Category: Business Bible for Interior Designers

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Designer Creates Bad Digital Impression?

Editions|Artists’ Book Fair
Editions|Artists’ Book Fair (Photo credit: j-No)

9 Ways for interior designers to create a bad impression – digitally of course!

When you first present to your newest prospect I’m pretty sure that you will be wearing your best ‘business’ clothes. When you first speak to a new client I’m sure you will make a real effort to do your best. When you send out a brochure or some other paper based literature I’m sure you will have it looking good. Hopefully too you take first emails seriously. And yes I’m sure your website looks great as well.

So all is hunky dory right? you can stop reading now and move on 🙂

Well firstly, before I get into the meat of the subject matter that drew you here, I suggest that one exercise you can do on a Friday afternoon is to write down EVERY single TYPE of point of contact that you make with clients. I’ve gone through a few of them in the opening to this post. No rocket science there. However what I suggest you do is really think if they all present a coherent view, when taken together, of you and your business. Do they look similar enough and do they say similar things and present similar images?

Click To Read More Interior Design Articles
Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

Just like that fine evening wear you have to impress on really special occasions and turn heads as you walk in the room all these points of contact between your business and your potential client are the same thing FOR YOUR BUSINESS (business? you know that thing that pays for the evening wear).

Well I’m going to talk a little about how to create a BAD digital first impression focussing on your website. So You need to look at the first page that people most often go to. In techie terms these are ‘landing pages’; they might include your home page or any special page that Google Adwords points to on your site or any page of yours that ranks particularly highly and get a lot of ‘hits’.

So to create  a BAD first impression here’s what your landing pages need to do:

  1. No Graphics: No logo, no head-shot of a smiley-you and certainly NOT clickable.
  2. Poor Content: Be sure to include waffle and irrelevance to the reason that drew the click..
  3. Lots of words and certainly no Bullet Points as bullet points are too easy to read.
  4. No Call to Action – an even better bad impression can be created if you make it as obscure as possible for the visitor to know what to do next. Perhaps presenting a beautiful image but making it as annoying as possible by adding some music and not making it obvious how to proceed to ANYWHERE else – Designers’ websites are OFTEN like this!
  5. White Papers, Videos, Registrations, etc: OK you might have accidentally put some of these on your website to be helpful but you can soon change any good impression that that might make by giving them away without even getting the visitor’s email.
  6. Confirmation/Thank You Pages: How rude! you forgot to add one of these and to make matters worse it didn’t offer the visitor another idea of what they could do on your site.
  7. Testing changes you make might improve a visitor’s experience to your site. So you certainly don’t want to do that..
  8. Google: create a bad impression with google as well. Ideally you will name your pages PAGE01, PAGE02 and so on. Never include keywords in the name of a page as that might help Mr Google do his job.
  9. Speling mstakes. Sme ppl really hate splling mistakes and abbreviations. Include a few to enrich their day.
  10. Always fail to deliver. Like by having 10 reasons rather than the advertised 9 reasons. Laugh! We might but our client’s probably won’t.

Am I perfect? No! Do I make these mistakes? Yes of course. It does provide some food for thought though.

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Interior Designers: Brand Colour

Source: Marketo
Source: Marketo

Colour (color) really does matter. As an interior designer you don’t need me to tell you that. I think sometimes though we know what good colours are and what good colour combinations are and we know what feels right to us and to our clients in the spaces we inhabit.

However…

Many of us are not graphic designers and perhaps our own branding may have suffered because of colour choices we would make in our day job.

Apparently if you look more closely at the infographic on the right then you will see that their research shows that more than 90% of the world’s top 100 brands use either red, blue or grey as the primary branding colour and more than 90% of those same companies use at most 2 colours. So there’s very much a ‘keep it simple’ line coming out for brand colours. No big surprise there I suppose.

41% only use text – so that will be the brand name and/or ‘strap line’ ie there will probably be no logo as such.

Colours considered suitable for companies in ‘the home’ are green and yellow. This doesn’t necessarily apply to the colour YOU should have for your branding as an interior designer.

Indeed their research shows that ORANGE & BROWN are questionable colours for companies in the interiors space. With our Pantone 464 I suppose we fall foul of that.

