Marketing luxury interior brands online
Coming from a professional marketing background where I headed up a marketing department for a finance firm in the city for many years, I’ve been watching very closely how interior brands and designers market themselves, particularly online.
Since starting interiorstylehunter.com, I’ve been approached by quite a few luxury interior brands to help them strategically with their digital marketing. While working with these brands, I’ve been doing a lot of research as to what is happening online, this post is just some ideas and observations that I’ve come across.
Bright and bold colours catching attention online
From what I’ve seen, a lot of high end luxury interior brands seem to be trying to imitate what the high street and online brands are doing on their social channels. The high street and online campaigns are bold, bright and far reaching, which is getting a lot of people to talk about them. This is a good result and I do think it’s because their products are understood by a wider audience and the colours used in these campaigns are usually bright and bold, and these colours work well online and catch people’s attention when quickly scrolling through their social feeds.
However, I don’t think this approach works for the high end luxury interior brands. These products, while amazing, aren’t bright and bold. Generally these higher end luxury products are made of natural materials which can be slightly boring to look at when comparing it to a bright yellow or teal lamp from a high street retailer. And some of the images from the photo shoots, while absolutely beautiful, aren’t eye catching enough for someone who is scrolling through 100 tweets a minute looking for something interesting to engage with.
Tell stories! Your stories are your USP
What luxury brands have that high street brands don’t, is stories. The story of the materials, the story of the craftsmen, the story of the design development and the story of the brand, founders, designers and clients.
You should talk about these stories and by engaging writers (like myself) you can tell that story to tens of thousands of people who are interested in reading in-depth articles about luxury interior design and luxury interior brands. These readers are your potential clients, not the people who are going to just click like on your Facebook post or retweet your tweets.
The people who read these stories and engage with them are the people who are going to appreciate the materials you use. They will enjoy seeing videos of your craftsmen at work, and want to know how you look after them, their ancient skills and how you help them develop and become better craftsmen. These people are also interested in you, how you do business and most importantly, why you do what you do.
Engage your audience with your stories
We are hard-wired to remember stories, a good story will get passed down for generations and generations. This is how we best commit facts to memory – through stories. Digital marketing is simply telling your story in an engaging way to an online audience.
I’d love to get a discussion going about this topic as I think that there should be a major change in the way some brands market themselves and I for one know that stories work well.
If you need help with your digital marketing strategy then please contact me.
