Ep 25: Finding your niche and focus with Magnus Ström, Ström Architects
Hello and welcome to Marketing In Times of Recovery, the bi-weekly built environment marketing podcast. And I’m your host Ayo Abbas, founder and director of Abbas Marketing.
Today my guest is Magnus Ström from Ström Architects who design one-off high-end houses.
Magnus takes a laser-focused approach to marketing and in this interview, we touch on how
the practice focuses on a very specific niche and the challenges surrounding finding and working with one-off, private clients
they approach the media and awards
social media and digital has played a huge role in their business.
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This episode was recorded on Thurs June 03 2021
Resources
Abbas Marketing
Ström Architects
Dave Sharp – Instagram is dead - MITR podcast
Hufton + Crow Photography
James Silverman Photography
John Pawson
Gino Wickman
Greg McKeown – essentialism
Seth Godin – This is Marketing
The Business of Architecture podcast
Transcript.
Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of Marketing In Times of Recovery, and I am your host, Ayo Abbas, founder and director of built environment marketing, consultancy, Abbas Marketing. Today, my guest is Magnus Strom from Strom Architects who design one off, high-end residential homes. Magnus always takes a laser-focused approach to his marketing. And in this interview, we touch on how his practice has a very, very specific niche in terms of high-end residential clients. We also took a look at their approach to Media Awards and PR which is again highly targeted. And finally we look at Instagram and Pinterest and the role that that plays in their business and driving it forward. If you liked the interview, please make sure you share it with others who might find it of interest to, it really does help us to spread the word. Anyway, in the meantime, I will stop talking so you can get on with listening. Enjoy the show, bye. Hi, and welcome to the latest episode of Marketing In Times of Recovery. Hi, Magnus. Thanks so much for coming onto the show. Can you give me a bit of an intro to you and your practice, please?
Magnus Strom: 1:14
Hi, yeah, thanks for having me. So I run a medium-sized architecture practice down on the south coast in England and a little town called Lymington. There is about 13 of us. We specialise in doing one-off houses and we currently work in the UK and all over the world really.
Ayo Abbas: 1:34
And in terms of the projects that you do. How difficult is it, the fact that they're one-off clients? Is that quite a big challenge to always keep the pipeline going?
Magnus Strom: 1:46
Well, I think all projects have their challenges and private clients have different challenges, perhaps to commercial clients. It's much more emotionally driven. And the hard thing is that you've got to keep the pipeline of work coming, and you can't go and market directly to them because you don't necessarily know who the answer is. Especially have to have a different approach to many other architects’ practices.
Ayo Abbas: 2:09
And in terms of how you approach the marketing for your practice overall, what do you do? What sort of things?
Magnus Strom: 2:18
Well, we are a niche practice. I read this book by, I'm sure you know, Seth Godin, marketing guru. And he was talking about the smallest identifiable market. And if you can, you don't need to market to everyone, you just need a very few select people that's going to give you work. The best example I can give is someone like John Pawson, for example. How many people want to have a white minimal house that's only got white and a bit of limestone and a little bit of timber, if you're lucky, many people want that and pay a lot of money for it. And so, there's not many people, if you look around the world, say 200 people a year, they want that kind of house in the world. But, half of them are gonna go and call John Pawson. So he's kind of got that smallest identifiable market really identified, and then he works in that niche, and he doesn't need that many clients per year. And I think that's really what we tried to do to really focus on that small, small sector of people that we know, want what we do. And how do we get to those? We can't go and just call people or going knocking on doors and so on. So for us, it's very much about creating some form of brand awareness. So, word of mouth: it's not someone saying, like, oh, yeah, you should, I did this out with them, and you should go to them. But it's more that someone has seen us on, for example, the internet or on Instagram or some publication, and then they're recommended that way, so that way, quite a lot of things happen. But for us, a bigger driver, the biggest driver is internet: Instagram, but also Pinterest, funnily enough, because we also when clients come to us, they also have Pinterest boards. So what very often they do, they start selecting all the work that they really like and do a Pinterest board and then to figure out who's done all of these projects. And then they go, okay, so this is Strm Architects and then they call us.
