Luxury Marketing and Lead Generation For Interior Design Firms
Can Luxury Marketing Help Your Interior Design Firm Find Better Clients?
Mercedes Benz sells a class of automobile, Moet & Chandon "is kept in a pretty cabinet" and Brooks Brothers is "Timeless Style, Always Appropriate". Aspirational brands command top dollar due to positioning and a carefully controlled and promoted market perception. Your interior design firm can benefit from luxury marketing as well.
Producers of decorative products, materials, furniture and appliances for commercial and high-end residential interiors should be used to align your firm with the luxury marketing your suppliers use to promote status. Online marketing has become more visual in the last few years as is evident in the rise of the influence of bloggers, Pinterest, Houzz, Instagram, and Facebook’s Timeline. By featuring the style and functionality of products through the use of keyword rich blogs and posting high-quality photographs on social media sites, you can now target interior design clientele at the moment, they are researching for project ideas. You will also realize additional benefits when homeowners collect images and information on the products and materials you use in your designs. Visual marketing with high quality photography provides opportunities to position your brand and the designs you create as luxurious and well worth the cost. The key is mentioning those high end brands you use in your interior design business.
Luxury Marketing Means Setting Perceptions
Perception is the stock in trade of interior design firms and décor retail companies. The materials, appliances, fixtures and furniture you provide may be the cutting edge of design and crafted from the highest quality materials but if your marketing is not highlighting luxury brands, than you diminish the opinion of your services with a high net worth clientele. Lesser quality products available most everywhere. How many Tom Dixon Lighting knock offs are available online at 1/3rd the cost? It’s important to distinguish your preferred vendors from cheap suppliers.
Knowing Your Clients is Key to Setting a Luxury Marketing Perception
It’s imperative to understand the way in which your target market sources products and it’s important to use tactics that keep your company top-of-mind. Architects and interior designers have rooms full of samples. Competition for client consideration of your services is intense. Use these samples to create design boards to illustrate your skill set in blog articles and as a deeper dive into your process on website portfolios. Sharing these website pages using content marketing techniques enable your company's services and project portfolios to be seen when research is being done online. Prospective clients will research product names when researching in search engines. Ensure you come up in search results by tying the product names to your location when writing page content. Online content is your most important luxury marketing tactic for encouraging website visits. In a recently published whitepaper, the software company HubSpot stated that, “Traditional outbound marketing techniques – including direct mail, print advertising and telemarketing – are becoming less effective. Buyers are not only finding ways to tune these messages out, but more importantly, they now have the capability to evaluate the products and services they need on their own… Given the digital nature of inbound marketing, the marginal cost per customer acquisition is typically close to zero, meaning that as buyers continue to shift how they make purchases, the cost per lead for a given business will continue to decrease.”
The steps taken to entice a high value clientele with luxury marketing are straightforward but require a thoughtful process of engagement that uses the appropriate language and imagery for each target market. The steps include;
Content Production - Publish blogs, websites and landing pages with built-in SEO and social tools.
Social Media - Track leads with a complete timeline-view of their interactions with your company.
Email Marketing - Send personalized, segmented emails based on any information in your contact database.
Marketing Automation - Nurture leads via automated drip email with links to your website and changes in the email content based on visitor actions.
Lead Intelligence - Track interior design leads with a complete timeline-view of their interactions with your company.
Closed-loop Analytics - Automatically track the ROI of all of your marketing efforts, both online and off.
Luxury marketing using content means that keyword rich blog articles, hash tagged social posts and drip marketing campaigns need to be paired with traditional forms of marketing to maximize its effect. Your product showroom or retail establishment and brand identity remain important channels. Open house events that illustrate high-end products (Wolf Sub-Zero, Ann Sacks, Waterworks, Cambria, Sonoma Tile Works etc...) allow your clients to experience your design style sensibility with all of their senses. Online website project portfolios that also mention high-end products and materials as well as highly stylized case studies, how to guides, blog articles, and YouTube videos help brand and position your firm. Lead generation through education and publishing, when done well, will result in your brand being sought out and your sales will increase.
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About Michael Conway
I'm the owner and strategist at Means-of-Production. My firm builds Squarespace websites, Houzz profiles, and content marketing and advertising solutions for architects, interior designers, design-build contractors and landscape design firms. Our all-in-one marketing tactics attract the right clients with exceptional architectural photography and brand messaging that sets you apart from the competition.