Content Marketing for Interior Designers: A Complete Guide

You’ve found your passion, and that’s amazing! Creating beautiful spaces for your clients is a rewarding career to have. While many interior design clients think it’s all fun and games as you choose color palettes and pick out décor, you know there’s a significant amount of work that goes into what you do. This work can be demanding and take up the majority of your time and attention. However, you are a business owner, and you need to also think about developing your business, such as marketing and lead generation. This guide on interior design content marketing ideas will help you utilize your already great interior design content into effective marketing.

It’s time you take your business online.

When developing your content marketing strategy, focus on the purpose of your strategy. The goal of producing and sharing content is to attract new clients. This means knowing your audience so that you can create great content that speaks directly to potential clients and convince them that hiring you is the smart decision.

Before you dive headfirst into developing your content ideas for your interior design business, you need to have a solid understanding of what you are actually doing and why you are doing it. Social media marketing is about more than just gaining followers. You can use your content creation to increase brand awareness or conversions. The piece of content you produce will be different for each of these or other goals.

Who do you want to view and interact with your content? You don’t want to blindly produce content without knowing the intended audience. This is called developing your target audience. I know what you will say; your target audience is potential customers. Well, that’s obvious but doesn’t really answer the question. The second answer I hear is, well, anyone can be my customer, so my target audience is everyone! Well, no. You should have a persona that represents your ideal client. Keep this profile in mind during your content creation.

Take a look at your past customers and focus on their demographics and details. Patterns will start to arise. Try to define who the client is by outlining different areas of their personality and life. Include education level, annual income, home size, home value, family size, lifestyle, and anything else that can help you create a persona. These patterns will help you develop a persona of your typical client. This person is your target audience because they are most likely to hire you as an interior designer.

This should be an easy question to answer. You are helping home and business owners create beautiful spaces. The problem you solve is helping people design a room by guiding them through the decision-making process of choosing a color palette, theme, style, furniture, and décor. However, this only addresses half of the equation. Many people don’t realize they need your design services. A solid content strategy addresses people who know they need you and those who don’t.

Because these are two very different mindsets, try to create content that speaks directly to each. You may need different content formats. For example, you could create video content that teaches people how to restore or repurpose old furniture. Pair the how-to video with written content that you can include in your interior design blog. This lets you also focus on search engine optimization (SEO) so that search engines feature your website higher up on search engine results.

The type of content you will produce will depend on where you plan to publish your content. Where you publish your content will also depend on your target audience. For example, YouTube and podcasts are both growing in popularity. However, one of these mediums works better for your interior design business than the other. When you have a project, you can take a video tour of the room or rooms before and after. This gives people a visual of the work you do and what you can do with a space. A video tour can give them as close to an in-person tour as possible. Because podcasts are audio-based, they don’t work as well for showcasing your work. Now, keep in mind that this doesn’t mean podcasts are useless for your interior design business. You could create podcasts that address questions and common struggles that people have when designing their own homes. You can then pair the podcast with a blog post. Direct people to your post from the podcast to help drive traffic to your website.

Your budget will dictate how you produce content and what content you can produce. A limited budget can mean you need to do most of the work yourself. However, this does take time away from being an interior designer and running your business. Hiring freelancers and independent contractors can help you make the most of a limited budget. There are freelancers that specialize in specific areas of digital marketing. You could work with one person to manage your social media platforms and another to manage your email marketing. If you have a slightly larger budget, you can hire a full-time employee or an outside marketing agency to manage all of your marketing channels. Don’t feel as though you have to spend a lot of money to have professional-looking content. You can take high-quality pictures and videos with your iPhone.

Having many grand ideas for producing content and growing your social media following is great. However, this doesn’t address the nitty-gritty of actually producing and managing the content. You need to establish who is going to create what, when, and where the content will be created, and when it will go live. If you have a small business or work on your own, these questions can be simple to answer. You will do it all from your design home base.

Enough delay; let’s get into the steps of creating your interior design content plan. These seven simple steps will help you develop a solid plan that you can put into action for your interior design business.