Ayo Abbas: 4:25
And are they pinning stuff from your Pinterest boards, or is it mainly from magazines and things like that?
Magnus Strom: 4:31
We are really slack with this actually, we used to have, on our Pinterest, on our Strom Architects one, we used to put up all our products but we've been quite lazy with it now, but as soon as the work is out, you can pin from the website, etc. And it's kind of doing its own thing without you actually doing anything.
Ayo Abbas: 4:47
So it's organic.
Magnus Strom: 4:49
Yeah, it's great. And it's one of those things, at the moment, we haven't focused on it because we have other priorities at the moment and the work is kind of working anyway. So it's not something we have focused on. But it's something that I know that we need to do more and engage more with it, because all our clients use it.
Ayo Abbas: 5:09
But it's quite interesting that because when you're looking at the some of those titles like Dezeen, and you look at some of their boards, and they've already got a million followers and stuff like that. So that audience is already there. So, in some ways, you targeting those types of publications, means that your work is going to end up on those boards anyway.
Magnus Strom: 5:26
Yeah. And, of course, you said Dezeen, for example, that's something you really want to get published there. And it really helps. And then you can see how your website hits; spikes after that. And obviously, for example, Architizer, and so on. So all of those online platforms really help.
Ayo Abbas: 5:46
And in terms of dealing with those types of publications, because they are really high profile ones, how have you built that relationship with them?
Magnus Strom: 5:54
In the beginning, I think that, with Dezeen, when all of this kicked off, 10 years ago or so when I set up, so much was going over to digital from print, suddenly you had people like Dezeen, for example, they didn't need two projects published per month, they needed to publish four projects per day. So suddenly, the hunger for projects to publish was much higher. So that meant that what we did very early on that I think was really key for us was we invested in the best computer-generated image renders of our products that we could possibly afford. And it took a large chunk of our fee. But it meant that we could get it published so it was published on Dezeen even before it was built. I don't think they do that so much these days, but back then we could get houses published that hadn't been built, and that worked really well. And that can then become, not viral, but it certainly made the rounds on the internet and so on. And that really helped in generating and raising that profile.
Ayo Abbas: 7:02
That's amazing. So, do you think it's harder for architects to get in those publications these days? Or do you think it's actually easier?
Magnus Strom: 7:11
I don't know, to be honest with you. I think that it helps if you've got relationships, people that know you, so you can drop something to them, almost private notes, saying I've sent you this today, keep your eyes open for it. There was people at Dezeen we used to have a very good relationship with, but she's moved on now, I think but certainly it does help. But also, if the work's good, it speaks for itself, and then they want to publish it.
Ayo Abbas: 7:38
That is true.
Magnus Strom: 7:40
That comes back to another thing. I listened to this podcast. That was your podcast, wasn't it? You had Dave Sharp on?
Ayo Abbas: 7:47
Yes, I did.
Magnus Strom: 7:48
And saying that, how Instagram is trailing off. And it's been trailing off for the last two years. And it's not something that we find at all. But also they were saying unless you have a really strong portfolio that's very visual, if you have that, then Instagram really works for you. And I think that for us it does, because when you look at the private housing market, on Instagram there's lots of homes, properties, fashion, cars, boats, yachts, whatever. But it's very visual. So if you're an architect specialising in hospitals, you wouldn't necessarily use Instagram, because it's not the right place to market it. But for houses and homes it really works. So I think that, therefore there has been a huge, well I wouldn't say huge, but we have worked on Instagram, that's really gonna keep it up.
Ayo Abbas: 8:44
Definitely, your projects are so visual as well. As well of investing in CGI, it's also the photography that you have as well, which captures the project. So you obviously spend a lot of time on getting the look right, and making sure that aesthetic works as well. So, in terms of photography, are there any hints and tips in terms of what you do? Or how you tackle that?
