Soon after starting as an intern architect, Heather Blazi realized the job didn’t spark joy quite the way she imagined while watching HGTV as a kid. So she adjusted her path. Today, she’s the marketing director at Pfluger Architects, a design firm specializing in the education market.
Heather joins us to discuss owning your niche, market expansion and building an effective team with diverse skills. She shares why Pfluger encourages architects to use LinkedIn and how a strong brand supports proposal development, boosts employee engagement and amplifies recruitment efforts.
Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn
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Who Heather Blazi is
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About Pfluger Architects
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How Heather’s architecture background influences her work as a marketer
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Insights into the growing intersection between marketing and business development
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The benefits of niche marketing
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How to effectively leverage your niche during proposal writing and market expansion
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Why use thought leadership to market your team’s knowledge, expertise and capabilities
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The importance of a strong firm brand and positioning
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About Pfluger’s recent successes with strategic email marketing
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Why Pfluger encourages its architects to use LinkedIn
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How people-centric social media posts aid in attracting prospective clients and architecture talent
About our featured guest
Heather Blazi is the principal-in-charge of marketing at Pfluger Architects, a firm on a mission to inspire people to create a more meaningful human experience. With nearly 10 years of experience, Heather has planned and executed marketing initiatives contributing to Pfluger's growth and expansion across Texas. Beyond the world of architectural marketing, Heather has two daughters who bring boundless inspiration (and chaos) to her every day, reminding her of the importance of creativity, adaptability and being open to a fresh perspective. Heather enjoys volunteering and crafting anytime she can. With a heart for service, a commitment to her family and a flair for strategic thinking, she hopes to continue making a positive impact on those around her.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by Reputation Ink.
Founded by Michelle Calcote King, Reputation Ink is a public relations and content marketing agency that serves professional services firms of all shapes and sizes across the United States, including corporate law firms and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms.
Reputation Ink understands how sophisticated corporate buyers find and select professional services firms. For more than a decade, they have helped firms grow through thought leadership-fueled strategies, including public relations, content marketing, video marketing, social media, podcasting, marketing strategy services and more.
To learn more, visit www.rep-ink.com or email them at info@rep-ink.com today.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Heather Blazi: Every market has their own language. Has their own unique aspects to it. And so it definitely helps that we can speak that language really fluently.
[00:00:14] Announcer: Welcome to "Spill the Ink," a podcast by Reputation Ink, where we feature experts in growth and brand visibility for law firms and architecture, engineering and construction firms. Now, let's get started with the show.
[00:00:31] Michelle Calcote King: Hi everyone and welcome to "Spill the Ink." I'm Michelle Calcote King. I'm your host and I'm the principal and president of Reputation Ink. We're a public relations and content marketing agency for architecture, engineering and construction firms and other professional services firms. To learn more, go to rep-ink.com.
So Pfluger Architects is a Texas-based architecture firm that specializes in higher education and pre-K through 12th grade architecture. Today, we're talking to their principal and marketing director, Heather Blazi. She's an architect-turned-marketer, which I'm really excited about. We've never talked to an architect-turned-marketer. So Heather started as an architectural intern at Pfluger in 2013 and now leads the firm's marketing department. So thanks for joining me.
[00:01:17] Heather Blazi: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:18] Michelle Calcote King: Tell us about your career. How did you start in architecture? I noticed you have your master's in architecture. How did you then find your way into marketing?
[00:01:28] Heather Blazi: Yeah, so my whole life I've wanted to be an architect. It started when I was a little kid. My mom and my grandpa were always building things and so it was just kind of in my blood. I moved to a new state in right before my fifth grade year, and I didn't have any friends, it was summer so I had nothing to do so I fell in love with HGTV which I know is not the real world, but that's what inspired me to really kind of, like, go for architecture. So the rest of my high school career, I did architecture and then went to Kansas State and got my master's in architecture there.
