Awards and published articles are the holy grail of many an architecture firm, as it is commonly assumed that these will bring clients to the door. While they do have merits, although not necessarily for the reason stated above (more on that later), there are also a myriad of other unexplored avenues to promote your firm to the world.
We are truly at an interesting crossroads, because we have access to many, many ways to promote our work, but that also comes with a challenge: it’s often hard to separate the wheat from the chaff and decide where to promote a design business. Indeed, social media, traditional media, design blogs, youtube, your own website, paid ads are among many of the ways to promote oneself.
Before you jump ahead and say “I need to be on TikTok, because that’s where everybody is going these days” allow me to pause for a second take a breath.
The first thing to consider when defining how you want to market your business, is to determine where your potential clients are most likely to hang out. If you only do industrial buildings, there is hardly any point in being on social media, because the decision makers that you’re trying so hard to attract are most likely not on Instagram, much less watching bored pre-teens doing silly dances on TikTok. They’re way more likely to attend trade shows, read trade publications and be active on linkedin. If you are a residential architect, then trying to get into House & Home, Designlines or grail of all grails, Architectural Digest is likely to make more sense. Perhaps Instagram and Pinterest too.
All of this is purely pragmatic thinking, you don’t need to like the medium you’re being promoted on. Actually, trying to develop a presence in places you like may be detrimental to your marketing, unless you’re doing this strictly for vanity (which then has nothing to do with growing your business) or you’re lucky to share the exact same tastes as your intended audience.
Before any of that, and by far the MOST IMPORTANT aspect of your marketing is to be crystal clear on what your offering is and who it is aimed at. You can think of it as a kind of heuristic equation in the form of:
Specialty (expertise) x Market (type of client).
Picking a profitable niche is an exercise in zooming in and out on either side of the equation. In other words, while it’s indispensable to operate in a niche narrow enough to eliminate all but the few most qualified competitors, you want to avoid going so narrow as to operate in a niche without competitors, but also without or too few clients.
Thus, in the above equation, if you zoom into one side, i.e. narrow the breadth of possibilities, you’ll want to widen up on the other side. E.g one can be an architect specializing in private plastic surgery clinics nationwide, but it would likely be too narrow to pick the same specialty but restrict it to Ottawa alone. Conversely, one could realistically decide to do industrial buildings in Southern Ontario exclusively, because of the unique constraints bearing on this particular typology in this specific locale, while still being part of a market large enough to sustain a practice. Keep in mind that these are completely made up and not necessarily viable business ideas, but a mere illustration to make my point.
Too many firms, even many of the large successful ones have a hard time picking a niche because they’re too afraid to specialize, but there are many small and nimble highly specialized firms out there that do very well, because they are seen as the experts in their field.
As my dear friend Dave Sharp wroteon this blog a while back, many firms are afraid of crossing the chasm once they see their first success. You can’t be everything to everyone and trying to be is a fool’s errand.
So before you decide where to promote your work, it is a good idea to spend some time thinking about what niche your business might excel in and see if there is an opportunity to specialized in that specific area of expertise.
The next step is actually going out into the world and trying it on for size, but that’s for another article.
When, and only when you’ve figured out who you serve with which services you can start thinking about your dream so becoming a TikTok superstar.