A unique, compelling brand identity is integral for almost every business regardless of industry. As an interior designer however, your emails, your branding, your ads, need to be as moving as your designs.
A unique, compelling brand identity is integral for almost every business, regardless of industry. As an interior designer, however, your emails, your branding, and your ads need to be as moving as your designs. Interior design is all about emotion, aesthetics, and personalization and the same needs to be true for how you market yourself.
This can be difficult for many interior design firms. Many companies typically rely on word-of-mouth referrals and use their website as nothing more than a business card. In doing so, they can miss the opportunity to attract, delight, and inspire potential and existing customers. The reality is that 60-80% of the buying process is over before a prospect even speaks to a salesperson.
We understand the struggles that arise from trying to balance running your company with studying the latest marketing tools, software, and trends. But understanding how to market your interior design company doesn’t need to be a checkbook-breaking, laborious ordeal.
Once you familiarize yourself with a few key elements of interior design marketing and work with the right partner, you’ll be amazed at the kind of growth you’ll see.
Effective marketing requires a multi-prong approach. Instead of spending all your time in one area, like social media or SEO for example, it’s important to maintain several different avenues. Ready to discover how to market your interior design company the right way?
In this article, we’ll cover:
- Building An Interior Design Marketing Plan
- Content Marketing For Interior Designers
- Interior Design Websites That Inspire
- SEO for Interior Designers
- Paid Advertising for Interior Designers
- Social Media Marketing for Interior Designers
- Copywriting For Interior Designers
- Email Marketing for Interior Designers
- Marketing Automation for Interior Designers
- Account Based Marketing for Interior Designers
Building An Interior Design Marketing Plan
Interior design is a highly competitive industry and today’s consumers are smart. In order to see increased reach and sustained growth, you need to stand out from the crowd. That’s where a strategic interior design marketing plan comes in.
When it comes to a digital marketing strategy, the first step is identifying who you are trying to reach with your marketing efforts. Next, you need to outline what your major goals are. Are you marketing your interior design company to build your brand’s reputation and online presence? Are you hoping for high conversion rates? Are you simply trying to drum up business? Breaking down your ultimate goals helps make your marketing path clearer.
Essentially it’s better to focus on a few primary channels and produce high quality content for that specific channel rather than to spread yourself thin and ultimately do a subpar job across the board.
Ideally, the platforms you choose to focus on is where your target audience spends most of their time online. If you find how-to blogs and email newsletters produce the best ROI, focus your efforts on utilizing SEO and paid advertising to boost this content further.
Understanding where your target audience spends their time and current platform demographics will help you avoid ineffective marketing campaigns. Luxury interior design companies for example, might not see much return from creating TikTok videos whereas Facebook posts might better suit your target demographic.
After you’ve implemented your marketing strategy, be sure to evaluate the results. Determine what worked, what didn’t have great reach, and why that was.
However, keep in mind that not all marketing strategies are meant to turn around quick sales and can take time to gain momentum, especially in interior design. Ready to get going? Let's take a look at some of the most effective methods for marketing your interior design company.
Interior Design Marketing Strategies
Content Marketing For Interior Designers
Content marketing, at its most fundamental level, is the practice of telling a story that inspires an audience. That story can be told through videos, animations, blogs, social media posts, or digital mood boards.
Think about it like this: prior to the internet, interior designers relied on sketches, swatches, color palettes, and portfolios to communicate their work and vision. Content marketing in the current landscape is merely an extension of this practice but with the potential to reach a much wider audience.
When using content the right way, this method opens up the opportunities for connecting with current and potential clients on a more personal level. Encompassing copywriting, video content, SEO, testimonials, and e-books, some examples of interior design content marketing ideas include:
- Before and after stories, images, and videos
- Images or videos of your work with context for each project
- Lighthearted stories about your brand and team
- Email newsletters
- Blogs with helpful tips and creative ideas
- Behind the scenes of what inspired certain designs
- Social media posts that drive visitors to your website
- Segmented Pinterest boards
- Videos tours of recent projects
To learn more about Content Marketing for Interior Designers, read up on our Top Interior Design Content Marketing Strategies.
