A well-thought-out marketing strategy can help your interior design firm grow its revenue, get more clients and sell bigger projects. Read our 8-step guide to marketing for interior designers.
As an interior designer, you wear many hats. You help your clients improve and optimize their spaces’ functionality, source materials, finishes, and furniture, coordinate with contractors, make sure everything is up to code, and so much more.
Then there is all the back-of-house work that needs to happen for the business to run, like operations, finances, customer service, admin, sales, and last but certainly not least, marketing.
The latter of which is going to be our focus in this article.
Targeted and measurable marketing strategies help you grow behind just word of mouth. With a marketing strategy, you can have a process behind finding perfect-fit clients, growing your sales and revenue, and supporting more people in achieving their dream spaces.
However, if you wish you had learned more about marketing your interior design business in design school, we’re so glad you landed here.
Here’s exactly what we’re covering in this article:
- Define Your Interior Design Marketing Goals
- Use Data to Breakdown the Goals
- Identify Your Target Customer
- Differentiate Through Positioning
- Create a Client-Centric Marketing Strategy
- Turn the Marketing Strategy into an Action Plan
- Execute It Yourself vs. Hire an Agency
- Nurture the Marketing Strategy
Let’s dive in!
1. Define Your Marketing Goals
Before diving into creating a marketing strategy, take the time to understand your ‘why.’ Why or how do you want to market yourself? Get specific. Don’t just say you want to grow revenue. Identify how you envision doing it.
There are three common types of marketing goals for interior designers:
- Want more new customers? Start by identifying who your target customers are and deeply understanding them.
- Want more repeat business? Focus on re-engaging your past customers or nurturing relationships with strategic referral partners.
- Want customers to spend more? Find ways to upsell your current clients or improve your brand and positioning to get fewer but bigger projects.
Other marketing goals that are more common among large interior design firms include attracting more and better talent for human resources or improving your success rate through the RFP process.
Whatever the marketing goal is, each goal elicits a unique marketing strategy, timeline and action plan.
2. Use Data to Breakdown the Goals
Before you set future goals, first understand how your business is currently performing in these areas. If you don’t create goals based on historical data, you’ll find yourself setting arbitrary numbers and timelines.
Comb through your data and gather the following insights:
- Number of Inquiries – How many new client inquiries have you received in the past month, quarter, or year? The last number of years?
- Sales Conversion Rate – How many of those inquiries converted into paying clients?
- Marketing Channels – Which marketing channels are currently driving these client inquiries? Is there a difference in quality or behaviour?
Not actively tracking these metrics? It’s never too late to start. Collecting and analyzing marketing data will help you make more strategic decisions moving forward, better understand which efforts are working for you, and set more realistic goals and timelines.
Say you got 50 inquiries last year and spent $10,000 on marketing. You might set a goal of spending double on your marketing efforts to double your inquiries. Looking at your past metrics and marketing spending can help you create realistic future goals and plans.
3. Identify Your Target Customer
Whether you’re creating an inbound or outbound marketing strategy, everything starts with identifying and understanding your target customer.
Your target customer could be …
- New – You want more and new clients. Maybe you want ones similar to who you have worked with in the past or maybe you want to target clients of a different size, location or industry.
- Existing & Repeat – These are people who have already hired you once and you want to work with them again. The problem is that you’re not sure what additional services you sell to them.
- Strategic Partnerships – They’re not exactly your target customer. They refer you customers. They’re typically your peers like agents, architects and contractors. How do you find more of them and build win-win relationships?
Once you identify who you need to target to reach marketing goals, the next step is to profile them. Research them, talk to them, look for patterns and document your findings. The better you know your ideal customer, the easier it will be for you to market to them and for them to find you.
The following steps to creating a marketing strategy will be easier and more successful when you identify your target customer.
There are two ways to profile your target customers:
- Demographics
- Psychographics
Research Their Demographics
Demographics refer to data about the population you’re trying to attract 1. This typically includes their occupation, location, income level, education level, and marital status.
Are your target customers residential or commercial property owners? If residential, are they typically couples, families, or a busy professional’s executive assistant? If commercial, are you mainly dealing with procurement, buyers, or construction managers?
Understanding demographic information will help you identify where your customers are, online and offline. When you know where your customers spend their time, you know where you need to be.
Here are some marketing questions demographic information can help you answer:
- Which social media channels do they use? LinkedIn? Instagram? TikTok?
- Do they enjoy following photos of design inspiration and trends? And if so, where do they find them – influencers, magazines or Pinterest?