Then again it is interesting to read that people associate ‘vibrant and fun’ with Orange. It is also interesting to read that the colour is the first thing that potential clients perceive about your brand.

Yet the safest choice appears to be shades of grey. If we all had grey houses and grey business and grey clothes I guess the world would necessarily be a greyer place. And I’m not sure it would be a better place for that.

Summary: Conform or stand out. It’s up to you. You can probably make most colours work as a brand but maybe a myriad of colours won’t work. Is this all stating the obvious?

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Interior Designers: Business Bible

Office PURE GRUPPEHere are all (most) of our articles on “the business” of interior design. Sales and marketing resources for a modern digital world.

Your comments or likes or backlinks are all appreciated as we invest considerable time into producing this content.

  1. business-tips-for-interior-designers
  2. 9-common-interior-design-mistakes-marketing
  3. 9.5-ways-for-interior-designers-to-make-more-money-profit
  4. interior-designers-get-more-customers-on-your-website
  5. Interior-designers-boosting-your-position-in-google-search-results
  6. the-proactive-interior-designer-1-0-1
  7. 6-things-that-interior-designers-do-wrong-on-their-web-sites
  8. interior-designers-5-and-a-half-ways-to-twitter-badly
  9. pitching-winning-managing-business-for-interior-designers
  10. use-pinterest-more-to-generate-interest
  11. facebook-interior-designers-10-steps-to-setup
  12. retail-interior-designers-8-ways-to-sell-more
  13. bad-things-they-say-about-interior-designers
  14. interior-designers-facebook-4-ways-to-correctly-use-it
  15. 7-facebook-mistakes-interior-designers-make
  16. designers-twitter-is-rubbish-use-twitter
  17. interior-design-marketing-2010-predictions
  18. designers-what-to-blog-about
  19. spying-on-competitors-staying-ahead
  20. interior-designer-did-your-web-site-just-popp-up-in-my-search
  21. interior-design-marketing-strategies
  22. facebook-adwords-effective-ad-writing-for-interior-designers
  23. interior-designers-facebook-key-elements-for-your-fan-page
  24. designers-interior-design-links-how-to-get-them
  25. target-markets-for-interior-designers-interior-design-marketing-strategy-2012
  26. interior-designers-an-update-on-using-facebook-linkedin-wordpress-blogs-and-twitter
  27. interior-designers-in-2012-how-do-people-find-you-on-the-web
  28. interior-designers-how-to-specify-a-luxury-cashmere-throw-for-your-client-projects
  29. an-interior-designer-gets-lots-of-web-visitors-but-few-leads-enquiries
  30. interior-designers-ipad-essential-apps
  31. interior-designers-to-houzz-or-not-to-houzz
  32. who-is-the-best-interior-designer-in-the-world
  33. interior-designers-and-their-financially-lucrative-bit-on-the-side
  34. interior-design-marketing-strategy-business-strategies-plan-for-designers-2012
  35. interior-designers-what-should-i-write-about-on-my-blog
  36. pinterest-and-customer-interest-interior-designers-pin-their-boards-to-the-wall
  37. interior-designers-why-does-no-one-visit-your-web-site
  38. marketing-strategies-interior-designers-consider-these-areas
  39. interior-designers-how-good-is-your-brands-colour/
  40. how-to-create-a-bad-digital-first-impression-for-interior-designer/
  41. sponsored-blog-post-by-interior-designers-charge-fair-rates-stop-getting-conned/

For more information on luxury cashmere throws or to request cuttings please visit www.kothea.com.  For black faux leather upholstery fabrics try <here> and for mohair velvet and mohair velvet upholstery fabric please follow the links.  Upholstery Linen is also one of our specialities as are luxury  silk velvet  fabrics.

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Interior Designers & Pinterest

Many Interior Designers have Pinterest accounts and quite a few of us use them. Here are my thoughts on whether or not interior designers should use Pinterest and HOW they should best use Pinterest.

http://pinterest.com/paulaovallev/color/

Here, for example is Paula Ovalle Vicuña’s beautiful pinboard of colors. Now, this and similar boards are great sources of imagery for colours for interior designers and of course there are other pins showing styles and colour themes and so on. If you had a board like this you could show your clients on your iPAD as part of your presentations.

