Are you putting all the effort you can into marketing your Interior Design business but it still isn’t doing as well as you’d hoped? Do you feel that your Interior Design business lacks the zing it needs to succeed in 2019? Just want to know what there is to know about digital marketing for interior designers in 2019?
Well then, you’ve certainly come to the right place.
Here are the top tips you can use in to market your Interior Design business in 2019. They’re all aimed at keeping your message relevant, getting you in front of the right audience and converting viewers into paying clients.
1. Make your Interior Design website mobile-friendly
More and more people are surfing the internet from their mobile devices. Not only that, mobile users consume twice the minutes that desktop users do. This shift is being felt the most by those businesses which are kind of ‘search on the road’ businesses, like groceries or escape rooms, for which people would naturally prefer to search on the go.
At the moment, people may still prefer to search for an Interior Design business from the comfort of their desktop table.
But the shift is secular (long-term trend), which means you would so well to stay ahead of the curve. In order to get the best of both worlds, I’d suggest you go for responsive design. It’s a design discipline that optimizes your webpages according to the device they are being accessed from. In simple words, if someone is viewing your website from a desktop they’ll see a desktop-appropriate webpage while if someone accesses your website from a mobile they will be served with a mobile-friendly webpage.
2. Apps
This is a logical follow-on from making your website mobile-friendly. Apps are even better for conversion than mobile-friendly websites. They’re faster, have a more user-friendly interface and can help consumers navigate the buying process better.
An Interior Design business can:
a. Showcase its portfolio
b. Offer loyalty programs and add-on services (for example consulting can be your core service and procurement and the actual design can be add-on services)
c. And add a ‘call us’ button
on its app to enhance visitor experience. If you do decide to go for an app, remember that they layout is extremely important and that app visitors will expect more of a visual experience than with a website. Finally, remember to have a ‘Call Us’ button prominently placed to prod visitors into making that call.
3. Have a proper CTA
That ‘Call Us’ button I just mentioned is one type of ‘Call To Action’ or CTA, which are very important in nudging a lead through your marketing funnel.
Some features of a CTA are :
a. It should be immediately visible when the webpage opens
b. It should be a button
c. It should have a short and sweet text like this?
4. Go Local
Always remember that local search has a special place of pride in search results. Getting your business in that coveted ‘3-pack’ in a SERP can do wonders for your Interior Design business. So, if you haven’t claimed your listing in Google My Business and Bing Places for Business, please get that done immediately.
With SERP out of the way, the other local directories where you can list your Interior Design business would be Yelp and Apple Maps.
If you’re in the United States, you can also think of listing yourself on Angie’s List and if you’re in North America (Canada, USA or Mexico) the Better Business Bureau is another local search listing option.Facebook (business account) and LinkedIn also have local search features but I like to think of them as social media and strategize for them differently.
5. Content marketing
Creating great content on your website and social media gives you a huge advantage in getting clients.
If the content on your website – it could be anything from an article on contemporary design styles to a compendium of local laws that pertain to construction in various jurisdictions – is helpful to viewers, it’s natural they’ll consider your Interior Design firm to be a good one.
Content on social media varies according to the website. For example, LinkedIn offers you the opportunity to upload short posts (not unlike your blog) to your account. Posts can be short but they must be useful and devoid of incorrect information. Such posts will go a long way towards getting your commercial clients.
Content on Facebook should be more personal in nature, stuff like your experience working on a project to short interviews with your client and/or your employees.
Your Twitter feed should be a mixture of factual tweets and personalized ones. But remember one thing. On Facebook and Twitter, your content must have engagement. People must reply to or like at least some of your Facebook posts. People should reply or retweet at least some of your Twitter posts. Uploading social media content that nobody engages with is highly poisonous for your firm’s image, however good that content may be.
6. Keyword research
If your content is phrased similarly to how prospective clients phrase their searches on Google (or Bing or Yahoo or wherever), your website stands a better chance of being selected in response to such searches.
Sounds very logical, right?
