Finding our voice

We were recently invited to join the discussion on ‘Finding your voice in communications’ for the ‘Marketing in Times of Recovery’ podcast hosted by Abbas Marketing, looking at the positive impact writing the new text for our website has had on our whole business.

When we started the process of reinventing our website, which was launched last year, we originally thought it was going to be a bit more of a tweak to the existing, updating it to make things slightly clearer. Once we started working with Juliette, from Architypal, it quickly became clear to us that there was much more we needed to achieve, we wanted to reshape our website to tell our story, in a language which wasn’t off putting to our potential clients.

Our old website was very standard, using text that was quite generic and seems standard across many architectural firm websites. We realised that to keep winning work and progressing as a company we needed to look at how we presented ourselves, and work on producing a website to appeal to people while also explaining who we really are, what we like doing and how we approach our work. 

Astonishingly the work we did for the website text has had a remarkable impact on how we now communicate across the business, it has permeated across George & James and has positively changed the way we approach everything; how we talk to clients; how we explain our offer; how we write proposals; how we attract staff – it has allowed us to be more personal and have the confidence to be more ourselves. 

As part of the website rewrite was our take on the RIBA Plan of Works (which was shortlisted in the Archiboo Awards – the original can be found here, our version can be found here), our aim was to make these accessible to our potential clients. The stages are an industry standard, so we kept to the same format, but by simply breaking each stage down and explaining what should be happening during each stage we have helped potential clients gain clarity and tools they might need throughout their build project.

Additionally on our site we have a FAQ section, including topics such as ‘How long will my project take?’ and ‘How much do you charge?’, many of which have been expanded in more detail as one of our blog articles. When looking at these areas of the website we started from a point of being helpful to prospective clients, not about ego around our own successes. We have been told that our website has been really helpful for those looking to start their own build projects, which has been such a positive impact from us finding our tone of voice.

The full podcast can be found here.