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

BUT think carefully about how you are going to use this as a tool to win more business. How are your potential clients going to be driven to you and/or your web site. Why is your potential client going to be looking on pinterest for work by interior designers. They MIGHT be using it as a means of selecting designers but IMHO I doubt that many potential customers will be doing that – some, for sure, but not many.

Now, your competitors may be using it to get some inspiration. So you’ve done a bit of work to help your competitors. That’s all well and good as others will reciprocate and you will benefit from that potentially. But that hasn’t got you any more sales has it?

If you are going to use pinterest for collecting and presenting images then it may be great as a productivity tool.

You have the option with pinterest of creating secret/hidden boards – that may be a good way forwards for those of you conscious NOT to help out your competitors!

So you have to answer this question: “Do my clients hang out on Pinterest so making them more likely to find out about my interior design skills from my Pinterest account?”.

IF you can answer that question positively then read on…

Effective Pinterest Marketing

1. Fill-in the Form! Setup You Account Properly – Gets the Basics Sorted Out

Your name (first and last), username, logo, About, Location and Website information should all be properly included. PLEASE if you can make sure that, for example, you use the same name as you do across all media – printed and electronic. It’s good for your ‘branding’. Verify your website and put your blog address in your ‘About’ section.

2. Be a digital stalker! Follow People – You build a following, which looks good to potential new followers, if you follow people. They often reciprocate. It’s a bit like Twitter in that respect. Perhaps look for people or boards with certain of your keywords on them and then follow those people.

3. In the Digital World, Content is King! Get content. Regularly seek out and add new relevant content. To be truly amazing you will, of course, add your own original content. Content may be the king but creativity rules the Empire of Design.

More?

Create a board and use it (link to it) on facebook or twitter to invite your other followers to discuss it.

When you blog you always add at least one great image right? Well make a collection of those great images on pinterest. That way you save a little time by using one piece of content twice.

Focus on the right content. Think always about your target customer. Only post what they are going to be interested in.

Put a url in your comments on pins to link back to the original content (your blog), Ibelieve I am right in saying that this URL is made clickable by pinterest.

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Interior Designers – Blog Topics

English: JC Hryb, interior designer/owner of S...
English: JC Hryb, interior designer/owner of Style de Vie and Twenty Gauge, promotional photo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What can I write about?

Anything you want to of course. Although it is clearly best for you to write things that your target audience will be most interested in, the things that will make them come back to your blog again and again and again. In old marketing speak that raises your brand awareness (and the interest in it).

It’s also best to write the words that NEW potential clients are most likely to type into google.

However, I suspect that you have come to this post as you have run out of ideas. Don’t worry it happens to us all.

Use these tools to find alternative ways or approaches to subjects you have already written about:

Start By Asking Ubersuggest and Soovle Questions 

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

So try;

  • can interior designers do…
  • does an interior desinger need to…
  • will an interior design project involve
  • would an interior designer be better if he/she…
  • how could an interior designer improve…
  • why does an interior design project always…
  • when does and interior design project usually…
  • where does an interior designer buy…
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Who is the best interior designer in Europe?

English: Interior Designer, Tanya GyaniWho is the best interior designer in the world? blimey that’s a question and a half.

I’m writing this post in wordpress and I use this thing called Zemanta which suggests images and articles to do with the subject, with suggestions changing as I compose the article. So the first designer that appears will get put in the picture on the right and that will be the person you are looking at now!

I’ll probably not know the person that is suggested (we’ll see it still hasn’t appeared yet!)

Ooops there she is: Tanya Gyani.Congratulations Tanya.

Now of course there probably really is no ‘best interior designer in the world’ that we can all agree on. But the point of my post was to go one of two ways. I was either going to come from the angle of saying that YOU should be the best interior designer in terms of how you market yourself to your target niches OR that whoever comes up and gets put in my picture is the best interior designer in the sense that they are the best at getting their image shown against a generic search for “the best interior designer in the world”.

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

Maybe Tanya will now go on to global fame? Who knows? If she does I certainly hope she will start specifying some of our fabrics on her projects as she hasn’t done so yet! (as far as I know).

