It’s quite often the case that an interior designer will start with one or two projects and then suddenly realise a few years later that they have built a business around themselves with a team to pay and rent to budget for. It’s at this point that thinking about how to market a design studio becomes really important. Realising that the flow of leads you had is exhausted and that now you need to get out into the world and create leads.
But it’s confusing, how on earth do you add in social media, blogging, paid advertising, email marketing, public relations and also a focus on SEO? Well, at the heart of all of this is content. You need to be consistently creating content that tells your audience about your brand.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing involves you creating and sharing content with both new and existing customers. There is no clear guide to how to use content marketing, instead, it requires you to look at your exact audience and decide how to best appeal to them. In essence, content marketing involves you building a story about your brand and creating useful information that relates to what you sell.
Why are bloggers so visible?
When you think of content marketing, you naturally think of bloggers who publish multiple new posts every month on to their site. This is a key component of content marketing and, in fact, there’s a point to be made for why every business should have a blog on their site. Think about how visible the interior design bloggers are? The answer isn’t magical, it’s just a steady stream of good quality content. Google loves this and so do the social media networks, and that’s why bloggers attract large audiences.
Content marketing offers a number of different benefits to businesses of all kinds. But let’s take a deeper look at the benefits content marketing brings to interior designers.
Become an authority within your niche
By regularly publishing and sharing useful content about interior design, and in particular, your niche within interior design, you establish yourself as the expert through repeatedly sharing content around your topic. This could be as specific as London interior design, luxury interior design, wellness interior design, in fact even as small a niche as chalet interior design. You start to build an audience and you start to rank better on search engines.
Increase organic traffic
Obtaining more organic traffic through Google is perhaps the most effective way to scale your business. You will no longer need to pay for traffic and can receive hundreds, if not thousands, of high quality, targeted visitors every month. But you’ve got to ensure that the content you are creating has the correct keywords in it and is useful and valuable to your readers. This is what we help our clients achieve through our content marketing service.
Create a passive sales funnel
One of the best aspects of content marketing is that potential clients will connect with you in a more meaningful way. Since you’re sharing a lot of useful and valuable content, these readers will feel like they have got to know you and this starts to generate leads. Content marketing helps you to connect with your audience as well as move them down the funnel. To learn what a marketing funnel is, have a look at this great article by Moz.
How to get started with your own content marketing strategy
No two content marketing strategies should be the same. Instead, you should craft an approach that is best designed to reach your target audience. To help get you started, here are some top tips and ideas for you to try:
- Start writing regular blog posts on useful topics within your niche
- Speak to customers to find what sort of queries and concerns they have
- Generate a diverse range of content; blog posts, ebook’s, email course, imagery
- Get your content out in front of your target audience wherever and whenever possible. This includes sharing on social media, emailing newsletter subscribers and working on your SEO
- Be sure to post content as regularly as possible (blog weekly and post on social media every day across all platforms)
- Monitor your results and see which avenues generate the most returns
- Be patient: content marketing does not lead to immediate success for everyone
- Constantly try new things and ideas
- Invest money in your content marketing, perhaps by paying writers who can create better quality articles and graphic designers who can design awesome graphics
If you are an interior designer and you have decided to develop your content marketing strategy, then you’ve come to the right place. Here at Interior Style Hunter, we offer a complete content marketing service for interior designers looking to better understand what content marketing is and how they can use it to dramatic effect.
