3 Ways to Attract Clients to your Interior Design Business

Attracting clients to your interior design business is no easy task. With a vast sea of competitors that are all highly skilled and want to be heard, having your business stand out among the crowd is crucial in helping you win more business. Plus, as businesses continue experiencing the new era of digital transformation, traditional practices of outreach are starting to get outdated.

So what else can you do?

While word of mouth and referrals are still popular methods of attracting prospects, utilizing various online platforms can help you tap into new business that will broaden your range for outreach. Nowadays, businesses that don’t appear on Google or on any social media platform can be seen as illegitimate. 

Especially when it comes to interior design, not being able to learn more about your firm or see an online portfolio can make it difficult for prospects to trust your expertise. So, with that in mind, it may be time to invest some resources in ensuring your voice is heard in the digital sphere to never miss out on any great opportunities.

Here are 3 digital tips to help attract clients to your interior design business:

1. Revamp Your Landing Pages or Website

Whether it be the landing pages you have created or your business’s website, your webpages will most likely host your prospect’s first interaction with your business - it’s important to make it count. While good copywriting and an aesthetically pleasing theme can make a great first impression, including interactive elements on your pages is a great way to catch a site visitor’s attention.

While you may already have rendered images or even videos on your website, another form of media that could easily grab your visitor’s attention is embedding a VR project onto your website. Virtual Reality has become a tool that interior designers turn to in order to share their visual stories in a clear and stunning way. The immersive and interactive elements that VR provides can give your webpages an extra boost in catching a visitor’s attention and retaining it for a longer period of time. Since a virtual experience prompts the user to look up, down, and all around, that curiosity to want to see more can encourage site visitors to stay longer or to reach out with more questions.

With Yulio we allow you to embed projects directly onto your page with simple HTML tools. Our recommendation is to create an online digital portfolio of your projects or design examples. You can use past projects if you get permission from those clients, or we recommend creating a handful of new projects to showcase your skillls. This along with the engagement we mentioned before can give your prospective clients an clear picture of what services you can offer as well as get them excited about what you can create for them. 

2. Create a Blog

While most interior design firms will have a fully functioning website, the same cannot be said for a blog. One common misconception of starting an interior design blog is that it’s a waste of time and it’s not worth the upkeep. Although it does take effort and time to write up quality content for others to read, a business blog serves a much larger purpose than just sharing your thoughts on a few topics.

The biggest way a blog can attract clients to your interior design business is by creating searchable content that can lead prospects to your website. Whether it be providing an answer to a question they typed out in a search engine or valuable insight from the eyes of an interior design firm, blogs allow you to create more opportunities to capture a wider audience’s attention.

From industry news to tips and tricks from the design team, having a business blog allows you to create more content that could catch the attention of many looking for your services. Not only does it allow your firm to demonstrate its expertise in interior design but your blog visitor will be more likely to click around your website to find out more about your firm and even the services you provide.

Having a business blog allows you to captivate a wider audience, much like having multiple active fishing lines.

In these blogs you also have the opportunity to showcase more of your work like in the digital portfolio we mentioned before. Let’s say you’re writing a blog about the latest design trends. Instead of showing static images of these trends, you can share VR projects that allow people to fully explore a space and get a deeper understanding of the information you are imparting. Same as before this will increase the time people spend on the page and engage with your content. All good things.

3. Build Your Presence Online

Apart from considering starting a blog and refreshing your webpages, the last piece we’re going to look at is building your presence online using social media. The majority of people in the world currently have at least one platform that they are relatively active on. From Facebook to LinkedIn, social media has quickly become a part of an average individual’s daily routine as well as a part of many business’s workflows. Aside from connecting all different types of people from every corner of the Earth, social media has become one of the most powerful and important tools for businesses to connect with current clients and prospects. Not only are most platforms free and accessible for anyone to use, but there is a platform for every industry and every business.

LinkedIn is a social media platform built strictly for businesses and professionals. The majority of content on that platform is B2B, meaning organizations are showcasing themselves and what they do to attract the intrest of other companies, but many users also use the site to look into the quality and type of work a business does. LinkedIn is great place to share blog posts, key messages, leadership thoughts and any content that you want to share that shows the type of company you are. Images are also very welcome on LinkedIn to grab peoples attention. We find that having images of you and your team at work either in the office, on-site or at professional events perform the best and can go a long way in humanizing you and making you more relatable and approachable.

Show off your stunning curated spaces on your Instagram profile.

Instagram is the largest photo and video sharing social networking platform where users showcase their library of stunning images. While Instagram is the choice-pick for numerous B2C companies, B2B businesses, especially interior design, have also found ways to make the platform work with what they are trying to achieve. Whether it be showing an exciting photorealistic project or even an employee highlight, Instagram allows you to share content that could attract scrollers to explore your beautifully curated account. Plus, being an active user on Instagram can again establish more credibility as well as give you another avenue to engage with prospects and potential clients.

When it comes to sharing VR content such as your portfolio on both of these platforms it can be done quite easily. Consider linking to VR projects on LinkedIn and encourage people to explore your designs. Or record a video of one of your projects and sharing that on either platform.

Start Today

While establishing your digital presence may take some time, taking the effort to do it well could be one aspect that could make you stand out from your competitors. Whether it be considering new platforms to highlight your voice and expertise or reviewing your current webpages, making your online presence known will only set you up for success as the business world continues to be transformed by technology. It’s time to rethink and prioritize your online presence in order to attract clients to your interior design business.

Here at Yulio, we strive for excellence in performance and integrity when it comes to our product, and customer service. To try our program for yourself, sign up for our free 30-day trial (no strings attached). Check out our Whitepaper on the right way to integrate VR into your business for maximum ROI. 

Original post from March 5, 2016.