Loved it. Loved the program. I was dead set on doing architecture. And then when I started in the industry, it was just kind of like, "Ah, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. This isn't the HGTV architecture that we used to see." So I found I was having more fun kind of drawing the dimensions, lining up the pages, organizing things, making sure everything flowed the way that it needed to. It was telling the right story on a drawing sheet. You know, probably the things nobody likes to do. Those were the things I was really enjoying. And so at the time, they were actually looking for a marketing coordinator and I had just finished up my project that I was working on. And so I said, "Hey, I'd like to give marketing a try.
So nine years later, I am now the director of marketing and a principal in the firm and I'm excited about it.
[00:02:55] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, that's interesting. I'm sure it gives you fantastic insight into what you do. And not that to be a good marketer for architects, you absolutely have to be an architect but, certainly, by having that educational background, it gives you, I'm sure, insight and credibility with your architects. You know, you speak their language and tell their stories in a way that there's not a language barrier, so to speak.
[00:03:22] Heather Blazi: Exactly. And I try to pad my team with people who have skills that I do not have. So I have writers on my team that are exceptional at writing. I have photographers, I have a social media guru who, I mean, I would be lost without her. And so, you know, I try to build my team up to give the-- I can help teach them the architecture side of things that they're learning. But they can teach me the marketing side of things that they learned and from their degrees.
[00:03:53] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good bridge. Well, tell me about your team. How is it structured? What expertise do you keep in-house?
[00:03:59] Heather Blazi: Pfluger has just grown a crazy amount over the last nine years and especially over the last three years. So about three years ago, we were a three-person team with probably 50 employees across the three offices. And now we are a seven-person team, including myself, with 120 employees across five offices. Because of that, we have the ability to have some specialization within our team.
And so one of my team members, her whole job is digital media. So she does our website, she does our social media, she does all of the things besides RFQs. I won't let her touch an RFQ because when you sucked in to the RFQ land, you never came out. So I have her and she's really done an incredible job kind of building our presence. I give her, you know, the parameters and then just let her run with it because that's what she knows. That's her expertise. She's been an incredible asset to our team. We've had her for three, almost four years. And so we're lucky there.
And then I have another team member who focuses specifically on bond support. So we have a communications and community outreach director, and his job is really to help school districts pass their bonds. And so she helps support him with all of that collateral, research. I mean, they do an incredible amount of work. We tried a long time ago supporting those efforts in a marketing department, but bonds are just, they're so unique and they require, you know, constant dedication during that timeframe on. And so we found that we needed somebody who was dedicated to doing that, not just at part-time. So she's been an incredible asset. She's an artist by degree and she's also very analytical. It's very cool to see her brain work because one minute she'll be doing something totally artistic and then the next you're like, "Oh my gosh. This is a lot of data that I just can't even wrap my head around," but she navigates that well.
And then the rest of my team, they focus heavily on our RFQs. So I have two in our Austin office and two in our Dallas office. They serve RFQs, really, company-wide. It's been incredible just watching their growth and their development.
Yeah, I'm very lucky to have an awesome team.
[00:06:16] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, that's that. It sounds like it. So the department has grown. How has marketing itself changed over the years since you've done this? What other changes have you seen throughout your time?
[00:06:30] Heather Blazi: I mean, it used to be our job was responding to RFQs and helping out with events at conferences. And so just kind of by nature of our growth as a firm, we found that we're doing a lot more, I'm going to call it that pre-business development work.
We're helping get the word out on some of our projects, helping strategize ways that we can get in front of potential clients or, you know, get access to potential projects. And so we get to do a lot more strategy now.
And I think we also, because of our social media expert and her presence and building that, we're helping her share out different stories. Somebody in every office. And so that helps. They get to be the boots on the ground, kind of hearing all of these different stories and projects going on and sharing that out. And that's been really, I think, helpful and fun.
I mean, it is different, but the same.
