Marketing is Easy Once You Understand There Are Three Essential Stages to Marketing Your Interior Design Business
The 3 Essential Marketing Stages
Marketing your interior design business can be a breeze if you understand and apply these three essential stages. Most businesses skip straight to execution and wonder why they fall short of their goals.
This blog post will uncover why this happens and how you can sidestep this common mistake.
Stage 1: The Foundations
Marketing falls into three different stages. The first stage focuses on your marketing foundations, which includes your value proposition, your buyer personas and your target audience and purposeful positioning of your interior design business.
I know a value proposition can sound intimidating if it's something that you're not used to talking about but it's not that scary. It's the sentence you use to describe or introduce your business. It should include what you're providing in terms of your services and who they’re for (i.e. your target audience). The important part of your value proposition is your differentiated value. That's your sizzle, the special part that makes you and your business stand out amongst the competition.
This is where you need to be leaning into your strengths and really defining what your ideal clients look like. This gives you control of reaching your ideal clients and building your dream business.
Stage 2: Marketing Strategies
The next stage is your marketing strategy or marketing strategies. This is all about the what and the why. Now that you've got your foundations in place, you're clear about the business you're building, the types of clients that you want to attract and also the value that you're providing them, your marketing strategies are all about how you're going to reach your audience.
This is the part where you are connecting the dots between the value you’re providing and the people who will care most about this value.
When it comes to thinking about your buyer persona(s), carry out some research. You can use Google Search, ChatGPT and other free tools available to you. ChatGPT is a great research tool as it’s like Google Search on steroids. You can type in questions to find out where your specific buyer persona hangs out online, i.e. which channels are they most present/active on, what types of phrases they are searching for online (keywords).
Regarding your marketing channels, you’ll want to pick multiple channels to reach your audience on. As a small business, two to three channels is great to aim for. If you can handle more, great, do more. If you’re just getting started, focus on one channel initially for the first month and then add a second channel from the second month onwards and so on.
It's better to choose a few channels and do them well (i.e. show up consistently week after week and share useful content) than spread yourself too thin across lots of channels and try to be everywhere and then not be consistent. If you’re posting sporadically the channel algorithms won’t favour you and you’re wasting your time. This is why many of you aren’t seeing the results you expect from your social channels. Planning and scheduling your content in advance will be a gamechanger for your social presences. Just remember to log in regularly and engage with your audience and respond to comments and DMs etc. Again, the platform algorithms will favour you for being responsive and engaging with your audience.
I'd recommend a website being one of your channels as you’ll want to use that as your online “shop window” for your business. This can be really simple to start. Your website is the key to filtering potential clients so you reduce the number of timewasters and increase the number of ideal fit clients who enquire with you. Your website can also help you control your clients' experience. Not only can you create a smooth, excellent client experience for every potential client who visits your website, you can communicate the information you need to manage their expectations and set boundaries and so on, helping you reduce the number of issues later on in the client process.
Adding this information to your website at natural points in the client’s journey is going to give you hours/ days/ maybe even weeks back each year. How? By reflecting your ideal clients on your website, through your messaging, the images and your client examples, you’ll eliminate enquiries from poor-fit clients. You know who I'm talking about. The ones you spend ages working on a proposal for them, multiple conversations with them back and forth, all for them to ghost you and disappear off the face of the Earth because it wasn't the right fit for either of you.
Make sure your website reflects your ideal clients through your images you use, through your messaging and the text you use, through the projects that you're showcasing on your website, through your values as well (what's important to you). Let your potential clients evaluate whether you're for them before they even come to you. I know that sounds scary especially if you're hearing crickets right now and you think, “I just want to get lots of people enquiring and I need work, I need people to work with” but this is absolutely the right way to do it because if you're clear about your differentiated value, you're clear about your purpose and your audience who you're targeting, then suddenly the third stage of your marketing becomes much easier. By being for everyone you're making your life (and your potential buyers' lives) more difficult!
Now you’ve got your marketing strategy defined, you’ve picked out your channels you want to focus on, whether it's Instagram or your website or perhaps it’s LinkedIn if you're targeting businesses, try to select the channels where your audience are most active but also the channels that suit you and your business.
For example, if you're comfortable on video maybe you focus on YouTube or if you're more of a writer perhaps you focus on something like LinkedIn or Substack or blogs on your website. Choose channels that play to your strengths as well as the channels your buyer personas are most present on.
The other thing to consider in the second stage is your content strategy.
Once you’ve decided on your overall marketing strategy, you’ll then define your content strategy. This is where you define the messages you want to share with your audience, how often and when etc. It’s going to be slightly different depending on the channels that you choose. For example if you're focused on LinkedIn it's more likely to be focused on written posts and articles or if you decide to focus on Instagram it will probably focus more on reels and videos and that type of content. If it’s YouTube, it’s going to be more video focused.
When creating your content strategy and plan, this is where you’re mapping your messages that will resonate with your buyer personas. Remember the first stage I mentioned, where you defined your foundations, your buyer personas and the core messages for each persona? You're using those messages to create your content so that it speaks directly to your buyer personas and engages them.
So now you can see how suddenly the middle marketing strategy stage is much easier because you've done the work up front in the first stage of your marketing i.e. you’ve defined your value proposition and detailed buyer personas making it clear what value you provide and who for.
Stage 3: Execution
The third stage is the execution of your marketing strategy. This is all about the how. It’s the breakdown of tasks you need to complete including posting on your social media channels and all of the tactical activities.
This is where 95% of businesses go wrong.
They jump straight to the third stage of execution and “doing” without doing the groundwork beforehand.
Marketing tools today are so accessible and easy to use, which is fab, except people try to get straight into using them without a strategy or plan.
By spending just a little bit of time back at the first stage, that's where it all comes together. Suddenly your marketing becomes much easier and you will start to see the results you are aiming for.
This is because when you are executing your strategy, you are really clear on the content you need to create and who you are creating it for because you did the groundwork at stage one. You’re clear on the value that you're providing your audience, the messages that they need to hear, you're clear on what's important to them, what the triggers are that prompt them to engage with a service like what you're offering.
Suddenly your marketing feels so much easier, maybe even enjoyable, and it's going to save you a lot of time and effort and stress.
It will be easier to decide which channels you should be on. Selecting channels can be difficult as there are always updates to the platform algorithms, they all go through different states of play, new platforms try to break through and so on.
However, the large platforms have hung around for a long time. That doesn’t mean you want to go all in on one platform and just rely on that for your business because anything can happen, your account could be hacked or an algorithm update means your traffic falls away or so on.
A tip to help safeguard your business from the unknown is use a scheduling tool for your social media and a clear content creation process. If there is an issue, you’ll at least be able to access the content you’d previously created so you can repost it rather than start from scratch.
Conclusion and Next Steps
I hope that's helped remove some of the smoke and mirrors around marketing and marketing strategy and you now feel more confident about marketing your interior design business and how you're going to move forward to achieve your goals.
For your next steps, I'd recommend reviewing your value proposition, make sure it reflects your target audience and your differentiated value (what makes you special). If you need further help with reviewing or creating your strategic marketing foundations, take a look at my course on the topic.
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