- Or do they prefer learning about the psychology, finances and logistics behind design? If so, how do they like to learn? Are they searching Google? Following email newsletters? Or listening to podcasts?
- Which in-person communities are they a part of? Golf courses? Conferences and trade shows? Or industry associations?
Research Their Psychographics
Psychographics go one step further. They consider more subjective information like interests, beliefs, fears, dreams, desires, lifestyles, and habits 2. Psychographics will help you create a marketing strategy that speaks to their emotions. It’s the kind of information that makes your customers think: “Wow — they understand me. If they get me, I bet they can help me.”
Some psychographic questions to consider for your target customer might be:
- What are their values?
- How do they make purchasing decisions?
- What does a typical day look like for them?
- For Residential:
- What is their aspirational life or home?
- What is holding them back from their aspirational home? Is it time, money or knowledge?
- For Commercial:
- What does a successful project look like to them?
- Are they more budget or aesthetic-conscious?
The more intimately you understand your dream client — and their needs, wants, and desires (really put yourself in their shoes here!) — the more impactful your marketing will be.
This is why we tell designers to focus more on psychographics in their marketing. Psychographics will help you better empathize with their problems, present more targeted solutions, and create magnetic messaging that primes them to work with you.
Document Your Research and Create a Profile
You don’t need a fancy market research firm to help you profile your target customers. They are
- Follow them online. You can learn a lot by reading their conversions on social media, forums and online communities.
- Talk to them. Go to events, arrange coffee chats and be curious.
- Make yourself available to them. Be open to having a preliminary sales conversation with anyone. They may not have the budget and scope to sign them on as a client, but if they’re in a location or sector you want to target, you can learn a lot about them through a 30-minute sales call.
Document your findings and keep them updated as you learn more about them with time. This should be a living document.
4. Differentiate Through Positioning
Take a quick look at Houzz 3 in your city and you’ll find thousands of designers and decorators listed. In San Francisco, for example, over 11,000 designers are listed on Houzz.
As a general design firm, it’s hard to stand out among 11,000 other designers. Now, what if one of them specialized? Say they were experts in restaurant design and the specialization was in their name, bio and all over their portfolio or socials. They would stand out a lot more on Houzz than the generalists and see more success on the platform.
This is positioning. It’s what makes you different 4 and is typically based on your aesthetic, location or specialization (e.g., restaurants, basement renovations, etc.)
Ask yourself: Why would my ideal client choose me over my competitors? Whatever the answer, it must be evident in your brand, services, marketing, and messaging.
Many interior designers we work with are afraid to pigeonhole themselves by getting too specific in their position and marketing, but this is where the magic happens. Tightening up your positioning helps you become known as an expert in your field, build your portfolio faster, and stand out in your marketing.
5. Create a Client-Centric Marketing Strategy
Once you have a goal, identify your target customer and know how you’ll differentiate yourself, it’s time to create a marketing strategy.
At this stage, you may be wondering:
- Where and how should I market my interior design firm?
- Which marketing channels should I use?
- Should I spend more time and money on offline or online channels?
- How do I show up on each channel? What do I say?
A successful marketing strategy is centred on the target customer. When you know the target customer inside and out, the questions above will be easier to answer.
We use an exercise called the customer journey to understand how your potential client goes about looking for and purchasing your type of services. A customer typically goes through three key stages before making a purchase:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Purchase
The customer journey can help you breakdown your marketing strategy and prioritize your marketing efforts.
Factoring it into your marketing will help you create content that ‘meets’ your ideal client at every step of their decision-making process and nudge them forward in your sales pipeline.
Research the Awareness Stage
Let’s say your ideal customer just bought a house. When they’re in the Awareness stage of hiring an interior designer, they:
- They’re looking for ideas and inspiration about what they’d like to change to make it their own. But they aren’t actively looking for or talking to designers yet.
- Are scrolling Pinterest, taking aspirational walks or drives around the neighbourhood to get inspiration from their neighbours, following designers (perhaps like yourself!) and DYI-ers on social media, and bookmarking articles from design websites like Domino or Architectural Digest.
This is the information-gathering stage. Your ideal client is dreaming, getting inspired, and figuring out what they like.
To market to Awareness stage customers: Create visual social media posts to get them inspired.
Research the Consideration Stage
After is the Consideration stage. This is when your ideal client starts thinking more seriously about taking action on their design plans and looking into their options.
They’re likely asking themself questions like:
- Should I try to tackle this myself? Or is it better to hire a professional?
