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foreign [Music] good question because for a lot of Architects I think the answer is no it doesn't work they spend a lot of time money and effort trying to generate inquiries and leads and they waste a lot of time effort and money so for most people no but but then again I guess it's a bit like does design work well you know for most people if they try and do it themselves no there is a sort of a narrow band of marketing that does work for when you're selling Big Ticket Professional Services like design architecture that you have to do and it's a bit different to what most of the marketing that you normally see foreign yeah okay so it is different so most of what we would see would be marketing retail marketing we see it all the time in our newspapers on TVs this is retail marketing where you're trying to make the sale on the first go and I think if you if we compare it to dating it's almost like uh um trying to get married on the first date it's probably the politest way of putting it um and when you're selling Professional Services that doesn't happen or all you're really trying to do when you're doing Professional Services marketing is not try and get the sale you're not trying to win a contract what you're trying to do is get engagement you're trying to get a meeting or you're trying to get someone to reach out and contact you and that's the big difference it's a series of much smaller steps when you're selling a bigger ticket item and when you do it that way you've got a chance of making it work [Music] I think the number one biggest mistake Architects make is thinking that doing great work is going to be enough I think you get told at University that a good project is the best marketing you can do the problem is most of your clients aren't Discerning enough to understand great architecture from very good architecture so it's not enough just to be a great architect and there's a lot of great Architects out there who don't have many projects or or um or not the type of projects that they want and it's got nothing to do with their ability so I think I think the Cure and you may not like this but number one you think of yourself as a marketer of architectural services first if you're running a business you kind of have to have that mindset firmly entrenched and number two you're an architect right so number one you're a marketer of architectural services number two you're an architect because if you if you're not good at number one then you either don't end up with any projects at number two or you end up with not the projects you want so yeah if it was a case between putting in more time and effort to become a better architect or putting more time to be a better marketer of architectural services um I think you know what I think uh the smarter thing to be okay so the first marketing strategy I think every architect would would value and get you settled is this idea that at the end of the day marketing uh or referrals is probably going to be your number one marketing strategy now for most of you you'll get 50 to 80 of your client projects and clients already from referrals and Word of Mouth so we know that works as for anything else uh all the other marketing strategies can work sometimes if you do them really well but we know that referrals works really well even when you don't do anything so the first strategy I'm going to just talk about over about 60 seconds is this concept of promoting the fact that you are a referral business so you would call yourself you would say something like you know we're very proud to be a referral Business 80 of our clients come from referrals and Word of Mouth from our happy clients and you would put that in your website your newsletter your emails you'd remind people constantly that you're a referral business and when you take them on you would let them know we're a refill business you probably came to me because you were referred and you promote the fact and you take pride in the fact that we're a referral business so that gets drummed into your prospect very early on and I'm going to say you know to phrase how this would work you identify as being a very proud referral business and it sets the expectation it's sows the seeds for any new clients when they come on board that that's kind of how we operate around here we have to refer more people to you so that's number one strategy number one number two is identify a network of people so I call this the dirty 30. mainly because it Rhymes dirty and 30 rhyme and it's catchy and most people seem to remember as soon as they've been taught it so the dirty 30 is around the fact that yep referrals and word of mouth is probably the most important thing and with that we need to identify Who are the influencers and the referrers out there in the marketplace for the type of projects you want who are they and we need to basically communicate with those people now why 30 because if you Target and build relationships with 30 people over the next 12 months you're probably not going to get referrals from all of them but you may get referrals from 20 of them or twenty percent would be six and we call this the Super Six right now if you had consistent referrals from six people that would probably keep you busier if you're on let's say you're a one-person band that will probably keep you busier than you could handle if you've got 10 architects in your firm then each architect should be developing their own dirty 30. because every architect in your firm should be bringing business in but anyway 30 people for each architect you're only going to get 20 of them become good referrers but 20 is six six is enough to keep you busier than you probably need to be um the other question that comes up with that is okay well who do I Target Builders are great other Architects maybe that don't do your type of work um but but get questioned around that um all the other people who work in the particular Niche that you want to work in so um Builders interior designers landscapers maybe past clients would be good people for the sturdy 30 and your job is to stay in touch with them in some reasonable way over the next 12 months and try and activate at least let's say 20 only 20 of them to refer to you so the third one is referral pricing and this goes well with the identity of being a referral business and what I teach my clients is to break up the the sales process into a number of steps rather than just trying to jump to a proposal quickly and Sell Your Design Services we break it down to a number of steps and one of the earliest steps that I get my people to to uh to put in place is pre-design research where you get paid to go and do research and