No; really YOU should be positioning yourself as the best interior designer at what you do. But rather than saying you are “the best at XYZ” it is probably more appealing and more humble for you to phrase it as “I am the only Interior Designer In XXX who does YYY”. Use that sort of angle A LOT in your client communications (written or verbal) and you give your potential clients A REASON TO CHOOSE YOU and a REASON FOR YOU TO JUSTIFY YOUR PRICING. Make sure it’s true of course. For uniqueness is priceless (well almost!!)

Remember of course that it should not all be about price. Your client wants a great job most of all. Cost might be a factor but so also is the risk of who the client chooses. Find a way of exuding confidence and competence to lower that perceived risk.

Good luck you and good luck Tanya (there she even gets a link to her website).

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Interior Designers: the financially lucrative ‘bit on the side’

Advertising advertising
Advertising advertising (Photo credit: Toban Black)

For our American readers I will leave the explanation of another meaning of ‘a bit on the side’ to your furtive imaginations. This article looks at some of the ways you can make a bit of money (on the side) from your blog – that is ways other than that of attracting your target customers to your web site.

Be Warned: This may well distract you from your core business for minimal gains!

There are 2 ways that web sites and blogs can make additional revenue. If you are in the right market writing the right stuff you could make $1,000 a month…just like all those unsolicited emails say you can! Or you could be in the wrong market and invest the same amount of time as the person who makes $1,000 a month but yourself only get $50 a month. So be careful.

The 2 ways are shown here.

  1. Put adverts on your site (google adsense – which is the reverse of Google adwords)
  2. Host blog POSTS that are effectively adverts containing back-links to other sites by:
    • You write the blog post for the advertiser; or
    • The advertiser or their agent writes the post and you just put it on your site.

Be Warned: This may impact negatively on the image of your blog or website.

Pre-requisites

To make money in either of these examples you need to have people going to your site. So if your site is currently ‘low-traffic’ then I would stop reading now and get back to your interior designing!

Google, with their adsense, program will be interested in adverts on ANY site, including yours. But *YOU* will only make money out of adsense if you firstly have lots of visitors for your great content AND SECONDLY they click on the adverts that Google put there.

If you have a good site with lots of visitors and a good ‘pagerank’ (>3) then advertising agencies will potentially be interested in your site, especially if your subject matter broadly matches that of their clients. If you also have lots of twitter/pinterest/facebook/linkedin followers then that might be a bonus for the agency/advertiser (but probably not, although it should be).

Simple adwords can go anywhere on your site – be it a web site or a blog. Paid posts could be a new page added to your website but more easily it can be accomplished with a blog which you hopefully already have.

So what do I need to do then?

Cheque from Google AdSense
Cheque from Google AdSense (Photo credit: Wikipedia). It’s on wikipedia so it must be true, right? 🙂

A. Attract Agencies

To attract advertising agencies I would firstly check a bit more closely some of the unsolicited emails you have been deleting. Some of these may well have been from advertising agencies genuinely offering to pay you to put posts (and/or back links) on your site for a fee…honest! Workout a standard response to these emails including why your site is great and how much you charge, save it and use it. We have accepted some adverts from this route and, yes, it is true and genuine and you do get paid (or you remove the post). We worked on the assumption that it was virtually zero effort and the post would soon get buried in the history of our numerous posts – you could even put a one year time frame on the advert after which you would remove it.

Secondly I would be proactive and look for sites that let you register an interest to be a host for these paid-for-blog posts. Sites such as www.socialspark.com let you do this.

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

If you have a good pagerank (>3) and, say, more than 5000 unique visitors per moth then you should get at least US$/£100 for a single post containing one backlink to an advertier’s client’s site. You may or may not get a few of these a month. Compare this to the next paragraph, AdSense, where you should get a higher frequency of lower value income…

B. Use Google Adsense

Many of you have your blogs on wordpress. If you let wordpress do all the hosting for your then you will not be able to incorporate ads on your site. This is because wordpress place adverts themselves and make money from your site themselves. You can’t see them doing this if you look at your site from your computer…but they do. Honest.

So you have to move or migrate your blog to somewhere that you control. The company who hosts your website will probably be able to let  you install wordpress on your part of their machine and then you can use it and put ads onto your site. This could involve quite a complicated migration and software installation for you or your techy people. Again there will be a cost associated to this. You will then have to set up your blog so that parts of it are able to automatically show Google’s ads and credit your account if they are clicked.

