Advertising for Architects Milwaukee WI

Marketing Strategy Start at the Start “Marketing is not a department. It is your business.” —Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible

Many architects make the mistake of thinking that marketing has only a peripheral relationship to what their firm does. In fact, marketing works best when it is totally integrated into the operations of your firm, when it’s a part of everything you do. You can’t create a plan for how to improve your marketing and increase your business without first considering your long-term goals—not just in terms of fee revenue or winning work, but in terms of who you want to be and where you want to go, both as a firm and as a professional. There are a number of ways strategic planning can help your firm:

Build a shared vision for the firm’s future.

Articulate your vision so that it can be communicated to others.

Get approval and support for the vision from senior leadership and, ultimately, your entire staff.

Create a framework for all future decision making.

Figure out (and agree on) how much you’re going to spend on marketing and other initiatives to make it happen. The discussion of strategic planning and marketing planning are divided into the following five areas, each with its own chapter in this book:

How much should we spend on marketing?

How do we plan and track our expenditures?

Clearly, strategic marketing planning on this level can be a challenge, and many firms avoid doing it, or consider only some of these issues, or involve only some of the key players in the process. The mind-set is often, “We know who we are and where we want to go. We don’t need to talk about those things. We just need to bring in more work!” But for a marketing plan to be successful, it has to start with an understanding of the firm’s vision and direction. The process of defining the firm’s vision and direction has to be shared by all the senior leaders in the firm, in order to get their input and approval. It can’t be delegated. If the leaders don’t understand it or believe in it, how can they possibly serve the plan? Strategic planning is the process of developing a vision of who you are as a firm and what your longterm goals are. It’s about more than just marketing; it can influence everything: human resources, finance, information technology, operations, hiring, promotions strategy, design process, client relationships, the design of your office, and absolutely anything else that affects your firm and its performance. Firms typically engage in strategic planning at defining moments in their practice, when the firm’s leadership changes or when the practice undergoes some kind of profound transformation. The strategic planning process enables the firm’s leadership to build a shared vision for the firm’s future, articulate the vision so that it can be communicated, and create a framework for all future decision making. When you’re ready to engage in strategic planning, it’s important to open your mind as much as possible. Get ready to think big. Because strategic planning is a process, not a document or a report, it isn’t effective for a small group of leaders to issue a fat document as the strategic plan for the firm. It will probably go unread. It will certainly not achieve approval and support from the 1 people who need to understand it and act on it. Strategic planning is best conducted as an open process, one that involves all your firm’s key leaders. To begin the process, set up a strategic planning meeting, either as a retreat outside the office or as an extended in-house meeting. (You may want to bring in a marketing consultant to help you with this.) Figure out who should be there to give input to the vision for your firm’s future. Keep the group as small as possible, but don’t leave anyone out. Ask everyone to commit half a day for the meeting (two hours just isn’t enough), and to come relaxed and prepared to focus on the firm’s strategic direction. Give everyone an agenda in advance and ask each person to bring historical data based on his or her area of expertise or interest (financial data, hiring or retention info, win/loss reports, client feedback, etc.). Gather any existing documents that attempt to define the firm or its vision, such as mission statements, a firm description, marketing materials, articles that have been written about the firm, and so on. Plan to spend about half the meeting talking about where you are now (your firm, your markets, your competitors, etc.) and the other half talking about where you’d like to go (your mission, your vision, the action plan). Your agenda for the meeting could look something like this:

Strategic Planning Meeting Sample Agenda
1. Who are we?

What makes us who we are?
2. What markets do we serve?

Who are our clients? What are we good at? 20 Strategic Planning: Getting to the Starting Line
3. What are our strengths?

What’s special about us? Whatmakes us great?
4. What are our weaknesses?

What could we do better?
5. What are our opportunities?

How can we grow?
6. What threats do we face?

What scares us?
7. What’s our vision for the firm?

Who do we want to be?
8. What’s our mission?