Start with the basics; what is the goal of your content marketing plan? To get more business, right? But that’s too vague. Your goal is to attract more leads that you can convert into clients for your interior design business. Establishing your goal will help you make the right decisions through the rest of the content plan creation process.

The next step is to do your research. Develop a buyer persona where you personify your target audience. If you have an established business, this can be relatively easy. Look at the demographics of your previous clients and use this as a framework for building out your target audience. If you are a new business, this can be slightly more challenging. You will need to decide on a target group of people that you think will benefit from your services and hire your interior design firm.

Additionally, if your business is established, this is also an opportunity to expand. You may already have your target audience established, but that doesn’t mean you can’t research opportunities for growth. Create a second audience persona that represents an alternative target audience.

If you have never produced any content or have a social media account for your design business, you are seriously behind the times and are doing your business a disservice. However, it also means you can skip this step. If you have ever created a social media account, written a single blog post, or even taken pictures of your work, then you have created content. Now is the time to take an audit of these efforts.

Look for strategies and efforts that worked and didn’t work. Take note of content that generated a higher rate of sharing or engagement. Look at past pictures and videos that you have taken during the course of your work. At the end of this audit, you should have a better idea of what resonates with your audience.

You probably already have a project management system for your interior design business. You know how useful it is to help you stay organized. You need to do the same thing for your marketing and content production. You don’t need to buy fancy software, but you can. All you really need is to create a calendar where you make notes about what type of posts you will publish and where they will be published. This lets you plan a series of posts and cross-promote your content.

It isn’t until step six that you start the actual content production phase. In this step, you will brainstorm ideas for content. There are several ways you can do this. For a solid content plan, try to have a variety of topics to help people move through the marketing funnel. For example, you could have content that speaks to people who are brand new to the idea of hiring an interior designer. Then have content that speaks to someone who knows they want to hire an interior designer but isn’t sure which one. Then you should have content that speaks to someone who knows they want to hire you but hasn’t taken action to hire you yet. Finally, you should have content that speaks to someone who hired you and are now hopefully an ongoing repeat customer.

Several helpful online tools help you generate topics. You can then organize your ideas into the funnel categories.

With the Feedly RSS feed, you can track trending topics in real-time. Just tell the software what you want to see and the topics you are interested in. Then watch your feed get populated with relevant topics. You can then use this inspiration for your content production. This helps you create content that will be relevant to currently trending topics. This makes your content timely.

This website is excellent for figuring out what content is popular. While there are a number of social media tools, there is a social media one that is particularly useful. You can use the tool to see what content resonates well on social media. You can use this to see what content is performing well and what content is floundering. If you find that a particular topic of content type performs well, you know to produce more of that topic or style.

Do you remember playing Mad Libs in school? Well, this tool is a bit like that. It will show you common headlines that have blanks in them. Then you fill in the blanks with the relevant terms to your interior design business. This is a brainstorming method that helps give you ideas by triggering your creative flow.

There are 3 billion Google searches every day. These are people looking for answers. This website helps you identify what people are looking for by harnessing the autocomplete data. This is a goldmine of information because it’s what people are actively looking for. You can then create content that speaks directly to what people search for.

The final step of your strategy is to publish and manage your content. It isn’t enough to simply post your content. You need to promote it and share it. This helps generate interest and engagement. The more you get other people to share it, the more people it gets in front of. Once posted and promoted, you can’t just forget about your content. You need to do ongoing management. This could involve revamping and updating old content. It could also mean repurposing content to give it a fresh take.

There are several types of content that you can produce for your interior design business. The easiest are pictures and videos. However, these aren’t your only options. They also don’t address what Google uses to help you rank. You need content with words. Check out some of your other content type options:

Consistency is more important than volume. It’s better to produce fewer content pieces and have them be high quality than produce a ton of content and have it only be mediocre. Choose a posting schedule that works for you. It’s better to start slow and ramp up, then come out of the gate hot and fizzle out. Try posting once a month. Then you can build up to twice a month and then once a week.

Are you ready to start putting these content marketing ideas for interior designs to work for your business? I can help. As a freelance content writer, I can consistently provide you with quality content that fits your posting schedule. Unlike other freelance writers, I have an established reputation in the interior design industry, with quotes published by major publications worldwide.