NEVER click the ads yourself nor get friends to do it. Google are very clever.

If you are on a site that is controlled by wordpress (like this one) then look at your wordpress control panel for clicks on your site. You will probably see quite a few clicks to sites that you don’t know about. How did these links get on your site? Well they were the ones that google put there. If you add up your clicks you will get some idea of the number of clicks you might get going forwards by doing AdSense yourself. If you work on a revenue-per-click of 20p to 50p (20 cents to 50 cents) then you can do the maths of a best case scenario and a likely case scenario for an interior designer.

Be Warned: AdSense can theoretically show your direct competitor’s adverts on your site through their AdWords program.

Problems

Sites like socialspark.com allow advertisers to automatically put posts onto your site. Whilst I’m sure the content will be ethical I’m not so sure it will always tie in with the image you hope to portray on your site.

Think how your readers will feel. Will they want to be shown ads on your site and might a post from an advertiser, in a way, trick the loyal reader into reading an advert they were not expecting.

Moving to a site capable of hosting AdSense adverts might be tricky and/or time consuming – depending on your current setup.

That’s about it really. Fairly simple to understand but potentially tricky to implement for uncertain rewards.

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Interior Designers – To Houzz or not to Houzz?

Alone
Alone

Should an interior designer really use Houzz.com?

“Oh no not another online directory!” you cry.

“Surely a waste of space!” you bemoan.

“Wrong!” I say with gusto (whatever that is).

As an interior designer you’ve probably been attracted to houzz.com to look at the many high quality interiors images there. And there are literally tens of thousands of high quality images. We’ll come back to those in a minute but first we’ll look at some other benefits for you being in that online space.

Houzz.com *IS* a popular web destination. It is used by your competitors and also possibly by future residential clients of yours. It’s always good to hang out with clients right? You keep telling me networking is important so I guess you are with me so far?

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There are lots of discussions initiated by potential residential clients. If you buy into how social media works then you will already know that.

  • Talking to someone and helping them could possibly lead to a sale (or a waste of time).
  • Talking to someone digitally leaves a record. Someone in the future could come along with the same problem and decide to talk to you based on your response.
  • Someone could be doing a bit of research into you and your opinions before deciding to contact you.

Of course if you haven’t bought into social media then you’ll think it’s a load of nonsense and you probably should stop reading this now as I’m surely wasting your time!

You can create “idea books” on Houzz. So you can pull together some of your images and perhaps somebody else’s images. You can then use these as part of a presentation to your client, for example. Or you could get your client to pull together an idea book and review that after they’ve finished. The danger there of course is that the client has control of the ‘digital capital’ and may tout around his/her likes and dislikes to your competitors. One issue with doing this on Houzz is that sometimes images are incorrectly tagged and so sometimes you are presented with the wrong images and/or you can’t find the right ones. Another potential issue with Houzz, which I have not verified, is that some images on Houzz become copyrighted by Houzz (I’m not quite sure how they manage that legally but that’s another issue, just be aware).

Any idea books you create stay on houzz and may be seen and liked by other potential customers or copied by competitors or taken to competitors by less discerning clients.

If you put together a pretty coherent theme then that could be seen as giving away your creative work to other people or it could be seen as you being a confident and competent designer worthy of considering for a client’s next project. So it could get you the chance of winning some business.

There are ways to embed “idea books” back onto your website/blog. This is good in that someone else is managing the hosting and techy stuff behind the display of your images and ideas. HOWEVER, and this is importnat, such embedded bits of digital stuff will encourage people to click back to houzz. So you will inadvertently be encouraging a potential customer (or existing customer) back to houzz and potentially out of the eager creative grasp of your web site or blog.

So I’d think carefully about that.

You can of course use houzz as yet another online directory. It’s probably better than most because of the aesthetics and wealth of quality images.

Why not, go for it! See how it works out? It’s free after all.

On sites that you think MAY turn out to be useful I would always recommend using a special link to your web site on that site directory listing/profile of you. That way you will be able to track the number of hits your site receives from houzz. eg you will have index.htm so create an identical copy of that called index-houzz.htm or index1.htm something like that. I hope that makes sense without gettign too technical. Don’t bother doing this if you are sceptical of houzz.

