Interior Design Marketing Strategy And Tips

interior design marketing photo

Are you curious to improve or start your interior design marketing online strategy for your design business? But don’t know where to start? Or what to prioritize?

Whether you are a designer, architect, blogger or showroom owner an interior design marketing strategy is vital for digital success. And will guide you through prioritization. This is especially important if you are doing this as a part-time business to your normal day job. Where every minute counts.

See my tips below and you will soon be on the way to help homeowners to create their meaningful and empowering unique design stories.

interior design marketing photos

caroline broman design studio 210

You might be thinking why am I starting to cover business and marketing within interior design and the creative field. My day job is working in marketing focused on organic growth. For long I had a passion to share my knowledge and to help smaller creative business owners within the design field to thrive. This is my way of doing so…


I have here collected steps that I encourage you to look into if you are about to start or revamp your interior design marketing plan.

And I must say, now is the time. This report shows that the interior design market will grow between now and 2023, so it is the right time for you to start your creative and organized journey to make other people know about your design story.

I am happy to help you out with any questions you have in the comment field below.

A strategy is about choices. You can’t be all things to all people.

Interior Design Marketing Top 13 Strategy Tips

Pick a niche within the design field

interior design marketing photos

Having a clear niche will help your audience, grow your expertise within that niche and also benefit you in regards to marketing authority. There are plenty of niches that you can think of. And picking one, all depends on your interest area, your purpose, your mission, etc.

All in all this will answer the question on what your brand will be about and how you can stand out.

I have talked more about it here: How to start a design blog and pick a niche.

Bonus: Important is also to figure out the “Why” you should have a website and blog in the first place. See more on those talks over here.

Set up Your Website and Blog

interior design marketing website

You can easily set up your website and blog using WordPress – see my “How to Start a design blog“. For an easy step by step on how to set up a blog (or website).

Important is before you start your site to plan out the tone of voice and mission of your brand. This will help the overall design and structure of the website and blog.

Remember to be consistent with your design story and mission throughout your website. Use areas such as navigation menu, sidebars, home page sliders to communicate who you are and how you can help. This way visitors will straight away understand this.

Areas that you should incorporate on the website:

  • About Us (Our Story + Mission)
  • Contact Us
  • Projects (Be creative here and also explain the process of the project)
  • Newsletter lead
  • Resources

Whether one should opt for a blog or not, depends on the amount of time you have for it. If you are targetting homeowners or virtual design consultation, then I highly recommend having a blog. Since the blog will help you to reach your audience and potential new leads. Keep in mind that value and purpose will be the two things that you should plan your blog around.

Some ideas: Share your knowledge that the reader can benefit from, solve challenges that they have, and that you can support on. Show behind the scenes images and give a better story around your projects. Connect and interview small business owners that you wish to do business with. And also connect with your community peers.

Set up a professional email

Nothing says amateur so much like an email address not connected to your domain name. This should be one of the first things you sort out before you launch your website.

Having a professional email, especially if you are new in the business will help you to show credibility and trust. So please, gut the @gmail and opt for one like mine @designstudio210.com instead. It is very easy to set up your own using this Google guide here.

Get on Pinterest if you haven’t

interior design marketing pinterest

This is your go-to social media platform both for brand awareness but also for traffic to your website and blog. If the right strategy is used, it is an easy way to get clicks coming in through your website that actually is spot on the audience you are after. 

What you need to do is, sign up and create a business profile. After this you will start creating boards on different topics. Important is to help users and Pinterest search engine to understand what your profile and boards are about. Be descriptive and use search terms, so that people can easily find you.

You also should install a Pin-It plugin on your site that helps people and yourself to share directly images from your site to Pinterest. This is key to drive traffic and clicks to your site.

All in all the best success with Pinterest is to use stunning images, images with overlay text, connect with your peers, and make people and Pinterest search engine find your profile and boards.

Target websites that show images and that have social sharing options

interior design marketing photos

If you are an interior designer wanting to show your portfolio, then target and network with websites that have a focus on images and especially those who have Pinterest sharing set up.

You will not only reach your interior design demographic like this if you stay within the same style and niche, but might also end up with a backlink to your portfolio (SEO ranking signal) and possibly even getting more traffic if people start sharing your picture from this other site.

Create Content that focuses on high quality images

interior design marketing photos

Sorry for making you tired about mentioning images again but truly they are your golden card into gaining traffic to your site – one of the key ways to get your interior design marketing up to speed.

Running your interior design business all comes down to trying to sell that vision, that dream, those concepts…so images truly becomes the “best way” to sell your service.

Make sure you occupy your pages with plenty of descriptive images of good quality and then image optimize them with proper Alt text, file names and also make sure you reduce the size of the images as this could have a negative factor for page speed and UX.

I have seen many cases where interior design websites get most of their organic traffic through image searchers just by following some simple steps – get your keywords in there.

