5 Marketing Methods for Interior Designers & Architects
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Your website will only work effectively if you can bring people to see it.
But you don't want just anyone to go to your website. You need to target a very, very specific small group of people and speak their language. Identify your customer's problems, and offer a unique solution.
Bringing people to your website only works when you know who your best clients are. Figure out the following based on your previous best-ever clientele base (only consider your absolute best clients, not all of them):
Their average age
Their gender
What cities do they live in?
What problems do they face when it comes to your industry?
Where do they get their information about your industry?
What questions did they ask before they became a client of yours?
Figure this information out first before spending any money driving people to your website.
After working with numerous interior designers, architects & professionals, below are the best ways to quickly get people to see your website, in order of quickest to slowest turn around:
No 1 | Yelp & Google Business
Any business that relies on local customers needs to be on both Yelp and Google Business. These platforms are totally free, and get you visibility in Google Searches almost immediately. Especially if you are one of the only providers in your area offering the service you do, such as a commercial architect or interior designer in a rural area, or if all of the accountants and lawyers in your area are rated poorly or have no reviews at all, you have a very good chance to being seen on these 2 platforms. If you have not already, sign up for these today at biz.yelp.com and business.google.com - do it right now!
No 2 | Direct Email & Mail Marketing
Spam is everywhere. But a very focused, narrow service to a very specific group of people is one of the best ways to bring people to your website. If you offer interior design services specifically for single family homes in a certain nice part of town, you can do direct mail marketing to just a couple hundreds homes, for relatively inexpensive, and direct your postcard specifically to your ideal type of client. The same goes for email marketing. Find who your best customers typically are, and target them with email marketing - directly addressing their unique problems. It won't look like spam because you're actually speaking to the right language to your ideal client.
No 3 | Third Party Organizations
Market directly where your ideal customers spend time, whether online or offline, and advertise at third party organizations which specifically contain your ideal customers. Don't market to just anyone, figure out the demographics of your past best-ever clients. This could be an online forum, an online organization, or an organization which meets in person.
No 4 | Google Ads
This is extremely difficult to master, and I recommend you hire a professional. It's very easy to spend $500 USD in Google Ads and see no results. That's because you need to first perfect your website, then narrow, narrow, narrow your focus down to the most specific keywords and demographics as possible. This is a quick way to jump to the top of the list of Google searches, but be prepared to spend at least $300 per month to effectively gain leads. And make sure your website is optimized first to capture leads.
No 5 | Advanced SEO & Regular Blogging
This is the slowest method of all. That is because Google wants to see credibility and longevity from your website. Your website needs to be up and live for at least 6 months before Google will start to see it as credible. The more traffic you get to your website, the more you blog valuable content, and the higher quality the website functions overall, the higher it will show up in search results. I always recommend to business owners that an Advanced SEO integration and blogging for your website should be the last method on your list, because it is labor intensive and the turn around is slow. I've spent over 2 years blogging regularly to get about 3,000 visitors to my website per month, but it has been a ton of work to get there. It's been worth it, but I had to put in the time.
Again, all the advertising in the world will do nothing if you do not know who your ideal client is. Get very specific. Write it down first. And then start with marketing options No 1, 2 & 3 above before moving on to more expensive and time-consuming methods.