Interior Design Websites That Inspire
An effective and impactful interior design website should serve multiple purposes. Primarily, to inspire potential clients. When people visit your website, they should experience what it feels like to walk through one of your creations.
Standard, templated websites don’t tend to cut it when you’re talking about high-end design. Instead, you need an interactive site with motion that evokes strong feelings and helps your prospect begin to realize their vision with you as the designer.
For example, video content, animation, 360-degree virtual tours, and 3D visualization tools will set your site apart from competitors. An inspiring website is also one that possesses a cohesive brand identity. Having a consistent tone, colors, graphics, and images create a seamless experience for your visitors that exudes a subconscious feeling of connection and assurance.
SEO for Interior Designers
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of increasing traffic to your website through organic search engine results and improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines. Most of this is done through utilizing keywords that fit your niche.
The better visibility your pages have in these search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective customers to your business. While you want to attract visitors, it’s also important to remember you want quality over quantity. Quality visitors are those who are genuinely interested in your service or product.
For example, you might google “where to buy an apple,” and be served content about where to purchase Apple products instead of the organic apples you’re trying to find at a local farmer’s market. This means keywords need to be hyper-specific and contextualized to your business.
SEO for interior designers starts with keyword research. With keyword research, we can identify which search terms people are using to find designers, how often they are using those search terms, and how difficult it will be to rank for those terms.
For example it will likely be easier and more effective to use a keyword like “luxury interior design company in Atlanta” rather than “best interior designers.”
It’s worth mentioning that unlike a one and done investment, such as your newly created website, SEO is a long term digital marketing strategy. It’s a consistent and ongoing process. Since the algorithms are always evolving, it’s important to stay on top of best practices and search engine changes to ensure your website is always optimized. Ranking on the first page of google isn't easy, but it can be achieved over time with an SEO strategy.
Paid Advertising for Interior Designers
Unlike SEO which focuses on organic traffic and search engine rankings, paid advertising is a method of paying for ad space to reach a larger audience and increase traffic. Although paid advertising for interior designers costs more than SEO, paid ads are an effective way to get your company’s name out there. Paid ads are typically displayed to users on other web pages to increase traffic.
The different categories of paid ads, like PPC for example, also have the benefit of allowing customizations to ongoing campaigns. Social media is also a great way to target potential clients by running ads on Facebook or Instagram.
Ranking for interior design terms can be competitive. Unless you're ranking in the top three positions for all relevant queries, it makes sense to pay for certain search terms. For example, if you are ranking #1 for "modern interior designer in [location]", but you are on page two for "designer in [location]" ; you may want to purchase the latter until your position improves with your SEO strategy.
As an interior designer, your business is highly visual. You should be engaging in prospecting and remarketing ads with video ads on youtube and display ads on Google. This can help you attract new consumers and stay top of mind with leads throughout the conversion funnel.
Social Media Strategy for Interior Designers
One of the most important aspects of marketing an interior design company is a robust portfolio. Highly visual social media platforms are the perfect way to convey your aesthetic and inspire potential customers.
Having a strong digital presence on numerous social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest helps ensure you’re targeting your audience in a variety of ways and exposing your brand to a much wider audience.
Social media marketing is essential for both sharing your brand vision and showcasing your talents. From Pinterest and Facebook to Instagram and Twitter, the verbal and visual content you put out there shapes the tone of your brand and therefore, should be as emotive, personal, and aesthetically pleasing as your designs.
It’s important that for each of these platforms you outline your social media goals. For example, you might want to increase your social media presence to drive sales, find new leads, establish an audience, or build trust. Once you understand the motivation and strategy behind your social media you can better meet these goals.
