As an interior design business owner, you’ve got enough to worry about. You don’t have time for marketing that doesn’t work.
Interior design marketing can be tricky. Especially with the digital marketing world constantly changing — new social media algorithms, email marketing techniques, funnels, SEO strategies, website, blogging — it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes into a successful interior design marketing campaign.
Breathe a sigh of relief – Huuhh! – In this article, I am going to show you the definitive guide to interior design marketing!
Define Your Marketing Goals
To define your marketing goals you will first need to understand who your target audience is. What are their interests? What platform are they using to learn about your interior design company? There is no use in marketing interior design services on a platform where no one cares about interior design!
Lastly, think about your personal goals as an interior designer. Maybe you want to work on designing more sustainable interior spaces or maybe you’re trying to get interior design clients who are in a certain income bracket.
Each of these goals will help you define your interior design marketing strategy! This will ensure that your time is wisely invested toward your goals.
Focus On What Matters
This morning you opened your interior design company’s Instagram account and posted a picture of your latest beautiful project.
Thirty mins later you check your phone and you’ve got 350 likes and 20 DM’s from potential customers!
That is amazing! Until you wake up and realize that it was a dream.
In reality, your post got 7 likes and most of them are from family. Thanks, aunt Cordelia!
We have seen massive Instagram success from interior designers like Studio McGee or Alyssa Kapito.
This type of success is like winning the lottery. Or on the other hand, years of content creation and growing an Instagram account.
The major problem with Instagram (or any other social media) is that one little tweak to the algorithm will cause a lot of damage to your bottom line.
Also, if Instagram shuts down tomorrow, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble because you’ll lose a huge chunk (if not all) of your audience.
So, bottom line: Instagram is a good place to showcase your interior design company portfolio — and for aunt Cordelia to see what you’re up to — but it’s not the best interior design marketing strategy.
You need a more reliable solution. And we’ll talk about that in the next step.
Get a Professional Website
I understand how painful and frustrating building an interior design website can be. You might have tried one of these do-it-yourself platforms and found yourself working for hours just to make a simple website, only for it to look… not so great.
In addition to that, it doesn’t generate any traffic. So you end up spending hours upon hours on a website that never made you any real money.
But just like you are an experienced interior designer, there are a lot of experienced web designers out there. I am one of those 🙌.
My point here is that if I wanted to do interior design by myself, the final result would be a nightmare. This is the same that happens when someone that is not a web designer tries to create an interior design website.
When carefully planned, an interior design website will generate traffic without you having to do any heavy lifting.
An SEO expert will optimize your content for interior design keywords, which is great because that’s where your clients are!
Here are 5 facts that show you how a professional interior design website can help with your interior design marketing strategy:
1) Your potential clients are on Google! I got proof! ✔️
In a recent study that I made, I found out that the keyword “interior design” has 165,000 searches per month. That means that people are using Google to search for “Interior Design” 165,000 times. Every. Single. Month.
Here’s a screen capture that shows that data!
2) You’ll master your local area ✔️
The term “interior design” is too broad. People could be also trying to find an interior design job or just inspiration.
The good news is that you don’t really need to rank for that word. You want to narrow it down to your own local area! For example, if you are in Atlanta, you don’t really care about people searching for “Interior design in Colorado” — Unless you want to get on a 21 hr drive to visit a prospect 😂.
3) A graphic example ✔️
Let’s take Atlanta as our example. The keyword we’re going to analyze is “Atlanta interior designers.”
1,300 searches per month! Phew.
That means that if you’re an interior designer in Atlanta and you rank on Google for that keyword you could get around 1,300 visits on your website per month. Isn’t that crazy? 1,300 prospects are trying to find interior design services in Atlanta every month!
4) You’ll bring more people in ✔️
When it comes to generating traffic to your website, there’s an endless sea of opportunities out there.
Actually, some of your potential clients might not know that they’ll be hiring you in the near future.
Let me explain. Let’s say that someone is searching for “Kitchen bar design ideas?”
Are they looking for interior design services? Well, not really, for now.
We can surely say that they are just looking for some inspiration. What they don’t know yet is that the beautiful result they want to achieve won’t be possible without the right knowledge and expertise that an interior design company has.
That’s where you come in! 🙌
When you rank for “Kitchen bar design ideas” on Google, your website will be one of the first few results!
So you want to make sure that you have a beautiful and valuable blog post that gives them exactly what they were looking for: Kitchen bar design ideas.
It’s important that you remember that at this point the purpose of this blog post is not to sell your interior design services. But we’ll get there.
Most of your visitors will just read through and try to implement those ideas on their own.
But with the right strategy, you’ll also be able to get leads from these types of blog posts.
If you’d like to learn more about SEO for interior designers you can check this article: SEO for Interior Designers | 10 EASY Steps (DIY Guide)
Extra tip: Valuable blog posts are great to encourage people to signup for your mailing list! Your mailing list is definitely a valuable piece of interior design marketing!
5) Choose only projects you love ✔️
It’s very simple. The more traffic you get, the more clients you’ll have. In other words, with this interior design marketing strategy, you will be able to handpick your clients rather than just take whoever comes.