What i like about houzz is that it draws the user into it. It makes the user (your potential customer) stay there and play around. This is an important thing to bear in mind as most potential cients that go to your site will say there between 10 and 60 seconds (if you are lucky). So anywhere that encourages people to stay is POTENTIALLY a good place for YOU to establish a profile.

If you are a designer who needs a bit of inspiration from time to time then you can get that on houzz. But again you’ll probably just be going there for product inspiration, right? As you would never want to (ahem) match/copy/change-a-bit someone else’s interior design ideas! Would you?

Houzz has the idea of region or metro area. That’s nothing amazing but it does help potential clients find a local designer.

I think the main draw is the huge volume of images with relatively straightforward ways of getting to that information and, importantly, an EASY way to then copy or “cut and paste” those ideas into an idea book. That’s what houzz fundamentally is built upon CONTENT and ORGANIZATION…photo-content, how they are indexed and displayed and how easily you can copy and create custom content.

Summary: It’s good! Wish I’d thought of it.

Related articles
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Interior Designers’ iPAD essential apps

interior design oxford rogue designs

I’ve just got my new iPAD 3…yeah! Whilst it has obvious limitations and is a tad expensive, it is also ‘obviously’ a great creativity productivity tool for interior designers. You can benefit a lot from all the stuff that’s already built in when you buy it but what about those pesky apps? You know, the ones that are a few pounds/dollars but are rubbish and the ones that are free and awesome…it’s a bit of a minefield sorting through them all to find a useful gem to help you with productivity and creativity at work.

Here’s a bit of help for you with my list of iPAD essential apps for interior designers. Some are specifically useful to designers other more generally useful to your business usage of an iPAD. Please feel free to suggest some more I certainly haven’t used them all.

  1. Houzz: The “Wikipedia of interior and exterior design” by CNN,  Houzz has the largest database of home design ideas on the net, with over 200,000 high resolution photos. Watch out tho it can show TRADE PRICES in many places..not great for your client to see. **Free**
  2. AutoCAD WS: View, edit, and share your DWG™ files with anyone, anywhere. AutoCAD WS mobile app enables you to work with AutoCAD® drawings directly: Free
  3.  iHome HD: Many free interior pictures. Cost: Free but a more extensive version is available at an additional cost.
  4. Home Interior Ideas HD: the best app in AppStore for discovering home interior designs and decorating ideas. $1.99
  5. Interior 2011 – Sweet Home (HD): find your perfect House Design. With Interior 2012 you can enjoy a wide variety of manufacturers in the area of Home Decoration and Interior Design. $0.99
  6. Dream home HD:  integrate the latest interior design trends into your home.  Explore the immense variety of decor solutions from professional designers for your entire home, browse through hundreds of real photos and navigate through the extensive menu of colors, styles and room types. From tiny efficient accents to the most sophisticated interiors, Dream Home HD contains a top class collection of ideas for the home of your dream. $4.99
  7. Remodelista: Get your daily deco fix with the new Home Design App from Remodelista, the online sourcebook: $2.99
  8. Phaidon Design Classics: comprehensive collection of general design classics including interiors: $19.99
  9. Sensopia : Create visual instant floor plans – I like it anyway!
  10. Moodboard: Creates a Moodboard! Does what it says. $15.

Secret Bit

Additional info and a link to:

Target Markets For Interior Designers

Oooooh!

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles
Some more…
  1. SktechBook Pro: Capture design ideas no matter where you are. A professional-grade paint and drawing application: $4.99
  2. Color Wheel: An OK but basic application that allows you to experiment with different colour schemes: $0.99
  3. Penultimate: Can’t be bothered to use a pen and paper but want that same look…this is the one. It can also do graph/lined paper…cool $1.99
  4. Peppermint, NCS Color: If you frequently work with color and need an incredibly accurate tool for making choices or purchases, the Peppermint app is one for you: $3.99
  5. Quill: is a vector art drawing program, a bit limited but OK: $0.99
  6. Freeform: is a vector drawing tool for your iPad perhaps worth a bit of research before spending: $9.99
  7. Adobe Ideas: Digital sketchbook that you will probably get if you already use Adobe stuff. Reports of quite a few bugs in this app tho: $5.99
  8. Brushes: A painting app for experimentation and drawing, a snip at $7.99 but is it as good as the INSPIRE app?
  9. PhotoPad: Change the look of a photo for some FREE inspiration.
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Interior Designer: Target Markets & Marketing Strategy

Customers are Ignoring You
Customers are Ignoring You (Photo credit: ronploof)

Whether you are a new Interior Designer or an accomplished Interior Designer of repute and long standing there is always a need to know who your target customers are. In fact, if you don’t really know your target customers then, unless you are lucky, you will not stay in business long.

