Marketing Agency for Architects: Strategy First, Then Design

Vernacular is a branding, web, and marketing agency for architects and everyone else in the shelter industry. Before we design anything, we spend time figuring out what makes your practice yours, and everything we make after that grows out of it.

Tell us where your inquiries come from

Architecture moves at its own pace

A lot of marketing advice assumes you have plenty of website traffic and customers who make up their minds quickly. That’s true for many businesses. For an architecture practice, a great year might be a handful of the right projects, and each of those clients probably spent months (or years) deciding who to trust with their house. There are lots of good agencies out there that work across every industry. We think architecture deserves an approach built around how people actually go about finding and hiring an architect.

Two people shaking hands in front of a large geometric V shape

What’s different about marketing an architecture firm

A few things are worth knowing here, whoever you end up working with. You need the right few people to find you at the right moment, and that matters much more than a big traffic number. It’s why we pay closer attention to qualified inquiries than to visitor counts, and why some things other businesses obsess over barely matter to you.

People looking for an architect also take their time. Most have been saving photos and reading about the building process for months before they ever pick up the phone, and by then they’ve often got a shortlist. Writing, editorial coverage, and email keep you in front of them during those months of browsing, which is a big part of why we lean on them.

Referrals are wonderful. They’re the best leads you’ll get, and we’d always encourage you to keep cultivating them. They just come on someone else’s timeline, so it’s worth having a second source of work that you can steer yourself. That takes a while to build, which makes a good case for starting while referrals are still steady.

And people hire architects they trust. They look for that trust in your work, and especially in how you think. Finished photos show what you made. A project page that walks through what the site asked for, what the clients needed, and how you got the two to meet gives them a sense of what it would be like to work with you.

Before we design anything, we sit down with you for a brand work session. We talk through your goals, your story, and your ideas, and then we get into the harder question of what sets your practice apart from the other good firms near you. It takes longer than jumping straight to a logo. It also makes the logo much easier to choose, because everyone in the room has something to judge it against, and it’s a big reason the work holds up for years.

We’ve written more about what comes before a logo, and you can read about how we run a project if you’re curious what working together looks like.

Usually it starts with brand and identity: positioning first, then the logo, the visual system, the brand story, and guidelines so everything stays consistent. After that, most firms want a website that shows off their portfolio, loads fast on a phone, and gives Google something to read. Then there’s the ongoing work of getting found and keeping in touch, like SEO and website management, email, digital marketing on search and social, and content and creative direction. Some firms also want help with media buying in shelter publications, PR, or a bigger campaign that ties a few of these together.

You’ll probably want a few of these rather than all of them, and we’ll tell you honestly which ones make the most sense for you. There’s more detail on our services page.

We’ve helped architects, builders, and developers across the shelter industry figure out what sets them apart and then show it, through new brands, websites, and the marketing that keeps the right inquiries coming in. See our work.

Architects are at the heart of our client list, along with the builders, interior designers, landscape architects, realtors, and trades they work with every day. That whole world is the shelter industry, and it’s what we know best. It helps your marketing, too, because the builder who refers you and the landscape architect you’re sharing a project with are part of your audience as well.

Our studio is at 217 Commercial Street, in Portland’s Old Port. Lots of our clients are here in Maine or elsewhere in New England, and there’s something to be said for walking a site together or talking a project over in person. We’re happy to work with firms farther away, too.

Illustration of a bird writing with a pencil

What happens first?

It starts with a conversation. We’ll ask where your inquiries are coming from now, which of them you were actually glad to get, and where you’d like the practice to be in a few years. Then we’ll tell you what we’d look at first. It’s often a shorter list than people expect, and once in a while it turns out the fix has nothing to do with marketing.

If you’d rather have a diagnosis than a pitch, tell us where your inquiries are coming from now and we’ll tell you what we’d fix first.

Tell us where your inquiries come from