Important Marketing Tools for Interior Designers

Logo & Branding Design
A strong design presence tends to help a company establish themselves as a leader, competitor and helps your visitors take your brand more seriously if you have a sophisticate logo and overall branding concept. In addition, you need a clear marketing slogan and explanation of what your business offers. A confusing brand strategy while drive customers away, but a clear and concise marketing strategy can help grow your business quicker. This would include a logo design, font concepts, color concepts, business card design, and marketing slogan concepts which then can be used consistently on all of your marketing material. 
 

Website Design
In 2018, websites are the cornerstone to any business's marketing strategy. Your website needs to be flexible, easy to update, and to help keep your long-term web development costs down. After working with over 600 business in the last 8 years, I strongly believe that Squarespace is the best website platform for most small and medium-sized businesses. The only exception would be if you are an ecommerce business driving over $100,000 in revenue per year directly from your website. For everyone else, Squarespace allows my clients to easily blog on their own, and make simple text and image updates within minutes. For more substantial changes you to your website, Squarespace development costs are dramatically lower than other popular platforms like WordPress & Shopify. I am passionately opinionated about informing you on which website platform is the best for small businesses, because I want to see your online business succeed. 
 

Email Marketing
Emails are engaged with much more frequently than social media. People who sign up for an email list are more likely to be buyers, and are more likely to stick with your brand for several months after signing up. All businesses need, at some point, to develop a strong email marketing campaign. At the very least, when you get your website live, you should collect email addresses - even if you aren't ready to start sending out regular email newsletters. This way, when you finally have time to take that next step, you'll have lots of email address you can send your first email blasts to. The best way to capture email addresses through your website are when you offer something free, valuable and unique on your website. You want to encourage someone to enter their email address to get access to free content, rather than simply saying "Sign up for our newsletter" or "Get 10% off your first order." Most people that visit a website are "on the fence" when they first are looking for products and services. So offering some sort of free download or other free content in exchange for their email address helps give you a competitive edge over other firms that don't have a clear on-boarding strategy. I've seen this work extremely well for business-to-business websites over and over again.
 

SEO & Google Search
While most business owners have heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the concept is really not as complex as people make it out to be. These days, Google Search algorithms tend to favor websites that regularly provide valuable, helpful, informative, and honest content. Most web developers are going to make this process sound highly complex and intimidating. But the truth is, if you create a weekly blog that continually contains valuable information that would greatly improve other peoples' lives, then there isn't much more you need to do in order to have successful SEO on your website. There are a few tips and tricks, but these days, valuable content is far more important than using "special website techniques" to get good traffic to your website. While SEO tends to be best for business to business that offer higher-end services or products, Social Media tends to work better for lower-end products that are business to consumer. For instance, a high-end technology consultant would do better with SEO marketing, while a local flower delivery service offering $49 bouquets would be better suited to focus on Social Media marketing.
 

Ongoing Marketing
Once each of the 4 main elements to your online marketing is established, the final step is maintain, grow and dominate your market online on a monthly basis. For my clients, I like to find the online marketing strategies that will likely work best for your business model. But in order for your website to be useful for your business, you must continue to maintain and grow all the different ways to bring new traffic to your website. This might include regular blog posts, email newsletters, more SEO integration, setting up a Yelp & Google Business page, asking previous customers to leave reviews on Yelp & Google Business, setting up Social Media accounts and doing regular posts, starting a Google Adwords or Facebook Ad campaign, or driving people to your website with business cards, flyers or brochures at your local office. There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, but you only want to select a few of them at first to ensure that your marketing strategy is paying off and gaining you new customers and clients. 

I encourage all of my clients to take this process one step at a time. First, by creating a logo & branding strategy, next is to build out an initial version of the website. Afterwards, if email marketing makes sense for your business, that will come next. And finally, SEO works great for most business-to-business websites. If not, you should continue to build and grow your online marketing strategy to reach more new customers each month. 

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Should Interior Designers Have A Blog?

For most of my clients, blogging is hard, boring or unimportant.  But blogging can be one of the most effective tools to build your brand online. And it doesn't need to take much of your time. 

In fact, all you really need on your website is a simple blog, and about 5 or 10 minutes per week to write a single blog post. You don't have to publish it right away, and you can let it sit on your blog website as a "Draft" until you've refined it a few times. 


Here's why blogging is important for your business.

1. When a visitor views your website for the first time, they are more likely to see you as trustworthy if you have an interesting, engaging, fun or helpful business blog. A blog can quickly show you are actively involved in your field of expertise, especially if you are regularly writing every week or so.

2. Over time, you can build a lot of natural SEO value that Google will pick up. Even after just a few months of blogging, many of my clients see thousands of extra views per month simply from Google Searches that end up leading to their website through regular blogging. When you write about lots of different, specific topics related to your precise industry, it isn't too hard to show up high within hundreds of different keyword searches. Specific, niche markets have a lot of opportunity to be found on Google.

3. It's an important way to capture email addresses to build an email list. Over time, you'll have a much larger potential customer or client base because they've been at least somewhat engaged in the content you've provided. Companies with a blog that provide regular, valuable information are much more likely to see visitors sign up with their email through a website's "Call To Action."


Here's how to blog effectively.

1. Short blogs are okay. Even one or two paragraphs is plenty. Most people wont read the whole thing anyways. They'll simply skim. Over time, if your blogs get better and better, you'll more likely have a decent-sized group of people who are willing to read longer blog posts because you've slowly provided lots of small pieces of information over time. 

2. Your blogs should come from a place that you are passionate about. Blogs don't need to be boring. And they should not feel like a chore. Even if every blog post is not related directly to the products or services you offer, your blog posts should contain topics that excite you enough that you feel motivate to write about and share them with other people. 

3. Blog posts should provide valuable, helpful and important information. Most people think of blogs as places where weird people express their bizarre or obnoxious opinions. But it can also be a place where other peoples' lives are improved, because you are spending time to share valuable information that you've learned from your own life experiences. And people all over the world are truly hurting because of lack of proper educational content, and lacking the proper tools to live life well. Your blog has great potential to actually make the world a better place by writing about things you deeply believe are helpful to others. 

4. Get in the habit of writing & practice regularly. No blog post is perfect, no blog needs to be perfect, and writing over time is simply a skill you'll always get better at. But don't be afraid that your writing won't ever be turned into a published book or novel. What's great about publishing on the internet is that you can always go back and make edits later. So get something up, publish it, and come back later and edit the blog post to improve it over time. Most likely, very few people will read the first posts anyways. But at the least, you can use the internet as an opportunity to learn how to write and get your writing in front of new eyes. 

Build an online marketing presence that helps grow your business.