Magnus Strom: 9:05
Yeah, the first advice is basically to hire the best you can afford. And we worked, in the beginning, we tried lots of different photographers, and every time you got the photographs back, you thought like, oh, yeah, it's good, but it doesn't quite sing. You knew something that could have been better or that could have been better. And we tried lots of different people. But when we shot this house, called Island Rest on the Isle of Wight, the client had a connection with Nick Hufton from Hufton + Crow. And I wouldn't say that they're rock stars of photography, but it's certainly up there, right?
Ayo Abbas: 9:44
Yes, definitely.
Magnus Strom: 9:46
It was a little bit more expensive and so on. I thought, oh, this is expensive. But then I thought to myself, hang on a second. We're spending far more money on CGI than we're spending on photography. That's kind of wrong, isn't it? So I thought, let's do it. And he was just fabulous to work with, Nick. They are so talented and the way they see things and how they put it all together. And it was just a joy to work with them and then see the photographs. It was just like, yes, when you get them. That's really amazing. We've just shot a project in Sweden as well. But we used a photographer based in Sweden, called James Silverman. He's also very talented, he's actually a Brit, but he's lived in Sweden for a few years. And he's been mostly doing self-commissioned works, he's been travelling the world photographing houses in South America or whatever. But because publications have changed, they no longer buy stories, right? So they want everything for free. So the architect's got to pay for the images, so it's changed. So we started shooting like that. And that was an interesting shoot. So we're just going through all our photographs at the moment, and we're gonna get some hopefully good images soon.
Ayo Abbas: 10:56
And what role does video play in what you do now, in terms of how you market? Are you using that more? Or is it something you're aiming to do?
Magnus Strom: 11:03
We are aiming to do it, we haven't done it at the moment, we looked into it a lot. And I think that there are certain projects that lends itself to it more, but the websites are going that way. And when we redid our website a few years ago, it's all set up. So it can very easily take video. So we certainly can do that. Because for artists, again, about portraying the lifestyle, because you can do so much more through video; just a sense of arriving at a house or the light that goes on there. So that's definitely something that we are looking into.
Ayo Abbas: 11:35
Because you do one-off houses, do your clients often say you can't photograph these houses? Because that's what often happens on high-end projects.
Magnus Strom: 11:46
It doesn't happen often. We've had one project, we just recently signed a project in Sweden, and they said we don't want you to publish it. They said, Well, you could probably put it on your website, but you can't publish it. But with all our projects, we always call them something different. So the project name that you see on the website, it's not what their house is actually called, because it wouldn't take long if you have a house name, you can just find it online on Google or through planning app or whatever. And as soon as you can do that, you can pinpoint where the houses are and some clients are high profile and they don't want people to know where the houses are.
Ayo Abbas: 12:30
And then how do you take the names for your project? Is it influenced by the location? Or how do you choose them?
Magnus Strom: 12:37
It's quite random. Normally, it's got something to do with the location or the feel of it, or the place of it or something like that.
Ayo Abbas: 12:54
As things have started to open up again and award season is coming back, how do you tackle awards? Because that's another part of your marketing strategy overall, and
Magnus Strom: 13:04
I think I have a bit of a love hate relationship what you do. with awards in a way. With The Quest we did a few years ago we
Ayo Abbas: 13:08
It's a cash cow. were extremely successful with it and we won two RIBA awards and were on the shortlist for House of the Year, which we lost to Caring Wood. And strangely enough, I went to Caring Wo d a couple of years ago, because he had sold it and the new o ner wanted to refurbish it and extend it because it didn't work as a home. So, in the end, it didn't do the job. With The Quest, I think we picked up seven awards or something like that. And we won British Homes House of the Year, we won hat for another project as well So that's great and it adds some form of, you know, we didn't design projects to win awards, but it helps when a client, can see like, oh, they have one this, and they've won the aw rds for it, it's some for of feather in your cap. But I t ink you also need to remember these awards they're businesses, a lot of them.