Then, you know, we're expanding markets as well. And so now we're pursuing other markets that we didn't necessarily have expertise in before. And so just growing and learning those different types of pursuits, it's been really fun.
[00:07:40] Michelle Calcote King: Interesting. And when you say exploring new markets, do you mean geographically or vertical industry markets?
[00:07:45] Heather Blazi: Industry markets mostly. Education. We try to keep that work. So what are those kind of support? Like teacher housing projects, you know, some of the early childhood centers, some of those projects--
[00:07:56] Michelle Calcote King: That are kind of related to that niche.
[00:07:58] Heather Blazi: Yeah.
[00:07:59] Michelle Calcote King: How does thought leadership play into your strategy? Is that something you've focused on at all? Is that something you're looking to dabble in?
[00:08:07] Heather Blazi: Absolutely. I mean, we're trying to grow and share our knowledge. That's really one of our core values is we want to share it out. We don't want to just keep it to ourselves. So we actually have like seven research and benchmarking teams that are focused on different areas of thought leadership.
And so our fine arts team actually just did an article with School & University magazine. They were able to share some of that research out that they've done.
We have a safety and security team that has traveled across to different districts, shared that presentation. We've given conferences, presentations as well. And the former lead of that group, he was actually serving on the state's safety and security, kind of, review board through Texas State University. You know, we've been able to expand that reach and we're researching in career and tech education.
Campus life. What does is it actually mean to be a campus where you want to live and rest and be on? Not just a commuter campus. Yeah, I mean, a lot of things going on. A lot of different types of expertise that we want to tap into.
Sustainability is another one. There we go. Sustainability. That's a big one. And so being able to take that and not only share that knowledge internally with all five offices and make sure that everybody is up-to-date on that research and that knowledge, but then help our communities, whether it's a owner that we want to work with or it's just giving somebody ideas or suggestions or recommendations that they use in their future projects. That's our goal at the end of the day.
[00:09:40] Michelle Calcote King: There's so much knowledge especially in the architecture space.
Being a more niche-focused firm, how does that drive your strategy? I can imagine it makes it a bit more effective. Rather than having to, kind of, split your strategy across, you know, ten different verticals, you get to kind of go a bit deeper. Is that true?
[00:09:59] Heather Blazi: Yeah, I think so. You know, as I've learned and just, as we've expanded a little bit, you know, that's a different world when you start going into those other markets. And so I think it helps having that really deep understanding because you can make those connections with clients. You can really show them how you've helped solve this you know, maybe a similar problem somewhere else. By having that expertise and that singular focus, it certainly helps. It helps me because I can streamline that message. I can pull, you know, 15 different stories that relate to maybe the challenge that an RFQ is looking to solve. I can pull those different stories in and I have a pretty hefty bench to pull from. Whereas if I'm going into another market, we get a little bit creative. You know, this may be a similar challenge in a different market. Here's how we can apply that in. So I think that is definitely... Every market has their own language. It has their own unique aspects to it. And so it definitely helps that we can speak that language really fluently.
[00:11:03] Michelle Calcote King: I was looking at your brand and I noticed that you talk a lot about creating a meaningful human experience. Can you tell me about developing that brand and a little bit about how you kind of arrived on the language and the positioning?
[00:11:19] Heather Blazi: Absolutely. I think it was about three years ago, we embarked on this journey to find our new purpose. We just celebrated 50 years. So we were like, "Okay, what is the next 50 years going to bring us?" So we really wanted that a purpose to be something that related to our craft, but also drove us to constantly be looking for how we can best serve our clients moving forward. To inspire people to create a more meaningful human experience is really about this core of when you walk into a space, we want you to feel what you're supposed to feel. If it's a school, we want you to feel safe. We want you to feel creative. We want you to feel like as a teacher, you have all of the resources that you need to educate your students. Everything that you interact with related to us has an experience and that goes to our RFQs. Our RFQs are an experience in their own. Working with our project teams, it's a particular experience that you're being crafted and welcomed into.