Pick your social Media platforms and have a plan for them

interior design marketing social media platforms

When starting your business it is of course good to first make sure that your brand name is unique to you. Make sure that you sign up to all social media platforms you can think of (for future expansion and so no one claims your brand name).

With that being said, it is okay to only focus on a few that make more sense to your business. Especially being a small interior design business owner it is even more important to be careful about the time one has to execute the marketing strategy.

But before even starting out, familiar yourself with each social platform, to understand how people talk – what is the purpose of each. Not every platform serves the same purpose and you should tailor your communication to meet those.

Here below are some social media platforms that can work well for an interior design business.

– Pinterest: As mentioned above this is your go-to Social Media platform. You will find your audience and peers easily through Pinterest. There are many benefits with Pinterest, it is used as a visual search engine, which means you can with the right tactics target the search terms you want. Also, the platform makes it easy for readers to see an image and then directly click through to your site. Which means you have a good chance of getting constant traffic into your site from Pinterest.

– Instagram: This platform is amazing for brand awareness and connecting with like-minded people. Also a good tool to use from a research perspective and stay up to date with this visual market. With that being said, this platform also requires a lot of work to see results. But, for the design niche it is a must to put in the work here.

– Twitter: This social media platform works great for networking. Network with companies, fellow designers, join discussions, share tips with others. It works brilliantly if you want to connect with other industry people, showrooms, editors of design magazines, bloggers, etc.

– Facebook: In certain local areas a Facebook page works the wonders.  Even though people are restricted from seeing your posts after a while and all that, if using the right strategy one can still even today still have success here.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is mostly forgotten within this visual niche, but if you are writing engaging and usable content within your topic, then LinkedIn is still a good choice to keep updated on. It would especially work if you touch on specific expert topics within design like sustainability, psychology, financial, business, etc.

Connect with peers

interior design marketing photos

This is also a part easily forgotten about, but it is vital that you take the time to connect with your peers and your audience. To some it may come more natural as this might be the reason let’s say an interior blog exists in the first play. But for others it may be more challenging. If the latter is you, schedule time for you to use to interact with people within your niche and also with people that are experts outside and that can support your niche.

Collaboration and interactions are key for growth

Local Search

interior design marketing local seo

If you have a local business then make sure to set yourself up for success in regards to local search. People who searchers for a service close to your area will then be able to find you.

A guide on how to do this can be followed here.

Understand how your site is performing from an SEO perspective

interior design marketing photos

Understanding SEO can benefit your sites organic traffic and then overall traffic. Usually the traffic that comes in from Google is of high intent and usually shows good engagement metrics on your site.

While SEO is important it has to be viewed as a long term strategy. Since it will take time to build up your trust and authority on your site, as well as you probably need time to create content that answers peoples questions.

There are around 200 ranking factors in SEO, some weights more and some less. Which of course does not make it easy.

Usually when talking about SEO you might hear people dividing this into Technical, Content and Links – all which are fundamentally all very important. 

Without getting too much into SEO here, I would suggest:

  • Create an easily structured web site. Keep it simple!

  • Each page should have a purpose and own a certain type of topic or intent. Google does not like it if you have many pages with the same purpose and search terms on. Example: Create a page on 101 Interior design basics instead of having 5 posts that speak about the same thing. It can confuse Google and will not help your rankings, nor the person who is trying to find this post.

  • Create content that people are actually looking for. To get inspired for this you can look around Pinterest to see what is trending, plus see what other people are writing about on their blogs. Tools that could be helpful here are: Answer The Public, Google Trends, and Uber suggest.

  • Make sure that your mobile site is responsive and that you only create mobile-friendly pages. All new websites Google ranks out of how they perform on mobile.

  • Google likes sites that other sites talk about. These sites should have a good reputation and be trusted, as well as ideally cover the same topic. Getting these strong links coming into your site will help your site to be trusted. Google will take this signal as a good signal when it comes to prioritizing your site for rankings.

  • Make sure your most popular pages have the most internal links to them. Important is that the page you link from and link to, have a relationship on topic.

Get on Houzz

Set up your business profile over at Houzz. This website can help you to get exposure in different publications but also help you to get new leads.

Have a purpose

interior design marketing photos

The whole main idea even before starting to make something is to figure out why you even should do something? Why are you posting Bi-weekly interviews? Why are you creating blog roundups linking out to bloggers?

The best way of learning is to know why you are doing something and then track the results of that. Some purposes can be:

– Increase brand awareness
– Establish credibility and trust
– Connect with your audience
– Find new leads
– Drive sales

Do competitor research

Know who your competitors (or close connected peers) are, understand where their audience is and how they reach them. Find gaps in areas that they have not yet done, and that could be an opportunity for you. For example, optimize for Google Image search and focusing efforts on local SEO.

Balance the knowledge you have of the gaps/opportunities together with what you see is clearly working and where you might find the same audience.

If the market is very saturated, in the start focus more on the gaps.

Running your interior design business all comes down to trying to sell that vision, that dream, those concepts…so images truly becomes the “best way” to sell your service

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