November 2020 - Old Website

Websites for architects and architectural firms have three main pieces:

All the architecture websites I’ve seen have at least those components. The home page is often just a slider with some very nice images of homes. It’s a bit of a shame because websites for architects can be so much more.

The Problem with websites for architects

If this image is proof of anything it’s that architects are not taking their websites seriously. In the top ad spots of google you have freelance aggregators. In the organic section of google, you only have one website from my selected area that belongs to an architect.

search engine marketing results for architects

The problem has to do with how user-oriented the architect’s website is against the query. To take on this issue, websites for architects need to create user-specific landing pages. The best place to start here is to understand your customers. I wrote an article that touches on this called marketing for architects.

A visible advantage for architecture websites

Often the hardest part of designing a website is the lack of great photos and illustrations the company has on hand. Websites for architects rarely lack great photos. Great photography sells clients on a proposal.

Great web design can bring you those clients.

The Form and Functions of Websites for Architects

Websites are not brochures on the internet. They are not business cards. They are interactive, involve motion and can provide entryways to other pages. These features allow the user to have a rich experience with your firm.

The Portfolio Page

The portfolio page comes in a variety of forms.

One of my favorites are interactive grids. The example from above comes from the MKPL website and has an interactive filter.

Here are some other examples:

example of well-designed portfolio page for an architect — From Blanchard Fuentes

The About Page

The about page is often overlooked. At the time of writing this I’ve overlooked it on my own website. I’ll fix that fairly soon. One of the about pages that I think has a lot of potential is this one:

This page’s services sidebar has the potential to open up so much organic traffic from google. Sadly, none of these pages actually link out to pages. That said, it sure beats the infamous blurb. Which is just a small paragraph about the firm’s beliefs, founding dates and the founder’s education.

The Contact Page

Here’s a contact page I built a few years ago. It has the added benefit of providing address information for google to put in it’s listing. The bottom buttons allowed the email recepients to organize email types.

web design example of a contact page with javascript validation on a form that ports right to an email — Contact Page

With the advent of interactive forms survey like forms that allow you to segment your users through “logical sequencing” of questions.

Opportunities for Architecture Websites

Most architecture websites don’t have a very robust section explaining their services.
I haven’t seen video effectively used in architecture sites.
Only 40% of the architecture websites, I’ve indexed use tracking analytics.
Architecture websites don’t create location focused pages.

The User Experience

Think of the website as a series of pathways. The homepage is often what is shared with people. Google lists this page as the face of your business.

Houzz does this in order to segment their users and hand the lead over to the contractor or architect.

Houzz splits up their customers by interests like design or construction, different rooms and budgets.

Your homepage should provide the beginning steps into bringing you a phone call. A quick call button on mobile phones is always a bonus.

Users rarely go to a website without an intention.

Here are a couple of user experiences on a hypothetical website:

home page> link to a kitchen remodels page > free quote sign up page for a kitchen remodel
home page> link to a style of architecture > portfolio page of a particular style of architecture > free quote sign up page

In order to create a great user experience, you need to create a robust page. It should inform and sell the reader and then encourage the reader to take action with your film.

If you pair this way of building websites with other marketing strategies like Facebook retargeting and email campaigns you can bring up your visibility quickly.

What’s the point?

You say to yourself, organic is obviously hopeless what is the point of focusing on web design for architects when the user will have to scroll half-way down the page to even know you’re alive.

Well, I believe Yelp and Houzz can be beaten for the top spot on Organic, but more importantly, even if you do ads or business listings your website is still going to be the first thing your clients see.

an example of behavior flow on google analytics.

I had a client who would get upwards of 150 people a week visit to her website and more than 80% of her clients would leave within the minute on the first page. Why? They left because their intentions were not being addressed as soon as the page opened. And that had to be addressed quickly.

Do you know how many people drop off after your first page?

If not, then you should take some time to think about the users experience and obviously hire me to get some analytics and guidance on your digital presence.

This article focuses on how Architects can market residential services to potential clients. That said the wide range of services offered by architecture firms fit within this model of marketing analysis. The examples and data in this article, however, are geared toward marketing residential architectural services. The key takeaway is that you should know your client like the back of your hand through iterative testing.

a custom redesign by an architect marketing in the residential architectural space

We’ll also cover concrete tactics to bring awareness to your services and testing your offers and messaging.

Customers: Define your customer
Where are your customers?
How do they want to interact with architects?
Entry points for prospective clients
Tell a story
Test Everything

define your persona. Often unknown until you re-iterate with marketing questionss.

Customers: Define your customer, then redefine them.

Often businesses, Architects included, focus the majority of their attention on their products and not nearly enough attention on their customer. Marketing breaks down customers into Customer Segments. Examples of segments include age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, profession and interests.

