What’s your marketing team working on right now? Or if you’re a founder wearing the marketing hat, what marketing tasks are weighing down your To Do list?
Next week’s newsletter? That giant case study backlog? A last minute award submission?
Now ask yourself, what’s really driving that list? Maybe a practice you admire keeps pumping out content, so you feel pressured to do the same. Or the algorithm keeps changing, so you need to keep feeding the beast.
That pressure to keep up never ends. It just leads to more work, more stress, and less reward.
Freedom to play
Now look again at your marketing list. Are you doing the same things as everyone else? Or could you drop a few items and approach the important ones in a unique way?
Say you’re a mid-sized practice that specialises in university buildings. You might have six similar projects you want to get on the website in case that dream potential client looks at your site.
What if you focused on the one project that encompassed all the key talking points?
Using the time you saved writing about the other five, you might interview some of the students and staff who use that building. Or the local community talking about the history of the place. Or get an outside expert to talk about its ecological impact.
The medium is the message
You could even take it a step further and get creative in its delivery.
What if you found a brilliant illustrator to help you tell the story. Maybe you got it printed as a newspaper, or a zine, or a ‘60s style print ad. And instead of sending it to everyone on your mailing list, you might just send it to a handful of people you really want to work with, paired with a personal letter.
Added bonus
All the content you created can still be used for the website. But in the process, you’ve got something unique and eye-catching.
Isn’t that more exciting, to think of your marketing as a place for trying novel ideas? A place free from the restraints, rules, and deadlines of fee paying work.
Architecture is about relationships. And marketing is just a tool for building them.
How you do it is up to you.
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