. 

Meta Descriptions are the same. Tell your potential clients: who you are, where you are, and what is your specialty. 

The when, why, and how can be in the details. 

The number of characters in the meta description should be 160 max. Abbreviating your firm's name can make sense. HOK – Formerly Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabau or PCL, formally Poole Construction Company Limited. But be careful, people are unlikely to search for a lesser known firm by abbreviation. IYKWIM (if you know what I mean).

Lots of firms have won awards, so unless it is an amazing award that will immediately resonate with your clients leave it off the description and put it in the copy as meta keywords: Architects, Architecture Firms Denver, Colorado Architects, Denver Architects, are all great long-tail keyword searches. 

Make Sure You Have A Stunning Portfolio with Persuasive Detailed Content and a Powerful Call to Action.

• Easy Navigation. Many sights get over complicated with search bars at the top and sides, when you are working on the mobile phone, a simple menu is all you need.
• Image is Everything. Your site should be designed with a clean fresh-look, professional photographs, and videos with strategic copy messaging, that demonstrates your core services and areas of expertise.
• Make sure your slider tells your story. E.g., Jenkins Architects recipients of The National Healthcare Design Award from the Academy of Architecture for Health, with a Call-to-Action (CTA) or Turning your community’s Civic + Cultural vision into reality, with a CTA.  

1.      Make sure the images have a file name and meta description that includes your firm's name, location, and project type, e.g., hospitality, and lastly, a project name.

2.      Do not name your images like this. Deb’s Day Care Center_ Architects _ Denver & Dallas _ Award-winning architectural design firm in Denver, Colorado, and Dallas, Texas. Who are the Architects? Put your firm's name into the images! Do not use unnecessary repetition of location, e.g., “Denver & Dallas.”  

3.      If you want your firm to turn up in Google images, you must label your images clearly.

• Share your core services, advertise your talents on your homepage slider and above the page break.  Many firms show a wonderful image that takes up the whole landing page, not recommended. Take a page out of Perkins + Will and use the landing page wisely to showcase your talents.
• Copy, the written word, makes up most of your SEO from meta keywords and long-tail phrases to attraction marketing and calls-to-action (CTA) you must have content that outlines your firms value proposition to the Internet and your potential clients.  
• Content that connects persuasively. Sure, your square foot descriptions are interesting, but what makes that project special, why would a client hire your firm? What unique value do you have that they need?
• Check Your Content. Hire a Design + Construction Industry Expert copywriter and editor to check your content, page by page. In the same way, your project architect and principals check each drawing in the CD set.

Use Occam’s Razor “simplest solution tends to be the right one.” Keep it simple stupid as a rule for your pages. Six great images are more powerful than an assortment of images where you can't see the wood for the trees.

Have multiple “Calls-to-Action” (CTA) to drive engagement and to get visitors to take the next step in the sales funnel. Yes, you should have a sales funnel.

Make sure your 365/24/7 General Sales Manager and prospecting machine is attracting and calling clients to take action. Why else would you spend money on your website?  

• “Sign Up for Our Quarterly Trends in Healthcare, Architecture.” We will not sign up for anything anymore unless it is beneficial. We have all been blasted with atrocious company employee updates. Try sending out something that will benefit your clients and has value and is of interest to them. 

Be professional. If you build trust with a great piece of thought leadership content, your clients will come back to you. Make sure you include a call-to-action, etc.

• “Read our Latest Article about XYZ.” These articles should be Thought Leadership articles; white papers targeted to your core service income generating areas and cross-linked to other relevant content. 

Make sure each of these CTA’s go to a specific landing page on your site that provides more information.

• Create Thought Leadership Articles, that attract clients, by sharing knowledge articles on a regular basis. Share case studies, architecture industry trends and news your customers will find beneficial and valuable to position yourself and your firm as the industry leader in your area of expertise. Always use a Design + Construction Industry Experts niche writer
• Show you are a thought leader with podcasts and webinars. 
• Attend and speak at the places your clients gather, post recordings of those presentations on your website and YouTube Channel for ongoing exposure. This process will attract new clients to you.
• Ge a Coach to be sure that you and your team are at the top of your game

A Thought Leadership Article provides you with the opportunity to establish yourself and your company as the knowledge experts in your industry.

2     A Website Is More Than Just A Pretty Face

Your attraction marketing website copy should be working 365/24/7 as your General Sales Manager, and prospecting machine. 

Visitors always leave a trail that the Marketing Director and Principals can follow if you have the right tracking software.  

Architects and Designers Need to Think Of Their Designs As Products, Not Just a Portfolio of Work.

Large Design and Construction firms can afford all the bells and whistles. They benefit from having dedicated marketing positions, Principals, and Associate Principals who specialize in a field of design. This specialization’s make it easier to delegate leads from the website and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and develop thought leadership and marketing plans to attract clients and boost sales. 

Even if you are the only member of your firms’ sales team, you can benefit from tracking prospects earlier in the prospect sales cycle plucking the low hanging fruit and then react quickly to visitors of interest. You can do this on a simple excel spreadsheet.

If a prospect is researching your website for information on your products or services, you will see their interest before they even decide to contact you for more information! Better yet, cost a lot less, have a powerful call-to-action that encourages them to set up a call.  

With this valuable information you can:

• Create a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) you can use it to interact with your clients. I know that many professional consultants have in-house CRM’s and are dubious about one attached just to the website… A professional CRM can be easily integrated; the benefits are huge.
• Create a website squeeze page to Capture qualified prospects information for the team to follow up. Cold calling Joe Blog’s is extremely time-consuming and very unrewarding, cold calling is a waste of time.