For an Architect, maybe gender, age and ethnicity aren’t as great of indicators as profession, marital status and interests. Customer segments should always be separated by service.

An example of a clear Value Proposal attached to a customer segment would sound like this:

We are an architecture firm offering zoning analyses to young millionaires who have purchased land in the hills of Malibu.

This, however, is only the beginning. You still have to test this idea. If life were as easy as saying something is true, we’d all be swimming in money.

To evaluate whether this theory is true, you need to talk to these potential clients and find out if it’s true. You can of course cut out a lot of back and forth by looking for research data.

For Architects, the AIA, Census Bureau, municipal community planning and property departments and real estate agents become invaluable sources of information to stay on top of buying trends and reign in possible customer segment hypotheses.

Rocket Mortgage has put some wonderful statistics about home-buyers together that might give you some ideas.

Takeaways:

88% of homes are bought through a real-estate agent
Single home-buyers are two times more likely to be women
Median home-buying salary is upwards of $70,000
63% of homebuyers are married

Where are your customers?

Ideally, the answer jumps out at you. For example, sports fans are at sports games or fantasy sports-game forums. Housing is not so simple. We can make some assumptions about where to market architectural services.

Finding marketing channels for Architects

Homebuyers are usually of a certain age, marital status and income level. And that should clue us into where to find our customers. We could look for people with job titles attached to salaries that match our median home-buying statistic in areas adjacent to high rental rates and lots of commerce. We could narrow that down to married people and reach out to them online.

There are tons of ways to configure this. We could spend some time to think about physical locations like open houses or certain industry mixers.

Iterative testing of marketing channels for Architects

At this point, you have a hypothesis of who your client is and a sense of where you can reach them. So reach out to them and see if you were right. Maybe once you start asking questions you find out massage therapists don’t want to own a home. Time to adjust your customer hypothesis. It turns out married folks don’t go to mixers. Then it’s time to adjust your marketing channels.

How do they want to interact with Architects?

Marketing for Architects isn’t all that hard at a local level. In Redondo Beach, where I live, most architects have outdated websites. Most of them do however have analytics running.

So one of two things must be true. Websites don’t matter and their analytics have shown them this or they installed analytics and never took it seriously.

When thinking about their customers and the context in which they are present their architectural services, Architects direct how they interact with their customers seemingly without attention to the customer.

To do this right, an Architect should think about what emotional, social, and functional needs the client is looking to get out of the exchange. For instance:

saving time
reducing stress
status
guidance

Architects should be asking clients about their favorite way to interact, possible options include:

lunches
text messages
links with helpful information
phone calls
in-office
events or interesting outings

The how question for Architects trying to market effectively also extends to your impersonal interactions like the branding of your invoices, plans and other communications.

Creating entry points for potential clients

Where do your clients get ideas? Your future clients are defined and you can guess where they got their ideas from but you won’t truly know until you’ve done some research and verified the data with good old-fashioned door knocking.

Some possible options include:

Real Estate Advertorials and Digital Ads
Open Houses
Houzz
Pinterest
Home Advisor
Zillow
Magazines
Blogs/ Online Articles
Podcasts

These possibilities need to be tested and measured for their return on investment. Prioritize which activity will bring you the most return or prioritize which one is the least risky and get to work.

I like to put together spreadsheets for this kind of thing.

Storytelling

It’s a bit tiring to say this, but it’s worth mentioning. You need to tell a story. People are moved by their emotions and stories are the perfect vehicle to create emotions.

An architect’s ability to relay a story is in their ability to market themselves on social, newsletters and all other media being directed toward prospective clients.

Each piece of branded media should integrate with the other. For example, your email should have your website, Instagram and other profiles on it and each channel can be thought of as a scene to the potential client.

Create a brainstorm. Imagine you are at your retirement dinner and people are sharing their experiences of working with you. What do you want them to say? How do you exemplify those attributes?

Test Everything

The most important tip when it comes to marketing for Architects is to TEST EVERYTHING! Just like the layouts of a home can receive different reactions from a client, your marketing strategy will also receive different reactions.

So write out each of your theories about your clients and confirm them by reaching out and asking questions about what they think of your services, prices, their biggest hassles, their hopes until you know your customers. Then redefine your value proposition and customer segments with the input you’ve received and retest your hypotheses.

This iterative process will save you time and money. From your conversations with prospective clients, you’ll find out what they want to hear, where they go for information and how to communicate with them. This will save you money. It’s a million times better than going in blind with a marketing budget and no plan.

The Big Leagues

We all hope our reputation precedes us. It makes marketing unnecessary, but that sort of status is earned. And the only way to earn it is with great work and happy clients. First, you have to find those initial clients.

Month: November 2020

Websites for Architects: web design concepts for architects