Architectural Firms Can No Longer Ignore Online Marketing

Architectural firms no longer have the luxury of a market with a laidback, ''may-the-best-man-win'' mentality. Today, architectural firms need to aggressively market themselves in order to win new clients and sell their concepts. As of now, many architectural firms still stand firmly against marketing their services, as that would mean commoditizing their creative services; however, these firms can ill afford to continue relying solely on their creative skills. People in architecture jobs need to think like businesspeople for the sake of their firms' long-term existence in the market. Enhancing a firm's image and communicating its unique strengths, services, and expertise is an important part of making or keeping it successful.

The Internet is a powerful medium for marketing, and firms are using it extensively for online research on market trends, competition, and much more. At present, forward-thinking architectural firms are already using the Internet to:

Attract potential clients through their websites.
Remain up-to-date with information on upcoming projects and awards programs.
Communicate with a broad audience of clients, employees, and potential customers about important happenings or newly launched services in an efficient, cost-effective, and immediate way through e-magazines and e-mailers.
Accelerate the speed of their business activities by sending e-brochures and electronic presentations.
Save on communication costs and time by submitting samples of their work for assessment by potential clients.
Showcase their portfolios in attractive, easy-to-access online venues.
Prove the effectiveness of their services by posting pictures of their projects online before and after building has been completed.

A website is a powerful and free medium for marketing communications. An online presence has almost become mandatory for any firm’s existence today. A good website can enable a two-person firm to communicate its ideas in better than a 200-person firm. In other words, a good site can maximize the reach and exposure of a firm. Most importantly, a solid website can promote your services and strengths 24 hours a day, 365 days in a year, irrespective of your time zone or location.

Here are a few tips to increase your market presence with the help of your website:

Make your site informative for your clients so that your they will come back to it time and again.
Register your site with search engines.
List your firm in online directories.
If possible, place your site’s link on your clients’ websites in order to divert traffic to your site, where people can see more of your work.

Your online presence can help you portray a complete picture of any of your completed projects. Here are a few tips to successfully build your website so that it will show the right image to prospective clients:

Create a content-rich, visually appealing, and visitor-friendly site.
Make your content keyword-search optimized.
If you plan to use your website as your portfolio, make sure to give considerable attention to the graphics and images you display. What’s more, be sure to test your site on the most popular screen sizes and commonly used resolutions.
Upload smaller images (in terms of data) of your work because people lose interest in a web page if they have to wait too long for it to load.
Track reports on your site’s traffic to get an idea about the profile of people visiting the site.

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Architectural Firms Can No Longer Ignore Online Marketing