And so we want it to be this series of kind of moments that you feel, you get that emotional connection and you have this kind of deep sense of, like, "Yeah, these people understand what we're trying to do." And I think that's the human aspect. It's not meaningful experience. It's the people, too. We don't want you to just connect with the Pfluger brand but we are all representations.
[00:12:44] Michelle Calcote King: How do you get your architects' buy-in on marketing? Do you find that they're is understanding of the role of marketing in the business or is there resistance? And has it changed over the years?
[00:13:00] Heather Blazi: I think we're pretty lucky.
We have a group of people who are very passionate about what they do and they want to share it out. And so we've always had kind of exceptional support with marketing. There are, you know, certain things were slower, like social media was a slow start for us to get on that boat. But I think once presented to them, the results and kind of what was coming from those efforts, it was very clear. And I think that has helped push us. But it's also kind of a pushback on us in that we want to make sure that what we're doing brings value to the company.
And it's not, "We're doing this just because we have to do it." We have to be on social media, right? Because you got to stay relevant anymore now. So you have to be on social. So how can we use that platform to really serve our purpose? You know, how can we make our website really support who we are, what we believe, what our core values are and help identify and share out that message. So I think we're pretty lucky. We haven't faced a ton of resistance on marketing initiatives or marketing efforts.
I think it helps-- I like to always read people in and I probably over communicate is what my team will say.
[00:14:13] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. Well, that's better. Yeah. I think that's the best way to go. Absolutely.
[00:14:18] Heather Blazi: Yeah. So I try to be very open and upfront. Like, "This is what I need. And then if they say no, first I'm like, "Okay, what can I do to make that better? How can I help bridge this gap so that you understand why I'm making the request I'm making?"
[00:14:32] Michelle Calcote King: How about email? What role does email play in your strategy?
[00:14:36] Heather Blazi: We have not done a ton of that. I will say, you know, as somebody who gets a ton of emails, I've always been hesitant about like, "Oh, we just don't want to be one more in someone's inbox.
And so we have done very strategic emails. We try not to do like a every week e-blast or, you know, every month. But we have done, you know, like targeted email campaigns, you know. We hired a bond planner and so we did an interview with him and we blasted that out to everybody so that they would see kind of on a broad scale, "Hey, this is a service that we offer now. And here's why it's different than maybe what you get from somebody else." And so we shared that out and I will say that did return some success. We did get some leads and eventually projects from that notion. And so we want to make sure that when we're doing those emails, we are doing them in a more strategic manner and not in a general manner.
[00:15:33] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, I feel like email is that nut that hasn't quite been cracked for a lot of architecture firms and professional services firms in general for a lot of reasons. I'm hearing that from a lot of people.
And on social are your main channels LinkedIn and Instagram? Are you on any other platforms?
[00:15:52] Heather Blazi: We are on them all. We're on X-- Feels weird calling that X.
[00:15:56] Michelle Calcote King: I know, right? Yup.
[00:15:58] Heather Blazi: We're on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. We are on all of the platforms. We're not on any of the TikToks or anything like that. It doesn't feel relevant to what we do. We could probably create a niche in there, but it doesn't feel like it's as impactful to our clients and what they're looking for.
[00:16:15] Michelle Calcote King: I watch TikTok just because I feel like some of the trends bleed over into some of the other platforms, but I don't see a need for, especially B2B to really be on TikTok. More, I see that some of The ways the videos are done, you know, some of that style kind of bleeds over, but yeah, I don't see a--
And it's interesting. I'm watching X and it feels like we're all just still on it because we were on it for a while and now we're just sort of posting our content and saying, "Okay, is it still worthwhile being there?" Yeah, it's a sort of wait and see and figure it out.
Do your architects, do they engage on LinkedIn much?
