When you’re in the process of establishing your interior design business, your primary concern is likely how to attract and obtain customers. You may be wondering how to generate more leads to land your initial project. Well, here are 5 free ways for you to market your business by an interior design business coach
1. Tell your friends and family about your interior design business.
Your friends and family are always going to be your greatest support. If you’re new in the industry and you don’t have many contacts or leads, then your friends and family are the best people to go to. You should tell them what you’re up to and tell them that you just started an interior design business. You can get a bit more specific by telling them what type of projects you want. By doing this, they will keep you top of mind when they’re talking to people or even for themselves when they’re doing a future renovation.
Your friends and family are going to be the most likely source for your first project because they already trust you so you don’t need to close that trust gap like you do with a cold lead. Let them know that you’re serious about your new business and you need their support. There’s no harm in asking and everyone in your circle should be aware that you’re building your interior design business because they would be the ones who will support you.
2. Use social media.
Social media is an easy choice for a marketing campaign because it’s free, except for your own time of course. There’s many channels that you can post on like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and LinkedIn. There’s also other channels which may not be immediately obvious like Pinterest and Houzz. If you are comfortable with creating video content, then YouTube is also a great platform.
Social media is probably the easiest way to promote your business and it doesn’t really cost you anything. The tip I would give for social media is to start thinking about your Niche. There’s a lot of noise in social media and there’s so many people competing for attention, so you want to be sending a consistent message about your interior design business. You can share content like what type of projects you like to do, or what is your niche, or what makes you unique from other designers. This helps to better reach your target audience.
Another tip with social media (and other forms of messaging) is to keep on repeating your message. Studies show that it takes an average of seven touchpoints for someone to receive an information before your message sinks in. This is why you’ll need to put in constant, repeated effort with the same messaging so that people can actually hear what you’re trying to say.
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3. Build relationship with industry partners.
If you’re just coming from interior design school, then your most immediate connection to the industry would be your teachers. You want to talk to them and ask them if there are any events or other places that you can go to build networks with people in the industry.
If you are a designer that have projects already, then build relationships with the trades, contractors, Architect, other designers, and other Consultants that you know from the industry. Those would be really good relationships for you to build and foster because they’re in your industry and they would be your best referral source. Let them know what are your skills, what projects you’re looking for and what is your Niche. In the future, if there’s a project that comes their way that doesn’t involve their own specialty, then they will refer it to you. For an Interior Designer, your most solid referral source will be Architects and Contractors. If you can build strong networks there, then your leads will become regular and quite easy after awhile.
4.Attend industry networking events with interior design business coaches.
There are many industry associations and they put on many events. It’s a great idea to go and network at these events because you will have many potential referral partners there. These could be design associations like your local Architecture or Interior Design Association. It could be a trade or contractor associations and it could even be meetups events.
Think about who your target referral partners are and where they meet and that’s where you want to network.
5. Promote with SEO and digital ads
Although you can learn to do this yourself, it is quite technical and it will probably be over the heads of most Interior Designers. So to keep it easy, it’s best to hire a SEO specialist to do this for you. They’ll do it better than you and then you can focus your time on getting new projects for your business instead.
There is a cost to this, so if you’re just starting out in your business, you probably don’t have a solid revenue yet to justify spending for this. If this is the case, I would recommend to hold off on this until you build up some steady revenue.
When your budget allows, investing in SEO is very good for exposure because your website is your digital storefront. In the internet age, people learn about your business from your website and they find you from Google searches. Your leads and potentials will increase once you build up your SEO ranking.
For those people who aren’t familiar with the difference between SEO versus SEM, here’s a brief explanation. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. When someone helps you with SEO, they are optimizing your website so that it’s more search friendly to Google because then Google will be more willing to bump you up in the ranks when someone searches for your services.
The other component is SEM, which is Search Engine Marketing. A lot of people know this as AdWords or Pay-per-click and its essentially paying Google to show an ad of your business when people search for relevant keywords.
A good search ranking will take months to build up so you’ll need to start investing and doing SEO work now to get your rankings up. SEM, on the other hand can get you instant clicks because you’re paying Google to bump your ad to the top of the searches. SEM is not a long term tactic because once you stop the ad campaign, then the promotion stops. On the other hand, once you build up your SEO, it keeps on promoting you in the ranks for sometime after. If you want to stay updated with the latest marketing trends in the world of interior design check my course out Interior Design Business Accelerator which is the most comprehensive interior design business course out there!
If you have the budget for it, then I recommend to do both. With SEO you’re building for the long term and for SEM, you’re getting some instant clicks and instant leads. The two together makes a powerful marketing combo!
You can check out the video version of this tip here.
