Interior Designers need to understand their whole marketing strategy and how each of its 7 constituent tactics work together to grow the business.
This article is a checklist. Go through each of the points I’ve listed and apply it to your sales and marketing in your business. My opinion on what are particularly important marketing communications for interior designers are highlighted in bold and might differ if you target business rather than the public. Let me know your thoughts: The checklist contains links to other resources and there are further articles referred to at the end of this article.
1. Search Marketing – Get your prospect at the time of their decision-making.
- Search engine optimisation (Higher rankings)
- Paid Search / Pay-per-click (Google AdWords)
- Paid for inclusion / feeds
2. Online PR – Create Awareness of your brand by getting it mentioned.
- Industry Portal Representation (eg Thehousedirectory.com)
- Social Media (blogs, feeds, communities)
- Media Alerting Services
- Brand Protection
3. Online Partnerships – Link your brand WITH OTHERS IN YOUR INDUSTRY
- Affiliate Marketing
- Sponsorship
- Co-branding
- Link building – good relevant links only.
- Widget marketing
4. Offline Communications – You should know these.
- Advertising
- Personal selling
- Sales promotion
- PR
- Sponsorship
- Direct Mail
- Exhibitions
- Merchandising
- Packaging
- Word-of-mouth (your old clients are your best and cheapest salespeople)
5. Interactive Ads
- Site-specific Media Buys (only if you target businesses)
- Ad networks
- Sponsorship
- Behavioural targeting
6. Opt-in Email
- House list emails (your clients and prospects) – look at mailchimp.com
- Cold (rented lists) – not normally a good idea
- Co-branded (share the marketing load wisely and boost your brand image)
- Ads in 3rd party newsletters
7. Viral Marketing – Electronic variants of traditional ‘word of mouth’
- Pass along emails
- Word-of-mouth (eg using the share & enjoy functionality below)
- Buzz marketing
- Generating media mentions
What do you think?
And as a PS I will follow this up with 2 more articles; one about different ways of engaging (financially) with clients; and a second about using facebook for an interior design business. The first comment, below, reflects a theme running through many questions posed to me: website designers (techies) and ad agencies (space sellers) are trying to get you to part with your hard earned design fees; I would read a book on digital marketing that comes more from the marketing end rather than the technology end eg “Mastering Web 2.0 bu Susan Rice Lincoln”, that’s a good way to start. DON’T SPEND £10k/$15k on a new web site think about your customers and how they behave, your marketing communications need to latch into their behavioural characteristics.
Photo Credit: McVitty (Designer)
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Curious about the discussion of website 2.0. I have had a website designer propose using that for my business. It’s very expensive, is it worth it?
£3000 – $5000 dollars – my goodness, that is a lot of money …. i have set up my website using a package called Mr Site, it is very easy, obviously you need time to play with it and it is not all singing all dancing but for a starter site it is great – i think the pack cost me about £35, i have jsut renewed the annual membership for peanuts….. try it yourself first before paying pots of money. In the UK there is a goverment body that offers free courses so took one that helped with getting web-sites higher up the rankings – very useful – you may find something like this. GOOD LUCK
I think you can do ‘it’ for less than £35 as well !! So I really do agree with you…really, really look at those expensive quotes.
My figure was what might be on the high side of reasonable for a SME…larger comapnies will spend even more.
If anyone starts talking about web 2.0 then I would assume that they are a techy and don’t really understand your business (maybe a wrong assumption).
Social media/online communities and the like ARE a valid way of reaching new target markets. You are an interior desinger on a supplier’s website now, right? So clearly it does work!
You have to look at what markets YOU are targetting and which you want to target and which channels you use to reach them. That is a marketing question not a technical question. Technology is involved but only as a solution to the channel communication.
However, it may be expensive, it depends on what is being proposed. For a small interior design firm the technology element should not be expensive it really is not rocket science by a long long way and much of the technology can be done by you for free. Say £3000/$5000 tops!
I have been reading these posts for some time now and do enjoy your site. Thank you for always delivering on the info. I want to mention a service that I am using to (internetmarketing-fordummies) build quality backlinks It is a fantastic service although it is probably ending soon. Might help!
It is always good to have a fan or two and a quality backlink or two. That certainly helps your google pagerank as long as you do not do reciprocal links, which no longer work in Google.
this topic has been amazing and useful,specially when I am looking for new and innovative ways as a marketing strategy.Thanks
Hi Jaishree, thank you for your feedback and kind words
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Great points. It really look worthy. Thanks for such a post.
How do we know a person / client requiring our services in the interior?
by uche
Talk to them. Find out what they want. Tell them what you do.
Hello,
Designs of the Interior (DOTI) of Ponte Vedra Beach, FL offers residential Interior Design services, home furnishings, and house decorating to Ponte Vedra Beach. http://www.doti.com/
Good luck
Cool interiors, really usefull informations and advice, thanks for sharing
Did you come up with this list by yourself?
Some of it yes, some of it no.
I really like your design Bed room with sectional fabric Bed or leather sofa furniture. Well, I can also choose modern or classic bed furniture to make your bed room looks so beautiful. Well, I think if you are living in small spaces maybe you can design your bed room with minimalist decoration.
A great way to advertise interior design business is via showcase/case studies, that people will actually see.
Try HomeDesire, it’s free:
http://homedesire.net/?submit-a-design,2
Cheers
Great ideas! useful information. Thanks alot for sharing 🙂