Clients’ Pain Points

What are the pain points?

Pain points are a marketing concept, defining obstructions in a buying process, experienced by customers as problem, frustrations, or troublesome issues. Marketing’s role is to turn them into opportunities for architects and architecture firms in their client acquisition effort.

Potential clients could give up, block, or delay their projects. Those pain points are “fight or flight” events, and decision-making situations. Often, they are setbacks, when the whole plan is reconsidered.

Good decisions depend on the quality of information. But both architecture and construction markets are asymmetrical information markets. Information is scarce for buyers, as architects and other professionals hold the vast proportion of information. In such conditions, potential clients’ frustration couldn’t be higher, as their decisions are extremely hard to make.

Pain points in building investment process

Conceiving our marketing strategies, we must never forget that architects’ services are part of a larger process. Clients’ aims are building, not architecture projects. Architectural design harmonizes clients’ goals with external factors:

• Land restrictions
• Zoning regulations
• Building permitting
• Construction codes
• Budget limitations
• Project feasibility
• Markets’ conjectures

The list above can increase with more items. But it’s obvious that architects’ knowledge is greater, no matter how educated the clients are. So they experience great difficulty making necessary decisions.

Decisions making = risks taken

The quality of decisions depends on the quality of information that leads to these resolutions. Project owners face complex situations. Their decisions are, in fact, a risk. But risks increase as they lack information, or if that information is flawed or incomplete.

However, potential clients are not gamblers. In fact, investments in real estate are among the safest. Building your own house is exactly what everybody expect from calculated individuals. But all architects’ potential clients feel this process as a chain of problems.

Although human kind has tremendous problem-solving abilities, we never feel comfortable facing problems. We are averse to risk, as all decisions are risky. So, there’s no wonder why our potential clients give up, or experience setbacks, delays, or blockages.

Potential clients pain points are marketing opportunities for architects

But these events can help architects attract clients. There are two conditions:

1. Architects have to anticipate potential clients pain points.
2. Create content to answer the questions they might have to solve their problems.

Although the first point is relatively easy, the second one is nothing but tricky. Investments, including conceptualization, design, building, etc have certain stages that we know. Even an architect has to go trough the same process stages.

But how do potential clients formulate the questions to find out the relevant information? Well, this is our question!

First, we don’t even use the same vocabulary! We do residential, while they want to understand what to do to build their home. We do commercial architecture, but business owners want to build a shop, a showroom, or an office building.

Our design is complacent with zoning regulations. But a potential client wants to know at what distance should be between the house and the fence.

Commercial architecture is a keyword in Architecturese language. Office building is the keyword in Simple English. Although professional clients (developers, project managers, builders, etc) might be familiar with our jargon, not even their searches don’t always use it, but common language.

Asking deeper questions

Search engines are better and better. But they can’t yet translate jargon in simple language, and vice versa. Besides that, users asking questions about houses, most likely ignore titles containing residential instead house or home.

On a deeper levels, potential clients can identify other issues. One logical pattern affects all of us. We identify a problem, then we deduce a solution. We are not searching for more information on the initial problem, but on the solution we think it’s correct.

How architects’ buying process is working

I made a description of the buying process in ”How Architects Attract Clients”. The bottom line is that most often, we don’t attract clients, but clients choose architects. This is why projects are usually underpaid.

Potential clients try to find solutions for the problems they anticipate during their building development. Because often they succeed in doing so, they are looking for architects to implement their solutions. Therefore, the architects’ services are not so important! After all, they are giving us the solutions, right?

But we must remember. Our potential clients don’t know how and what to do in the beginning! They do their research. They identify the problems (pain points), then how to solve them.

However, we can be not only the source of this information, but the solution itself! Architects can offer guidance and help. We can offer correct, feasible, and elegant solutions.

Content marketing for architects

Architects can not only offer guidance, but anticipate potential clients’ pain points. Content marketing disrupts clients buying processes, guiding them to real questions and real solutions to their problems.

Content marketing changes the paradigm. Architects can start to attract clients during preliminary building phases, earning their trust and winning projects.