Populous

AEC

Digital marketing for a leading global architecture firm

Diving deeper into evolving market segments.

Challenge

Prospective clients were changing. Populous was expanding into new regions and industries at the same time their clients were becoming more educated about the design and build process through online research.

SOLUTION

With offices all over the world, getting a holistic perspective of the opportunity and challenges was step one. Stakeholder interviews with clients and leaders rooted our team in the Populous culture.

With an understanding of the brand, we then provided detailed competitive analysis. By comparing performance, frequency, and channel usage of global competitors big and small we were able to draw out many learnings useful as we refined the Populous marketing strategy.

To ensure the firm spoke with the same voice from their offices from Kansas City to London to Brisbane, Australia we created multiple on brand voice guidelines and examples for their full marketing team.

The content editorial calendar created by Native covered all digital channels for the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific offices for the upcoming quarter. By balancing the industries, regions against their business goals we were able to provide a plan that was not only sustainable, but accurate to their greater goals.

To fully execute on the distribution of their online content our team created specific internal workflow guidelines and governance procedures that outlined the step-by-step for implementing across global offices.

CONTENT CREATION

To support the Populous’ content strategy, Native assisted in developing content for key industry segments, working from interviews with internal thought leaders through copywriting and design. We partnered closely with the Populous team to develop white papers, blog posts and videos highlighting Populous’ expertise and thought leadership in collegiate sports and convention center architecture and design.

ORGANIC SEARCH

Much of the current traffic was due to consumer facing terms related to their sports clients. To increase relevant traffic to Populous.com we focused on “architecture” and “design” specific keywords.

Starting February 2016 we have been able to increase Top 10 frontpage organic search positions for design & architecture-specific keywords from 21 to 146 with only limited edits to the Populous website. The upcoming launch of a new site brings even more opportunities for optimization, organic search rankings and traffic based on our initial SEO strategy.

SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING

Twitter is Populous’ most active social channel, and a favorite of architecture industry professionals. To gain more brand awareness for the firm’s growing markets, we developed a year-long series of Twitter ad campaigns, including niche targeting, ad messaging and creative, landing page optimization, and A/B testing to find out which messages resonated most with the industry.

Populous went from a basic editorial calendar to a robust, detailed plan thanks to Native. The team evaluated every facet of our positioning to fortify our content. We’re now even more confident in how we reach customers online.
Gina Stingley
Director of Marketing, Populous