What do we want to change?
9. What are our goals?

How are we going to achieve them?
10. How do we communicate the results of this meeting:

to our staff?

to our clients and prospective clients?

Notice that these agenda items are all questions. Questions are effective conversation-starters, because they require an answer. Questions like this also convey a certain level of openness. It’s not a trick, or rhetorical. The answers really are unknown, and the purpose of your meeting is to find them. Think carefully about how to facilitate this meeting and how to capture the ideas that people have. Use flip charts to write down the things that people say so that they’re recorded and so that everyone in the meeting can see them, process them, and respond to them. Let everybody know that you’ll be recording the meeting in this way, and will distribute notes to them within a day or two of the meeting. TIP Questions are good for getting the conversation started. Keep your questions open-ended. Yes-orno questions don’t further the discussion. Remember that the strategic planning meeting isn’t about looking smart or showing that everything’s fine just the way it is. You want to create a new vision together, and it must be based on honesty and trust. Make everybody feel comfortable, appreciated, and a part of the process. Ask a lot of questions. Ask stupid questions. Listen carefully to the answers. Discuss them, record them, and learn from them.

Who Are We? What Kind of Firm Do We Have?
First things first: It’s important that your key leaders are in agreement about who you are as a firm and what you stand for. It may seem simple, but the most fundamental issues are sometimes the hardest to agree on. Who are you? What are you all about? It’s not easy to frame a broad discussion like this or to determine beforehand what the answers to these questions are going to be; you have to stumble upon them. Just be as honest as possible. You’re not trying to build a marketing case or define how your clients see you—that comes later. At first, you’re only trying to determine how you see yourself as a firm and how you explain what you’re all about. You may want to start by asking each person in the room to say how he or she describes the firm to friends or colleagues (not to clients or prospective clients— you don’t want to know how they sell the firm, but how they think of it). As they talk, write a few key words on your flip chart as they come up. The flip chart then becomes the documentation of the discussion—the closest thing you have to the real identity of the firm. Once everybody has had a chance to speak, you may want to ask, “Does everybody agree with what’s up here on the flip chart?” Then discuss whatever seems “meaty” or interesting, making additional notes along the way. In some cases, a discussion like this could go on for quite some time. Within the framework of a halfday strategic planning session, set a limit for this discussion (half an hour or an hour) and then summarize. It’s okay if you don’t get to a “final answer” in this session.

REMINDER Remember to treat your colleagues with the respect they deserve. Listen, ask questions, and don’t talk too much. You’re working together to forge a common vision; give everyone a chance to contribute equally.

TIP Be honest about what your firm is all about. At this point, it’s not about how you sell the firm; it’s about what the firm is.

Identity is a complex issue. It may not be easy to find a neat and tidy definition of “who we are” that sounds right to everyone in the group. Expect differences of opinion. Don’t ignore them; face them openly and try to integrate them and find the common threads between them. In your discussion, feel free to mention other firms as models or benchmarks. “We’re like Big Firm A, but we’re smaller and more focused.” “We’re like Small Design Firm B, but our design style is more driven by the client than our own tastes.” These comparisons help you to categorize your firm and to figure out where you fit within the solar system of your competitors. An identity map is a great tool for deciding how you compare with your competitors. Select two factors, and map one on the X-axis and one on the Y-axis. (The example in Figure 1.1 uses size and a design/ specialty firm as the two factors.) Put your competitors on the map and put your own firm on the map. (In the example here, the given firms are placed more or less randomly on the map; this is not to be construed as any kind of statement about these firms.)

TIP You may need to establish time limits for discussing each question. Otherwise, you may not make it through the entire agenda.
RULE OF THUMB Expect differences of opinion. Try to find common ground between differing opinions. Recognize that there are different categories of architecture firms, and that you probably fit into one of them. There are a number of ways to define the categories, but for the purpose of this discussion, let’s say that there are three major categories:

Design firms

Specialist firms

Large firms/matrix organizations

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