Magnus Strom: 14:16
It is absolutely. You got to do this and then you got to go to the dinner. And by the time you've done it, you spent, you know, a couple of grand or something like that. Or if you go to WAF, for example, you're gonna send two delegates, and I've been and it's massively expensive. I've been there twice. The first time I did it, we went to Singapore, and I had a great time, and it was really good. It was really early in our practice and, met lots of people and lots of fun, it's not often you hang out on top of Marina Bay Sands having drinks with the guys who work at Marcio Kogan, but -
Ayo Abbas: 14:49
You're paying for it.
Magnus Strom: 14:57
Yeah, and then we went back to the one in Berlin, it's a good laugh. But it also it's a networking event as well for the industry. And you kind of hanging out with your peers.
Ayo Abbas: 15:13
Is that the kind of thing where you'd find actual clients? Or is it more of your peers?
Magnus Strom: 15:16
No, we didn't find clients there.
Ayo Abbas: 15:19
Okay, so you can't justify that as in do that regularly, because it's a huge cost compared to other things you can do.
Magnus Strom: 15:25
It's a big cost. But I think that with awards
Ayo Abbas: 15:26
So you're kind of on the fence of awards, you see it's very political as well, some boards more than others, you've got to have the right - put it this way, if you do a one-off large house, there's not the most type of awards that does something great for society, or for the population in a certain way, because it's a very selfish and indulgent thing. Just go look at Dezeen in the comments section of any private house, and you can see that sometimes the vitriol that just comes, because you've done a luxury or well-designed house. And I think that's a bit sad, but it's kind of inevitable in society. So I think some of what's very political, and it's got to tick certain boxes to just be ab e to be qualified for it. Some awards are more like that than oth rs. So I think you've got to lo k at which awards you submit for which you don't submit for. some benefit, but you're not 100%?
Magnus Strom: 16:32
Yeah, you can kind of think that you've won an award, you won House of the Year, you think like wow, fantastic, and you're not even shortlisted for the same project for some other ones. And you're going to end this kind of this is boast an award for the one of House of the Year but so you start thinking that oh, why is that? Or it's because you've got you can see the projects have got a completely different agenda and can have a different aesthetic. Sometimes you look at the judges who's judging that year as well.
Ayo Abbas: 17:03
And what their bias is, or what they're really into.
Magnus Strom: 17:06
I think so, we're all biased.
Ayo Abbas: 17:15
We've had COVID for the past 18 months, probably more than that now, March last year. How is that affected how you've marketed yourself and what you've done? Because you were already online, weren't you?
Magnus Strom: 17:30
Yeah, it hasn't actually changed anything for us, which I suppose is quite unusual. When COVID hit and lockdown started with seven of us in the practice, the whole private residential has really gone crazy. So we almost doubled our size in two years. And that's come with growing pains. And we're working currently, with a business consultant, it's a bit of a restructure, and but it's lots of excitement going on and so on. The biggest challenge for us has been to get the work done, actually all the work that we have, and the work that's coming in. But it's not really the pipeline of work coming in that's the issue for us moment. But in terms of keeping up the marketing the biggest challenge is content creation. How do you keep create enough quality content to put out on for example, social media.
Ayo Abbas: 18:27
And my question for you is actually what's enough for you, in your mind?
Magnus Strom: 18:35
We had a period when I posted on Instagram, for example, we did a post every single day. And we were really active. And we could see we got, you know, your following it just increases so much, you could do 100 new followers a day organically. And that's extraordinary. Because then the algorithm kicks in, and you comment on the right things, and you use the stories and you use this and that and it really starts to work hard. But lately, we've been really, really busy and never glamorous, busy, but we've been fortunate to have a lot of work on it has taken a little bit of a back seat. But we're gonna have so many projects, we just photographed new projects, we have loads of images coming out soon. We have three, four projects, we are in CGI rendering at the moment. We got another three, four projects we're going to photograph next year, so we're gonna have plenty of content available. It's about keeping the quality of the content. I don't want to put out stuff that I'm not happy with. We can you can use stories in a completely different way to post things that are just like a reflection of your site, etc. And that works well but that's more for your current followers, I suppose rather than people who don't follow you.
