A Visual Marketing Plan for Interior Design Firms

Interior Design Marketing Plan

Creating an Interior Design Marketing Plan

Managing an interior design firm requires creative talent, a way with people, diverse technical skills, analytical capacity, and an understanding of core architectural concepts. Clients are fickle, with a variety of different tastes and often need to be educated about the value of your service.

When seeking the best projects and highest profit margins, interior design firms must come up with a marketing plan that works hand in hand with your business plan. Permission-based inbound marketing enables you to reach targeted prospects by providing them with pictures and written content that educates and keeps your business “top of mind.” This business philosophy has propelled a marketing strategy known as inbound or content marketing. The process allows you to showcase and demonstrate your interior designing skills to the public and in turn, generate leads, sales revenue, and profits.

A marketing plan should be set up as a calendar that outlines the monthly and weekly steps to being taken to showcasing how you help clients. The best interior design businesses use a clearly outlined marketing plan can post visual marketing content on a frequent and regular basis. It should be designed to build a record that explains the culture of your business by showing your sense of style to a clientele who values your work. It is, therefore, vital for you to be clear and post in categories the services you offer to the client personas that you seek. It's important to keep in mind that you are promoting your reputation as an interior designer.

Additional Information On Marketing An Interior Design Business

Factors to consider in your marketing plan

For your marketing plan and your business to be successful, there are factors that you have to examine that go beyond tactics. These include but are not limited to:

Client Personas

The visual marketing strategy of your interior design firm should capture and identify the type of clients you want. Are you seeking families with a starter home and kids, empty nesters who have downsized their home or small businesses trying to improve the look of a brick and mortar location? Who are the decision makers of these potential interior design clients? Do they have a high net worth? What are the design styles that appeal to them? Creating a document that has a stock photo portrait, a made up name and answers to these questions will help you create marketing deliverables that appeal to your ideal client.

Services

Your visual marketing plan should define the services you offer and explain why your firm is unique. Whether to provide generalized or specialized skills is a question of the skills you have and which clients seek.

Partners

Incorporating partners such as general contractors, architects, and home décor retailers will enable you to provide a wider range of services and opens a new channel for referrals. Developing these relationships allows you to benefit from associating your firm with respected brands and the expertise of the others.

Pricing

For a marketing plan to be successful it must address the price ratio and leave enough margin for profits while keeping an eye on your competition. Giving clients accurate estimates and paying close attention to potential “scope creep” is imperative. We recommend writing a guide that outlines typical pricing scenarios for three versions of a scope of work. Include images of spaces you've created and given a price range. Be sure to include close up pictures of items like countertop materials, cabinet finishes, and flooring. This visual approach to pricing shows the client what to expect if they can afford to spend more.

Promotion of valuable content

Marketing strategies and promotions go hand in hand. Promotions are one way that you’re able to build and maintain contact with both targeted and prospective interior design customers. More so, through promotions, your clientele can judge the quality of your abilities. Consider offering a guide to kitchen and bath design on a website landing page that highlights the unique sense of style you bring to a project and how you attain this look for clients.

Relationships

It's essential to remember when drafting your marketing plan that it should help build strong relationships and encourage conversations between you and your customers. Automated marketing programs like Drip.co and MailChimp allow you to remain top-of-mind with prospective clients. Automated marketing is a set of emails that are pre-scheduled to go out in a sequence with a period between each. Write these emails as a narrative that helps prospects move toward scheduling a meeting.

Interior Design Visual Marketing

Steps to a comprehensive visual marketing plan

Your firm's marketing plan should consider your brand. Your brand is mostly influenced by how uniquely you can showcase your services. Therefore, your interior design business marketing plan should evaluate on the:

Color Schemes - Your color combination should attract customers rather than chase them away. Stick with your brand colors whenever possible.

Themes- It is vital that your plan elaborates themes you’ve chosen for client work. Speak using metaphors to convey the themes. Offer branded guide or whitepaper downloads on your website as incentives for customer engagement. Be certain to spend the time to design a landing page and include an image of the cover of your guide as a visual element. Click here to download our Squarespace Landing Page guide to see an example.

Products Display - Your marketing plan should account for social sharing and blog links that showcase products you sell Create a Canva design to enhance visual aspects of the items you sell within the designed spaces you create. Write content that explains the look and feel of your work but doesn’t give away the whole story. If you don't sell products like, decor objects, rugs, and small easy to ship items on your website, you should. Commerce is an excellent way of increasing the number of pages on your site and will act as a lead source for your services.

Fresh Perspective - Like your products and services, your marketing plan needs to keep or bring a new perspective helping attract and retain customers at the same time. Use branded images within blog articles that emphasize your uniqueness in a story format.

Canva is for Designing Branded Content

Canva is a web-based design tool that has built-in social media formatting allowing you to craft social posts that match the size requirements of Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin. Canva has a drag and drop builder with easy-to-use features that allow the creation of a variety of visually engaging content. The paid version of the tool allows you to upload brand identity assets like your font set, brand colors, and logo.

Social Media Posting Schedule

We recommend using Buffer, MeetEdgar or MissingLettr for posting images of your work as well as blog articles. These social media scheduling tools allow you to select pages from your website and post them with an image in a calendar format. Posting content should be done with intent and be seen as a narrative that includes many posts that tell the story of your firm.

These visual marketing concepts enable you to get some initial ideas down on paper. The tactical delivery of promoting your services can be fun and generate a great return if executed with goals and a narrative in mind. If you need guidance setting up a visual marketing plan, you can always schedule a time to speak with me by clicking on my calendar.

About Means-of-Production and Michael Conway

Means-of-Production builds writes blogs, designs Squarespace websites, and builds marketing campaigns. We provide these services to architects, interior designers, design-build firms, landscape designers and residential developers. Interested in learning more? Click here to view my calendar and schedule a call.

Michael ConwayMeans-of-ProductionComment