Is it possible to be both rubbish and brilliant at marketing?

When we started Norton Mayfield Architects we definitely didn’t have a ‘marketing strategy’, nothing written down and very little clue about how to effectively market ourselves to potential new clients.

Our presence on social media has been patchy and often missing the mark; the exact opposite of our approach to project work - thoughtful and purposeful. Our website was developed at a time when we had a bountiful supply of projects from returning clients. Therefore the website perhaps lacks some of the focus needed to draw in potential customers outside of our current network.

What we did have in the beginning was a clear strategy for business success; be good at what we do and develop excellent, lasting relationships with everyone we worked with. Although not sophisticated, once we got a few projects under our belts it worked! More and more projects came from repeat work and recommendations.

For a decade this approach lead to a steady stream of decent sized residential developments for a regular group of clients and we grew the team to suit the demands. But after a while we could see the limitations of this model and we needed to start pivoting to a larger client base and a broader range of project types. It didn’t happen over night, but again we relied on excelling at what we do (and always striving to be better) and utilising the relationships we have developed. Such that we are now doing 4 times as many projects per year and covering a wide range of project types: residential development, private domestic, retail, office, education, and light industrial units. This has put us in a much better position to weather whatever storms come our way (we were well prepared for Covid, even if we never really believed we would all have to deal with something quite so disruptive*).

So, have we been brilliant at marketing ourselves to reach our goals or rubbish? Probably somewhere in between. On reflection we could see that we could create a much more deliberate, clear and effective marketing strategy to help us achieve future goals.

Now after 18 years in business we have created such a marketing strategy linked to our specific business goals. I won’t go into the details here, but one aspect of the strategy is to talk more about the challenges of what is still our core work; residential development. To this end over the coming months you should see articles on LinkedIn from myself and my colleagues covering our experiences of things like the new Building Regs regime, Biodiversity Net Gain, recent changes to the planning process, and some new takes on other age old challenges. You can follow our Norton Mayfield Architects LinkedIn page for the articles, but I will link them as well.

I would like to give a big shout out to Rebecca Robson and Anna Foley for their efforts in pulling together our marketing strategy and to . Gary King . of Tendo and Blue Turtle Consulting for showing us the way.

As ever I’m always keen to hear about other people’s experiences; what marketing strategies have brought you the best results? Or what do you think has been a waste of time for you?

*when talking about Covid 'disruptive' is a completely inadequate word that falls way short of what many people went through and are still, so please excuse my laziness in using it here just to describe it's affect on our working lives.