Analysis now once this is set up and you've got a product that you can sell and you're confident about what you're offering and selling it becomes a much better way of selling Design Services it's like a doctor doing a diagnosis and and obviously that's a more professional way to go about it but at this point if you are competent at selling what I call an LCC um if you're competent in selling that you can offer referral pricing right so let's say it's a two thousand dollar package to go away and do some research analysis you can say would you like the normal price of the referral price to which they'll reply oh what's the referral price and you'll go oh sorry didn't I tell you yeah well you know as you know we're a referral business and most of our 80 of our business comes from referrals and word of mouth so in the past we've had so many so much business coming in we haven't been able to see where it's coming from and I want to rectify it so if you're prepared to refer people to us to one of our lccs our pre-design research or or anything else then I can give you this pricing if you don't think you can refer anyone or you don't want to that's fine then you get the normal price so what do you think you know would you prefer the normal price or the referral price the next one is not a referral strategy it's going back to I wouldn't say it's traditional marketing because it's not what most people do but it's we call it a monkey's fist so it's it's if you think about the stages that a buyer might go through before they're ready to hire an architect there's quite a number of stages and I like to break it down because it's almost like a bus going along and there'll be clients sitting at different bus stops along the way and you've kind of got to have an offer where your doors open up and you can let people on at different stages depending on where they're at depending on which bus stop they're at now a lot of people at the early stage and you know some Architects might say with their Tire kickers and they just waste my time sometimes they are and sometimes they're not they're just at the early stages and they're still doing their own research and Analysis and maybe it's too early uh you know you don't want to sit down with them and spend five hours working through design with them because they are too early for that but what you can do is produce educational content that answers the question so let's say what are some of the questions people in the early stages might have might be things like how much is you know you know does a project like I'm thinking cost how long will it take who are the people I'm going to need to contact what's the process all right so there's four questions that they're likely to ask that themselves right they're looking for answers so if you can create a document uh or some a video or anything that answers those questions gives them an idea about how much things might cost how long it will take who the experts are and you can name the experts then people will put their hands up and request that information right so we'll normally set up a system where it's automated where they can put their name and contact details in return for that those answers right now you would I would always make these questions Niche specific so if I was going for a beachfront you know if I wanted beachfront homes I would say how much does it cost to you know build a beachfront home who are the experts associated with beachfront homes and what's the process for a beachfront home how long would it take to build a beachfront home and what's the steps for getting a permit uh or you know board approval or whatever it is and so by by making it more specific you're going to make that content more valuable to those people and they're more likely to reach out and and contact you okay I'll give you a fifth strategy and this one really relates to if you're a bit of a specialist and it does pay to be a bit of a specialist and that is PR or press releases so if you think about all the Publications out there in the old days there used to be the same newspaper would have 20 or 30 journalists on staff and there'd be typewriters there and they'd be working away furiously and then going out into the public into the city to capture stories it doesn't work that way anymore right it's too expensive so what newspapers TV stations magazines any small publication rely on is input from other people input from people like you input from experts who can write articles for them so what you can do is a press release you'll have probably heard of that but you send a press release to the editor or to a journalist in a particular publication that you think your ideal target market are likely to be reading and you would pitch a story you would pitch a story with what what you're working on you'd say Hey you know I I've just done this type of project and I can write this type of article you can go online actually go onto Google and just check out what the format for press releases are okay but you would send an email to an editor using the correct format and basically pitch an article if they like the article then they'll take it up and they'll you know there's a good chance they can run that article now one good catch is to once you if you get on board with an editor who wants to write an article offer to run one every single month for them right you can have an ongoing column now you think oh they wouldn't want that no they do they're trying to save money they don't have the journalists that they need they don't have the writers they need they're often trying to run these Publications on a shoestring so if you're any good at writing um then you know doing a press release to offer your services to a publication that your ideal target market are likely to be reading is probably a good strategy for you there's a lot of other strategies that I work with those are just five to get you started I hope that's I've helped you [Music] 've got a .archmarketingarch marketing.org then there's a website there there's a number of resources training tools blogs about marketing about the type of stuff I've been talking about that you can get help with and and get you on your journey I'll tell you one thing I say it's not just about the strategies it's about the mindset right so to be a successful winner of projects you have to have yeah you have to have marketing tools and referral tools but you also have to have the mindset so there's a lot of mindset stuff at archmarketing.org there's a private uh Facebook group you can join it's if you go to Architects marketing Institute uh it's a private group so go and go and look for that you can join that there's a lot of resources provided there [Music] [Music]