Design Practice: The Basics of Marketing Your Business
Marketing your design practice will require substantial attention and sustained effort. It builds on the steps outlined in a previous ideabook: define your brand and establish your business structure. Here again the steps are broken down into two types of tasks: procedural ones and more conceptual, challenging ones.
Resist the strong urge to set up your dream studio; rent a highly visible office space; order new furniture, computers and plotters; and acquire all of the trappings that make you feel like you’re running a business. Those things will come when you have work to do (or even later). Your more pressing task is business development. You need to take the brand you’ve been curating, announce your presence to the world and start filling your boards with projects. After all, without projects your business doesn’t exist.
“Marketing” defined. This probably isn’t something you’ve had a lot of experience with as an employee. Projects were probably handed to you. It’s certainly nothing I was ever taught in architecture school. But as a business owner, an entrepreneur and a CEO, you’ll devote a lot of time to marketing — not only to get projects but also to make sure your brand is delivering on the promises you’ve made. At its core the goal of marketing is to let people (your target market) know what you do (your unique selling proposition, or USP) and how you do it (your narrative).
Once you’ve put some time in and have developed projects, you’ll come to know that marketing actually extends far beyond these early steps, touching almost every aspect of the way you run your business. From keeping clients happy and projects running smoothly to writing emails and contract agreements, it’s all marketing. You want to be sure your clients, your project team and all of the contractors, consultants and collaborators all have a positive professional experience with your brand. Ideally, you want that experience to be one that warrants their recommending you to others.
Target market. Let’s begin by defining exactly whom you will be selling your products and services to. Make their avatar your ideal client. The more clearly you can define this early on, the more successful you’ll be in reaching them. Your limited marketing budget needs to be highly focused to be successful. Architects and designers often lack marketing skill because our professional training, for the most part, has yet to realize its value. Read as much as you can on the subject, at the very least the basic theory, because you’ll need a working lexicon.
The group of people who prefer to read about high-end, more formal architecture is much different than the group who wants to read about young families living in modern homes. And, because it’s your business, you get to decide whom you’d rather work with. Figure out what they value, what they desire, where they hang out, where they vacation, what their family looks like, what they do in their spare time and what kind of music they listen to. If they emptied their pockets, what would they be carrying? Your brand should be crafted to attract these people, and now you must design your marketing strategy to appeal to their sensibilities.
Take action: Develop your target market avatar to represent your desired clients; be as detailed as you can in describing them. List every possible location they might frequent: web, blogs, community, print, forums (online and off), social clubs, day care centers etc. Research the four P’s (product, price, promotion, place), the four C’s (consumer, cost, communication, convenience) and foundational marketing theory.
Your unique selling proposition (USP). What differentiates you from your competitors? Your USP defines what makes you a better value than the other choices available. One of the reasons that 80 percent of new businesses fail within the first 18 months is their unwillingness to define their USP.
If you’re struggling with this, there are many resources available. (Check out this chart for starters.) While historically much of a designer or an architect’s work has been local, the Internet has opened access to the world, and we’re competing in a global marketplace. Standing out means differentiating, or niching down, as many in the entrepreneurial world refer to it.
Part of defining your USP is determining just what your niche will be. Some architects are generalists, and some are highly focused, working only on one project type. If you’re just starting out, I would argue, it’s difficult to build a general practice. Of course, if you’re purchasing or inheriting one, that’s different. The phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” applies here. I really believe that trying to serve everyone will short-circuit your success.
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Design Practice: The Basics of Marketing Your Business
