Juggling your marketing activity and interior design projects is no walk in the park. You want to grow your business, but carving out time to keep your social media channels alive while engaging clients means working longer hours and spending less time on what you're truly passionate about: designing beautiful homes!
Brand transformation is only possible with a clearly defined growth strategy, producing engaging content, and streamlining your processes to improve your services. But, like many interior designers - you might lack clarity with what to post or how to build strategies that make marketing easier and more effective.
If you're nodding your head and thinking, "yes, that's me!" then we're so glad you're here because we know this blog will truly help you. If you want to learn how to win more of your dream clients, create awesome content, and design time-saving processes that take the tediousness away from marketing, it's all here for you. Let's go!
First, let's talk about your growth strategy. This is where you'll think strategically about what you want your brand transformation to look like and how you will achieve it.
We believe there are three steps to every growth strategy.
This phase is all about understanding your superpowers and how to leverage them to attract your dream clients. What do you do that others cannot?
Designing assets is key to telling your brand's unique story and connecting with your ideal clients. These assets include everything from your website and logo to your social media channels and email newsletters.
Once your brand positioning and assets are aligned, you can then build and improve your marketing processes as your business grows (more on this later).
Think about what growth you'd like to achieve and within what timeframes. This will help you get real about how much time and money you'll need to invest.
For example, if you want significant revenue increases, you'll need to work smarter to land higher-end clients and larger projects. Or maybe you're generally happy with where you're at and want to maintain visibility; in this case, your investment will be smaller.
Now, look at your leading and lagging indicators. Your leading indicators are looking ahead at what you need to do to achieve the growth you're after. This could be making more sales calls to potential interior design clients or investing in more marketing campaigns.
Lagging indicators are looking backward at your success. Typically this is your revenue and growth so far. Understanding these performance indicators will help form the foundation of your growth strategy.
Now that you've established your goals and decided what's realistically needed to reach them, it's time to build trust with your audience with highly valuable interior design content. Knowing what to post and how to connect with your prospects is half the battle, creating systems for that content is the other half.
We've put together guides for creating better content processes and have some practical frameworks for interior design content your prospects will love to get you started.
There's a wealth of tools out there to make creating and posting content so much quicker. When you automate a large chunk of your workload, you'll have more time to focus on building your business, which is what we all want! Here are our top tips for optimizing your content process:
Consider the fact your prospects are all at different stages of the sales funnel, which are: awareness (top), consideration (middle), and action (bottom). By creating content that speaks to each audience segment, you're helping move them towards the stage where they finally take action with you. Let's break down what type of content prospects are looking for in each stage of the funnel:
Prospects in this stage are looking for a solution to their interior design problems and seeking information to help them make a decision. For this stage, you want content that builds awareness about your brand and what services you offer.
Here, your prospects are evaluating your services and comparing you with competitors. This is where you'll teach your target clients how to come to a decision and choose the right business for them.
Your prospects are now in the final stages of their decision-making process. This is your opportunity to nail down exactly why you're the best option for them and highlight your unique selling points.
The best content tells a story. What stories do you think your target audience will connect with? What problems have you solved in the past that they're looking for solutions for? Build trust with them by showcasing who you are and how you can help them. You can use these content ideas across all your marketing assets, including blog posts, email newsletters, website copy, webinars and podcasts.
For social media posts, in particular, here are our top tips for interior design businesses:
It's no secret that well-written interior design case studies that tell the story of an incredible before and after transformation build a ton of trust and are a great tool in your marketing kit. They help your audience visualize you solving their problems through the lens of similar projects completed. So to help you create a winning case study, we've developed an easy-to-follow framework:
The best way to transform your brand into the one you've always dreamed of is by investing in time-saving processes that free up more hours for improving your services and adding value.
Investing in software and systems that speed up or automate repetitive tasks are almost always going to save you time and money in the long run.
Every interior design business should have these fundamental processes in place to get tasks done faster, push your brand transformation forward, and streamline your business:
Optimize your marketing and sales process with tools specifically designed to turn cold leads into long-term clients faster than you can manually. Long gone are the days of cold calls and typing out email after email. Now you've got a world of digital data and software to take advantage of to make marketing that much easier, like:
Without business software, you might end up wasting time sifting through documents for information, and things are bound to fall through the cracks. Having these essential business streamlining tools in your arsenal will ensure you're not working harder than you need to:
By using templates, you can spend less time writing repetitive emails from scratch and more time focusing on high-level tasks. Keep these templates in organized folders so you and your team can easily copy and paste them as needed. Here are some examples:
There's nothing more cost-effective and stress-relieving than automations that work away in the background while you get on with more pressing issues. There are several automations you can implement to help streamline your business. Some examples are:
Integrations are when you connect different software or tools together. It's like they're speaking to each other to perform certain actions. For example, this could be connecting your CRM with your marketing software to direct specific ads to particular audience segments.
Every business changes as you grow, and so too should your processes. This could be as simple as updating your calendar depending on your availability or creating a new email automation to reflect your new sales process.
If a process is outdated, you'll end up reverting to the manual way of doing something, and you're back to square one. Performing regular check-ins helps you get ahead of any changes you need to make to keep everything in working order.
We hope you've found our guide to building momentum, streamlining, and growing your business helpful and have plenty of content inspo get you started! If you're an interior design professional who needs help building processes to streamline your marketing activity and free up more time, you're in the right place.
We help interior design professionals transform their brands to attract dream clients, sell projects for more, stay current online, and get their time back with automated systems. Book a free 15-minute consultation and discover how your newly found clarity can help you attract more high-quality clients.