Ayo Abbas: 20:03
Certainly, yes. I guess that's the difficult. Especially with Instagram, there's so many different formats, and it's always which ones do you prioritise? And which ones do you use? And like you say it can be a beast in itself, even just as one platform. Do you use things like LinkedIn? Or is that not your platform? Is it literally Pinterest and Instagram?
Magnus Strom: 20:24
I actually recently started doing more LinkedIn. And as you said, Facebook has dropped off the face of the earth, I think.
Ayo Abbas: 20:33
Oh they kill anything organic, it doesn't work, it just doesn't go anywhere.
Magnus Strom: 20:37
You can post something to Instagram and you
Ayo Abbas: 20:39
It can be bitter, yeah. post it up, it probably goes up on Facebook anyway, but it's not something we actively monitor and work on. And Twitter. I think Twitter doesn't work for a chitecture, in kind of that wo k. It's great if you want to ave a chat with people or have moan. Because I think Twitter' angry mainly, so I believ when we started the business, w built up a real following. And we got followers and so on. B t it's just kind of, for m , it's not my thing.
Magnus Strom: 21:15
Yeah, LinkedIn is something we started doing a lot more recently. And the engagement we're getting from that is pretty exciting.
Ayo Abbas: 21:25
Which audiences are you looking to connect to from there, because it's a slightly different audience to Instagram isn't it?
Magnus Strom: 21:30
I think that you connect a lot with other professionals. And it's a lot of peer to peer. So again it's about raising profile, and so on. But it's hard to say as well, I don't know enough about the how the algorithm works, because obviously, you got your own account, and then you've got a business account. We just tried to grow that business following a little bit. So we'll see where that goes.
Ayo Abbas: 21:58
Are there any particular tools or systems that you use for your marketing to make it easier to do? What kind of processes do you go through?
Magnus Strom: 22:06
The only thing that we did last year was that we signed up to BowerBird. And we put out a project and that worked really well. The difficulty perhaps was that we were all suddenly like, oh, we want to do this, but we all want the exclusivity of it and so on. And then if they didn't get it, they weren't interested in selling it. So I felt like you still had to manage it quite a lot. It's not just like, you can just upload and off you go. I did upload some old projects, and just saw them kind of getting republished, it was quite interesting. And that really didn't take any work. Suddenly, you see it, you know, popped up on Instagram, and then someone's published it and on their online web page or something like that. But BowerBird is really the only kind of system that we use. But I think that when we do publish a project for something we normally try to get a a print exclusive. And a digital exclusive before we let it free. And the print exclusive, for example, why would you want to print exclusive in the Architects Journal? I don't. It might be different for other people. But
Ayo Abbas: 23:21
Some people do! for me, I don't want to, our clients don't read the Architects Journal, do they? They read the Financial Times' How To Spend It or the home supplement in The Times magazine, or, Wallpaper or something like that, that's wher the excitement is for us. So how have you learned your marketing? How have you come to the conclusions in the strategy that you've come to?
Magnus Strom: 23:54
I think it's a little bit of a combination of trial and error. I think it's also just sitting down and thinking about where our clients are, what kind of magazines they read, and so on. And also, I listen to podcasts all the time when I'm out. Driving, for example.
Ayo Abbas: 24:19
So do I!
Magnus Strom: 24:19
When I go to client meetings, I listen to podcasts. I've listened lots of Seth Godin.
Ayo Abbas: 24:25
He's got a lot of podcasts, hasn't he?
Magnus Strom: 24:27
Yeah, there's a lot of nuggets in there that are worth a lot, and also The Architecture, Business of Architecture. And, yeah, I think that we listen to a lot of those podcasts. And I've also done a lot of reading multiple business books, and all of that kind of comes together.