1.  You can also use the captured qualified leads to segment your leads into your service areas to provide them with beneficial content that matches their interests and provide inbound marketing content to move them through your sales funnel.
2.  Engineers and Suppliers to Architects Inform your Sales Team, who can contact the interested Architectural party right away, rather than waiting for a lead conversion event.
3. Use Great IMAGES ? GRAPHICS ? INFOGRAPHICS to tell your story.

• If you have a tracking app loaded on your website, you already know who they are and the pages they visited on your website.
• If you utilize Google analytics, you can see which pages attracted views the most, etc.

Not ready For A CRM use an excel spreadsheet to capture and research your website squeeze page captured qualified prospects.  You can research a wealth of information about their needs and level of interest by searching and reviewing them on the internet.

You can also use the captured qualified leads to segment your leads into your service areas to provide them with beneficial content that matches the and provide inbound marketing content to move them through your sales funnel.

The following responses come from a recent survey conducted by Marketing Charts (Hubspot, 2018)

“Which digital marketing channel is perceived as the most effective?”

The various survey findings revealed a pattern in the top channels working today? They all involve COPYWRITING.

Which Is Best? Website Content Marketing 59%… Email 61%… SEO 50%… Or Social Media 41%? 

The Answer Is All four, Working in Unison.

TIP: Understanding and focusing your efforts on the marketing channels that give you the best possible results from your website can increase your conversions of qualified prospects.

3. Stay Engaged - Nurture Your Client Relationships

Pick up the phone, go for a coffee, stay engaged and track those meetings on your CRM or spreadsheet. Email is not a substitute for face-to-face and personal calls. 

Email blasts to a brief list of thousands twice monthly become annoying and stale with time and repetition over saturating their interest. It’s the fastest way to get opted out of and diminish your list.

For most Design and Construction firms, once a month to quarterly cycle emails with brief bulleted descriptions with backlinks to beneficial information, with a value that your clients are looking for is enough.

Some Ideas for Your Emails for:

• Contractors: Construction Market Trends. Built point pricing trends, materials shortages along with labor trends are interesting Construction market predictors of value to potential clients and the architecture Design and Construction industry. 
• Cost Consultants:  Architects and clients always underestimate costs often basing it on the last project they did years ago-  it is not today’s cost we care about it is where the costs will be in one and a half years from schematic design (SD).
• Suppliers and vendors: Tell us about your new materials and products in one sentence with backlinks to more detail
• Architects: Share an earth shattering market changing project. We Architects get inundated with mediocre content that shows the latest project. Tell your clients and me why we should click on your information? 
• Develop your thought leadership by sharing a presentation, or feature an employee and showcase their expertise

If you are using a “Funnel Email Series” keep the hook lines concise. Use bullet points with backlinks.

Don’t Do This:

• Feature your company holiday party, no one cares. If shared at all, it is for your Facebook page, if you have one.

Tips for Your Email Blasts

• Don’t Blast them out, consider the content and your targets
• Define your list into multiple lists of clients whose interests vary
• Add sharing buttons to the email and your website white paper/article pages
• Include both Opt-In and Opt-Out options to receive your emails on your website, social media, etc.

4   The Social Media Connection for Design and Construction Firms 

Love it or hate it, social media is here to stay. It has become the shadow of a false rumor, the mainstay of our instantaneous communication and news. Many firms live or die on and through social media.

Professional firms in the Design and Construction industry have ventured into the quagmire of social media and got burnt.   Tired of shouting in the wind of the twitter feed? Firms retreated to the safety of a website and sat waiting for Google+ to flourish. 

Many small design firms sort the shelter of Houzz and Expertise. Small Home Builders and plumbers’ sort Angie's List and Homeadvisor. Catalogs, or more directly, internet yellow pages that connect professionals with clients, just like a dating site. All third-party services you must pay for.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn has blossomed into the professional network for networking, thought leadership and attraction marketing that Architects, Engineers, Consultants, and Contractors should be using consistently.   

From Hootsuite’s “A Long List of Social Media Statistics that You Need to Know in 2018” (DeMers, 2018)

“94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content, making it the social media platform used most often (they also say it’s the most effective social media platform).”

What should Architects Engineers and Contractors to do on social media:

LinkedIn is a must.

• Create a company “business” page on LinkedIn
• Join LinkedIn. Make sure your Leadership group is on LinkedIn
• Join LinkedIn Groups where your clients might gather
• Share Knowledge articles on LinkedIn groups directly or from your website back linked 

To read the full article please go to Increase Profits with Attraction Marketing – Tips to Expand Your Architecture & Engineering Firms

Peter Lucking is the Co-CEO and Creative Director of Content Branding Solutions, I put your Brand Strategy and success first. Our team offers copywriting, content strategy and attraction marketing for the Design and Construction Industry.

Sources:

Blattberg, E. (2015, April 24). The demographics of YouTube, in 5 charts. Retrieved from Digiday: https://digiday.com/media/demographics-youtube-5-charts/

Martin, B. (2018, March 5). Global Digital Future in Focus 2018. Retrieved from comScore: https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepapers/2018/Global-Digital-Future-in-Focus-2018

Target:  #Denver #marketing #digitalmarketing #sales for #architects #contractors #engineer #searchengineoptimization #contractors #engineers #engineering #sales