We go much deeper into social media marketing in our Interior Design Social Media Marketing article.
Copywriting for Interior Designers
Influential copy cements your brand identity, highlights your strengths, and tells your unique story. If you’ve overlooked copywriting, you’ve overlooked a myriad of possibilities. Good copy serves multiple purposes. It supports your SEO strategy, encourages sales, inspires calls to action, and establishes your social media presence.
Beyond supporting these essential assets, copywriting is fundamental to brand identity. Your company deserves storytellers, voice enhancers, and craftspeople who understand that the power of the written word is subtle, fantastic, life-changing, and best of all, how well-written copy can convert.
Sure anyone can put a few words down on a page, but the art of copywriting combines the ability to generate traffic with the power of creating an emotional connection with your customers.
Email Marketing for Interior Designers
Email marketing is often an underutilized, underestimated marketing channel. People tend to think that because so many people get a million emails a day and often don’t open many of them that it's an ineffective tool.
The truth is that email marketing reaches a highly qualified audience, and a captive audience that has already expressed interest in a particular company. Sending out a monthly email with inspiring designs, company updates, or new trends, can be a great way to stay top of mind with your audience.
It’s also worthwhile to consider adding a value-add in email marketing pieces every once in a while, such as a free consultation. Ready to learn more? Check out our deep dive into Email Marketing For Interior Designers.
Marketing Automation for Interior Designers
The path to conversion for interior designers is much longer than purchasing shoes or a new suit. It’s obviously a much larger purchase. Your audience is shopping around and weighing options which means you need to capture their information and nurture them with content that is more engaging, more impressive, and more personal than your competitors.
You can achieve this through marketing automation. Think about it like this, someone comes to your website and is inspired by your portfolio. They aren’t ready to inquire yet, but they sign up for your emails.
Over the course of three months, they get a series of emails based on their engagement actions. First, you send them an interactive 3D tour of your most prized design concept. If they engage with that we may assume the prospect enjoys visually engaging content. Based on that action we might send them a video teaser reel of other impressive concepts. If, by chance, the prospect didn’t engage with the interactive tour we may consider that they may prefer a different medium, and send them a whitepaper on farmhouse versus country cottage design.
Once marketing automation is set up, there’s minimal work on your part involved. So, three months down the road, when the prospect is ready to talk, they will think of you and not your competitor since you’ve spent the last 3 months providing them with valuable content and information.
Account Based Marketing for Interior Designers
If you’re an interior designer, you should be engaging in account based marketing. Account based marketing is all about personalization, it’s the art of identifying something in common (much like you’d do on a first date). For example, if a hot lead loves vinyl records, you send them a custom vinyl record with tracks that evoke the mood of their desired concept.
Converting a lead into a deal, especially in such a competitive field, must be done with this kind of dedicated personalization. There are a few different types of account based marketing: one-to-one, one-to-few and one-to-many. One-to-one is creating something personal for just one person. One-to-few is creating something for a small group of people with something in common that still feels personal. One-to-many is creating something for a decent sized group of people with something in common.
One-to-one account based marketing can be a valuable tool to help close leads as an architect. Companies that go above and beyond to create personal experiences stand out, and that's what account based marketing does.
More Interior Design Business Marketing Plan Resources
Each of these marketing techniques requires some trial and error, expert know-how, and a little bit of wizardry. It can be overwhelming to get started when you’re unfamiliar with the best marketing approach to take.
Depending on the type of interior design company in question, not all these avenues may be the right fit and many will need to be tailored to your specific company or location. That’s why it’s helpful to find a knowledgeable partner to take marketing your interior design firm off your to-do list.
Effective digital marketing for interior designers requires a multi-prong approach. At ThoughtLab, we provide expert services across every avenue to set you apart from the competition. From stunning brand design and marketing automation to account-based marketing and the creation of interactive sites, our omni-channel solutions are flexible and impactful.
Ready to elevate your brand? Contact us today for a free consultation.