Times change. Remember what was a great target market in the boom times might not be if things get tough, you should look at your target markets annually.

There are broadly two types of customer; residential, and commercial. The former would be characterised by an individual or household decision making unit whereas the latter would be characterised as an organisation, potentially an organisation can be very difficult to deal with as it can be more complex with decision makers, buyers, specifiers, influencers and many people involved in the decision making processes.

A potential, residential customer could be a friend, relation, someone down the road, a referral. Essentially someone who wants to ‘do’ their living space.

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A potential commercial customer could be a hotel chain, your local restaurant, the office where someone you know works; often it will be a ‘workplace’ of some sorts but it could also include a large property developer/builder building an apartment block or a private aircraft or yacht manufacturer/designer.

What is NOT a target market. Green design is NOT a target market. Kitchen design is NOT a target market. You must always phrase the target market in terms of the customer. So the preceding examples become: People who are environmentally conscious in their interiors purchasing decisions; and People who are replacing their kitchen.
Remember. There are a LOT of people in this world. There are a LOT of workplaces in this world. So you will probably need several criteria to precisely specify your target market.
And here is where it gets tricky.
You can use criteria like:  Age; Location; Gender; Income level; Education level; Marital or family status;  Occupation; and Ethnic background. But then, really, how meaningful is that for your marketing? If one of your criteria is “educational level” then, for example, ‘graduate’ may well describe all of your previous customers BUT how useful is that criteria in seeking out new customers? Will you really vet everyone that comes to you to see if they have a degree? Will you assume that all graduates are intelligent (very many are not, trust me!)? Will you assume that all graduates are wealthier? In  your marketing how exactly can you target graduates? If you use alumni magazines for advertising then I admit that would be a great route to graduates but really alumni magazines!? With the advent of Facebook advertising you CAN specify that adverts are only shown to graduates…so assuming that the Facebook user is telling the truth about themselves then OK I accept that would be reasonable. Think it through, whatever you decide.
So what you are trying to achieve with your target markets is a level of manageable clarity. Clarity in the sense that it becomes clear who your customers are going to (hopefully) be. You can see how your marketing efforts will be focussed towards them. Manageable in the sense that there are enough that you can ‘easily’ target them with the money, time and manpower you have available for marketing.
Do not fall into the trap of saying that your target market is “People who buy my type of service”. That won’t really help you! despite it being obviously true.
Once you properly know your target markets (which might require some research) you will be able to work out how big they are. You will be able to see how easily you can get your message to them. You will be able to assess if they can afford your services. Much of your marketing will ‘fall into place’ relatively straightforwardly once you have figured out what you are selling and who you are selling it to.
Remember that there are LOTS of people out there trying to get the same business that you are. So you have to be smart. The obvious market may well be obvious to 100 other interior designers and your basic design service the same as the one offered by those 100 other designers. Often it is good to aim for a less crowded market with a relatively unique offering that is suited precisely to that market. Easier “said”, than “done”, of course.
Here are some suggestions:
Commercial Interiors
  • Hospitality & Leisure
  • Marine
  • Medical
  • Aerospace
Residential Interiors
  • Age
  • Location
  • Gender
  • Income level
  • Education level
  • Marital or family status
  • Occupation
  • Ethnic background
  • Eco-buyers
  • Buy to let
  • New builders
  • Renovators
  • Landlords
  • Tech savvy
  • Time poor family
  • Friends
  • Networks/ past client networks

If the target user of your service is someone you might not directly contact and you have to go through someone else (usually an organisation). then that organisation becomes your channel to market.

Examples here include;

If you have any additions to suggest please add them via a comment below. I will put them into this list.

There are links below to more related and detailed stuff. Here are some of the posts I previously wrote or you can find them all in one go by <clicking here>
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