Ayo Abbas: 24:44
Have you got any favourite books?
Magnus Strom: 24:47
Yeah, This Is Marketing by Seth Godin.
Ayo Abbas: 24:51
I've not read it, I'll have to admit.
Magnus Strom: 24:53
There is...Gino Wickman's - what's that one called?
Ayo Abbas: 25:02
I did put you on the spot here. That's very nice.
Magnus Strom: 25:05
Gino Wickman's done a book that I read recently. But it's more about how to be the entrepreneur business model. Very interesting. And I also recently read, last year, Greg McKeown's Essentialism. I love that book. Love that book.
Ayo Abbas: 25:24
I'm gonna check those out. I'll have a look, I don't always read that many marketing books.
Magnus Strom: 25:29
Also, there's this book called Surrounded By Idiots.
Ayo Abbas: 25:34
Oh, I think I've heard you mentioned that before.
Magnus Strom: 25:36
That's really interesting, talking about different personality types, and how we react differently, how we think differently, and so on. I suppose it's more business related, in a way, you know, he's helped me in understanding clients and staff as well and how people are different.
Ayo Abbas: 25:57
But also, I think that comes into marketing anyway. Because people react differently to different things. And I think understanding that whole kind of business angle, I think, is so important, because it's like, actually, why am I gonna do awards when it cost me 10k to get there? And, you know, I get more bang for my buck from this activity? I think all of that it's all connected to the business and what you choose to do. And I think there's always this connection, and it shouldn't be disjointed at all. And so in terms of if there was a practice starting out, and you had to give them one tip, in terms of getting their marketing going, and to be successful, what would it be?
Magnus Strom: 26:32
I don't think it's a single kind of line for it. But I think that the usual cliche things, you've got to be authentic, you've got to know what you're saying, what's your message? Finding your voice. And it can be so different depending on what you're doing. But for us, I always had an interest in private houses. And very early on, we decided that we weren't going to try on any other work, because we've done some other work, but it just wasn't what we should be doing. So, at the moment, our message is very portfolio based. But then, some people have a message that's completely process based. But coupled with our portfolio based message, I think that we're really developing what we call a Strm way of working, this is the way we work. So when we attract clients who say, this is the way we work, we know this works, very often client comes now I want to do it this way, I want to do that. And we just now say no, because we don't want to have the fight anymore. On projects, and sometimes 90% of the time, they can't get or I completely understand that it makes sense. Sometimes it doesn't work, and then they go away. So then we feel like we kind of missed out on you know, we've skipped a bad project, perhaps.
Ayo Abbas: 27:48
So there's your audience and your message and being authentic.
Magnus Strom: 27:56
Yes, and then the other thing is, the really important thing is the quality of the work you put out there, for me that's absolutely key. And when we started out, we knew what we wanted to do. And so we kind of we stayed small for quite a long time. And we turned down work, because it wasn't what we wanted to do. And we said, well, if I do take on this, we're going to fill the office with work we don't want to do and then we might not be able to take on the work actually want to do. And also if we did that work to stay in business, then we didn't publish it. I know some other people who set up at the same time as we did. And they grew a lot quicker than we did, but now we've kind of gone the other way where we have overtaken them in a way because we have a much more defined niche that we're working in, and we're stronger and better positioned in that niche. So I would just say get a focus on what it is you want to do, what your tone of voice is, and what your message is and then just really kind of work on that. Don't scatter, don't do a scattergun approach when you can do a rifle shot.
Ayo Abbas: 29:04
On that lovely, lovely note. Thank you so much for your time, Magnus. It's been awesome interviewing you. Thank you.
Magnus Strom: 29:10
Thank you.
Ayo Abbas: 29:18
Thanks so much for listening to the latest episode of Marketing In Times of Recovery, and I'm your host Ayo Abbas. If you want to find out more about the bi weekly show do check out the show notes which will give you more information about who the guests are and all the things we've covered. And if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out on an episode. Until next time, bye.