Here are more related keywords for you to see that there are thousands of people searching for interior design topics.
If we sum up all the traffic that those keywords generate we get 14,110 in the US alone!
So you’ll go from having 7 likes on Instagram — from people that won’t buy interior design services — to 14,110 interior design lovers. Imagine if just 0.3% of those people are actually qualified leads in your local area that are willing to invest in your interior design services.
That is around 40 new clients per month. It’s probably way more than what you (or me as a web designer) can take.
Final thoughts on getting a professional website
If you’re still here, it means that you are loving this article and it makes sense for you! Yay 🤗.
If you want to achieve what I’ve been talking about, you need to choose wisely.
Setting up a website that drives that amount of traffic is a lot of work, so you’ll need to be ready to invest in a web design and SEO company.
It is important that you choose a web design company that is a good fit and can help you with your interior design marketing goals.
Make sure that they offer some kind of consultation call or “test drive” before even buying any of their services.
As a web designer myself, I like to do free website video audits. In a nutshell, it’s a 15-minute video where I review your website traffic, your competitor’s traffic, and I give you a basic action plan.
I love doing that because I get to help you and at the same time you get a little taste of my services.
Feel free to request a free website audit anytime! I’ll be happy to send that video to you.
Now, let’s keep talking about more interior design marketing ideas!
Post on Google My Business
Google My Business is a local listing for your business on Google. It’s a free and easy way to enhance your online presence, get found by local customers searching within local parameters (e.g., “interior design company near me”), and communicate with customers that are close to you or have visited recently.
If you’re not there yet, take this opportunity now! Go to https://business.google.com/ and fill out all the information. You’ll be able to add your logo, write a description of what you do, update local listings with business hours and other important details.
Once you have your Google My Business account, you want to make sure that you are adding content to it.
You can add a bio, photos, videos, and any other local information that will make the customer feel like they know you a little bit.
If you post consistently on Google My Business, you’re more likely to rank higher in local search!
Consider Pinterest
Pinterest, unlike Instagram or Facebook, is a search engine. Just like Google. That means that people type keywords on Pinterest. If they’re searching for “kitchen design ideas” and you come across one of your posts, they might click the link and open your website!
The idea is to create boards that answer specific queries. For example, “living room design ideas” or “chic master bedroom.”
If you’re not on Pinterest yet, I highly recommend it! It’s a great idea for your interior design marketing.
Here’s a great blog post that Gray Malin made about 10 Pinterest Accounts to Follow for Interior Design Inspiration
Get Google Reviews
If you want local clients to find you on Google, get reviews!
It’s not enough to just list your business in local search, you want people talking about it!
And the best way is by getting them from your clients.
Offer Clients an Incentive or Discount to Encourage Reviews
You finish a project. Your client is happier than ever. You ask them to leave a review on Google. They never do it.
What’s going on?
You could try to get more reviews by offering your customers a discount or incentive for leaving one.
If you know clients like taking pictures of their homes (and they always do it when they’ve been happy with the result), ask them to add those on their Google reviews too.
Now, this shouldn’t be done verbally. My best tip is that you create a “Goodbye” presentation at the end of every project and that you include the exact steps that they can follow to leave a review. Make sure that you include the link to your Google listing. We want to have as little friction as we can!
Pro tip: Get a customized Google Reviews link that is easy to remember. For example https://companyname.com/reviews
Automate as much as possible!
This might not be a direct interior design marketing tip, but it will help you a lot!
How many times did you find yourself doing repetitive tasks for your business? Here are a couple:
- Creating/sending proposals
- Creating/sending contracts
- Creating/sending invoices
- Telling a client what the next step is
- Answering the same questions from your clients over and over again
- Send the welcome email
- Send the goodbye email
There’s nothing more frustrating than repeating these tasks. There are plenty of tools that can help you free up some time and use them in other productive ways!
For example, to handle proposals, contracts, and invoices you could use Hello Bonsai.
And to speed up your email workflow you could use Google Workspace (Essentially GMail for businesses). There’s a bit of a learning curve but they have a super useful templating system that is perfect for canned responses!
So, where should I start?
Reading all this advice might be overwhelming, but you don’t need to make everything happen in one day. My advice is that you evaluate what your priority is and work on that. You can move onto the next thing once you feel comfortable enough.
If you want local clients to find your website in local search, focus on that first and work on the rest later.
It’s also important that you consider that SEO takes time. There’s no website that ranks overnight. The reason is that Google needs to see a consistent stream of relevant content coming from your website. When that happens Google is more likely to “trust” you.
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve covered a number of interior design marketing strategies to help you grow your business.
Right now you’re aware of the reasons why Instagram might not be a great idea and that investing in your website is probably a smarter decision.
We’ve seen that people are searching Interior design in Google 165,000 per month!
Don’t forget the importance of reviews and more importantly, how to encourage them.
Remember that you can get a free website review video that I will personally send to you. I’m sure you will have a lot of “wow” moments while watching that video!
Phew! That was a lot of information!
Time to get a (healthy) snack now 🍉
