Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

Architural firm? an Architect? attend industry related events- give a presentation showing designs and experience, advertise in industry magazines, write an interesting article for targeted industry magazine, meet other architectural firms and find possibilities of associating with them in a project.

The biggest thing in architecture is networking. Word-of-mouth is huge. I think advertising is seen as tacky/desperate to a certain extent (by advertising I mean tv ads and billboards). PR is also very important (getting articles written in local papers and industry magazines). You've got to take what you can get until you can build your reputation.

I assume that you want to market architectural design services. If this is not correct, please let me know.

If I were truly serious about finding this out, I would get a laser printer and a few reams of paper. I would do a global search and look for a hundred or so competitors online.

In phase 1, I would try to identify and bookmark 25 or so websites which seem to be competitive to my proposed offering and which seem to have lots of information.

In phase 2, I would revisit those sites and print out those pages which seem to have the most information and which I would perceive to be good examples of web-based marketing.

In phase 3, I would turn off the computer. I would buy a set of colored highlighters. I was like different colors for different types of information. For example, I might use one dollar highlighter to indicate benefits provided by a company. I might use other highlighter to highlight terms which might show up when prospects do Google searches. And so on.

Next, I would try to summarize the data in Excel spreadsheet.

By doing this, you can get a pretty good handle on how competitor companies are positioning and marketing their firms.

By the way, you could also do a Google search on each company's domain name to get an idea which companies are doing a good job of promoting their firms on the web (by comparing the number of hits on their domain name), and then you can study those sites and build a list of best practices.

Good luck.

Are you marketing a school that teaches architecture, or are you marketing a book about architecture, or are you marketing an architect or firm?

What country? Who is the target audience? What's the objective? How will you know when you've been successful?