[00:16:51] Heather Blazi: We have made a huge push for doing that. And so our digital media coordinator, she will-- If somebody says, "Hey, post this on our, LinkedIn," she's, she would say, "Hey, that's great for you to post on your LinkedIn and I can help you." and so we are trying to do that because of all the research out there that shows that individual posting is far better reach that a company post.
We ask folks to, you know, engage with our stuff, but also if you share it, don't just hit share. Share, and maybe write why you're sharing this. Make it meaningful for the person that's going to be reading that on your feed. Why should they stop and read this versus just skim over it and get to the next one? And so having that personal touch, that personal insight really does make a difference. So we've gotten a handful of folks who are really engaged on it. And our social media coordinator, she has all these great ideas and she's like, "I'm going to make an Influencer of the Month award. And whoever gets the most or whoever gets the most reach that month, they get a little trophy that they can wear." So it was trying to find ways to make it a game. I think people like that. And really make it impactful for everyone. So hopefully you'll start seeing a whole lot more Pfluger presence on LinkedIn.
[00:18:03] Michelle Calcote King: Well, and I also noticed a lot of your content on social is about your people. And I'm assuming that's strategic and that a lot of your business development strategy is that your clients are choosing to work with the people that, you know, make up your firm. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:18:19] Heather Blazi: Absolutely. I think it is about people. At the end of the day, we do business as people, not as companies. And so if I don't like you, it's going to be not a great relationship working together. And so we want to make sure that we have that personal, like, a face behind the firm. But then we also thought it's a great way-- Kind of showcasing our people is a really great way to show kind of what individuals do and what their expertise is, but then also for young college kids coming out looking for jobs, who do they feel like they relate to? Who do they feel like they connect with? And who do they see like, "Oh, I want to be that person, you know, ten years from now. That's where I want to be."
And so it is about the people who make up our firm. We wouldn't be where we are today if it wasn't for them. So we want to highlight their expertise and really show what they bring to the table in support of, you know, all the project work that they are producing. And we have some pretty amazing projects coming out and so we want to showcase both of those for sure.
[00:19:19] Michelle Calcote King: I can imagine it's achieving that kind of balance of talking about your people and your project and the ideas behind them. You know, the ideas around sustainability and safety and all of that. Kind of getting that right mix with all of that in your storytelling. Well, that's great.
This has been a really interesting discussion. So I always like to end these interviews with asking sort of if there's one final thought you'd like to leave our listeners with around, you know marketing an architecture firm.
[00:19:48] Heather Blazi: You know, I think the best thing that I have learned over the last nine years in marketing is it's okay to take risks. Sometimes they don't pan out, sometimes they do. And those risks will teach you something that you can apply to a future, whether it's a risk in an RFQ, a risk on social or on LinkedIn or anywhere or a risk at a conference. I think it's okay to take those risks. We're all, especially as women, we're all so tight knit and afraid to fail and, you know, like everything has to be perfect before we execute it, and I think architecture is like that, too. As an architect, you know, everything has to be at its best before we show it to the world. And I think having the grace to say like, "Okay, it may not be perfect right off the bat, but you know what? We're going to improve it and fine tune it and where we want it to be at the end." So that would be my, probably my biggest advice is take those risks.
[00:20:42] Michelle Calcote King: I love that. Yeah, marketing is a risk-taking endeavor. Absolutely. Yeah. It is not for the faint of heart. A lot of people don't understand that. So yeah, to make an impact, you have to try new things and be willing to do something different. So that's fantastic.
Well, thank you for joining me. So we've been talking to Heather Blazi of Pfluger Architects. So if somebody wanted to reach out and talk to you, what's the best way for them to connect with you?
[00:21:06] Heather Blazi: LinkedIn I'm most active on LinkedIn. And then email, of course, phone call. I'm happy to talk to anybody really.
[00:21:13] Michelle Calcote King: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:21:15] Heather Blazi: Thank you.
[00:21:18] Announcer: Thanks for listening to "Spill the Ink," a podcast by Reputation Ink. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click "Subscribe" to get future episodes.
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