- What will it cost me if I do it myself versus hiring out?
- How much time is this going to take?
- When should I take on a project like this?
They are going to Google, forums, podcasts and other sources to find answers to specific questions about the renovation process.
To market to Consideration stage customers: Publish informative blog posts and case studies that answer these questions.
Research the Purchasing Stage
The Purchasing stage is the last step in the journey, where potential clients eventually commit to a solution (which could be you!).
They will likely ask their friends and family for recommendations and referrals, check out Google or Instagram, or perhaps look at directory websites like Houzz.
At this point, they’re likely thinking about:
- Value — Can I afford this service? Will I get a return on my investment?
- Scheduling — Does the project timeline align with my own needs?
- Aesthetic — Do I like the designer’s style?
- Trust — Do I feel confident that the designer will deliver on my vision?
To market to Purchasing stage customers: Use your service, portfolio, and contact pages to answer questions and build trust.
6. Turn the Marketing Strategy Into a Plan
Interior designers often start with the Awareness stage because it’s the first step of the customer journey. However, focusing on the Considering and Purchasing stage clients first is much more effective since these people are already looking for designers and are most primed to buy.
Then, you can work backward to create an action plan for your marketing.
We are huge proponents of marketing strategically, and not just for the sake of it. But how much time (and, let’s be honest, money) does it take to execute an interior design marketing strategy, and what kind of results can you expect?
We’ll break it down for you.
Plan Timelines & Milestones
Changing up your strategy too soon (say, after three months) won’t give you enough time to see whether your actions are working. On the other hand, investing in a strategy for too long without yielding results (say, more than 12 months), isn’t smart either, as it could lead to wasted time, finances, and other resources. Six months is the sweet spot for having enough tangible data to assess how your strategy is performing.
Marketing Budget
To maximize your strategy, we recommend investing $2,500/month in paid marketing (e.g., professional marketing services, ads, etc.) and 10-15 hours/month in organic marketing (e.g., writing blog posts, pitching to the press, etc.).
When we refer to organic marketing here, we’re not talking about creating a website and hoping people stumble across it in their Google searches or relying on referrals. We’re talking about really putting yourself out there and actively creating content. Like any strategy, you get out what you put into it. Low effort will lead to lacklustre results.
Typical Results of an Action Plan
After six months, you should see an increase in the quantity and quality of your online leads. However, you might not necessarily see a huge growth in sales at this point. The intention here is to prove that your website and marketing can get leads for you and without you (i.e., without having to constantly network or cold pitch your services).
Even if the leads you’re bringing in within this timeframe aren’t your perfect fit client, increasing traffic, visibility, leads, and inquiries will give you more data to inform decisions moving forward and eventually boost your bottom line.
How Marketing Impacts Sales
Marketing should support your sales process — but it doesn’t replace it. The more your services cost, the longer and more complicated the sales process (and vice versa). That’s why tracking the micro-sales goals before the big sale is so important. If your marketing efforts lead to more discovery calls or paid consultations—these are wins. Now, you have more opportunities to build trust and nurture a lead into a client you wouldn’t have otherwise.
7. Execute It Yourself or Hire An Agency
DIY-ing your marketing strategy will typically take longer than outsourcing, which would be a significant financial investment.
However, another factor to consider is the time it would take to reach your goals. At Findable Digital Marketing, we aim to significantly increase our clients’ search result rankings in a three-kilometre radius in just 21 days and triple sales inquiries within 12 to 18 months.
If the best next step for you and your interior design business is to tackle your marketing strategy on your own, check out our other blog posts or subscribe to our monthly newsletter to get our top tips.
But if you’d rather leave the marketing strategy work to the experts and focus more of your efforts on your zone of genius (designing beautiful, functional spaces), we’d be happy to help you. Book a call with us.
As an agency specializing in digital marketing for interior designers, we create custom step-by-step plans for our clients. We know how to set up a solid marketing foundation and develop effective strategies that help them see results faster — because we’ve done it repeatedly for designers like yourself. If you’re DIYing your marketing efforts, especially if this is your first go, achieving this goal may take months or longer.
8. Nurture Your Interior Design Marketing Strategy
The most successful marketing strategies need nurturing. As time goes on and you execute your plan, stop to reflect and analyze the data.
Not only will you find ways to make the process more efficient and enjoyable for you, but using data and feedback will give you the direction you need to improve the strategy and see greater returns from it.
We suggest doing a formal retrospective every quarter.