It is, and you need to act on it. The terms people use in their online searches are called ‘keywords’ and you need to include them in your content.
When I say ‘include’ I mean include where they can be included naturally. Don’t stuff keywords in by force, your content quality will go down and you’ll be downgraded in search results.
And how do you select these keywords?
Search engines like Google and Bing have their own Keyword Planners; and there are third-party websites that can help you with this as well like Keywordtool, the one by Wordstream and KWFinder.
7. Guest posting and link building
Quality websites linking back to your website (backlinks) are a powerful ranking signal for search engines.
If you can swing a few quality backlinks your way (to your Interior Design website, that is), it’s going to go a long way towards boosting your credibility and thereby your ranking in organic search results.
The best way to go about this is to scour for guest posting opportunities on authority websites (like Architectural Digest, Elle Decor and so on). Remember to strategically include a link to your website within the article you write.
Remember to make the anchor text of the backlink relevant. Keywords are always important but don’t automatically stuff keywords into the anchor text; it might be regarded as spammy by Google and that might bring down the effectiveness of the backlink.
8. Don’t try to take shortcuts
SEO is a process that builds over time. There is no ‘quick fix’ to building your reputation and boosting your ranking.
People still resort to things like ‘link exchange’ which is basically Website A linking to Website B and Website B linking to Website A in return.
Sure, it can always happen that two Interior Design website are mutually relevant in some ways and then it’s highly proper that they should link with each other.
But don’t adopt this as a core strategy and don’t make irrelevant links. Search engines consider a factor called ‘unnatural velocities’, which basically means that if they perceive some process on your website picking up an unnatural pace, they will look more closely into it and you’re liable to be downgraded in search rankings.
9. Watch over your online reputation
Hear ‘reputation management’ and you think something like Ray Donovan, right? Or one of the big PR firms like WPP Plc?
Well, no, that’s not what I’m talking about. (Of course, if you want to become a bad boy fixer like Ray Donovan, go for it)
What I’m talking about is just being responsive to clients. Your clients can post reviews about your Interior Design services on various places like Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, Yelp and so on.
They may even review your Interior Design business via a Facebook comment.
And a few will surely be negative. That happens in every business. NEVER try to suppress or delete negative reviews, by offering clients incentives in return for a positive review.
If it’s a positive review, give a short reply, thanking the client in question for their review and say you look forward to working with them again. If it’s a bad review, first of all, apologize for the bad experience the client had. Then, try to establish why the project went wrong and lay out some steps you’ll take to rectify things.
It can be as simple as ‘We’re very sorry you had this experience with us; obviously this is not the kind of experience we want our clients to have. We are going to review the vendor supply chain in your project and find out why the items you pointed out were not up to the mark.’
Pro Tip – Set up alerts for your profiles where reviews may be expected so you can act on them as soon as they come in.
10. Email marketing
According to a study, 83% of people like receiving promotions over email.
In order to make use of this fully, remember to
a. Ask viewers for their email when they take any action (you can’t ask everybody for their email; if they take action they’re interested in your Interior Design business so you can ask them)
b. Make sure your email loads easily (opens fully quickly and doesn’t have broken images)
c. Make your email mobile-friendly
As far as possible try to make your promotional emails self-sufficient and include only a link back to your website. If not absolutely necessary, do not include downloads or external links that would take the reader away from your email.
11. Do some paid promotion
I know that many Interior Design businesses run on very tight budgets but you should try to allocate a bit to paid online promotion. When done correctly, (by including keywords and making your content experience by itself), paid promotion will pay for itself and a whole lot more.
12. Don’t assume. Test.
If you’re unsure about anything like colour scheme, text…do not make assumptions or just make a random choice. Do a split test – where different sets of viewers are shown different versions of your content – to see which choice converts the most leads into paying clients.
Most website platforms allow for such tests. And finally, believe in yourself.
If you don’t believe in your own design business, marketing tips can only take you so far! I wish you all the best in your Interior Design business.
