Digital Marketing for Interiors and Design Businesses – The Why, What and How
Marketing has changed in the digital age. The internet has become the main tool for people to find information on companies, products and services and has made offline marketing less effective.
Thanks to Google, social media and the increasing use of tablets and smartphones, people are now discovering, connecting and engaging with brands online on a daily basis. This means only one thing, if marketing is about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time then online is simply where you need to be.
While digital marketing has become widely adopted and essential for brands in all sectors to reach and communicate with their audience, design businesses have yet to fully embrace it and build their online presence effectively.
We are not surprised! Digital trends change constantly and keeping up with best practices and new technologies can be daunting. Nothing is more important, however, to get the basics right, so in this post, we share the three main steps that interiors and design companies can take to build a strong and effective online presence.
Let’s begin!
For the uninitiated, digital marketing is the term that describes all your marketing efforts using online channels and tactics. These include Social Media Marketing and Advertising, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Content Marketing, Email Marketing, PPC (Pay Per Click), Affiliate Marketing and Online PR. Your website is your main asset and plays a key role as most content is created to drive people to it.
What’s next?
1 – Develop a strategy
Most interiors companies fail to succeed online purely because they don’t know what goals they want to achieve and normally their efforts are in vain. Whether you are looking to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, attract new customers or build better relationships, clear strategic goals will give you direction.
From understanding what resources you require to achieve those goals to recognising what content to create for your audience, developing an online marketing strategy is vital to define where you are, where you want to be and how you can get there.
2 – Create quality content
Whether you are a small interiors business or an established interior design studio, to get your voice heard and become an authority online you need to create content, as the word authority suggests, you need to become an author.
Content can include blogs, videos, social media posts and guides to name a few. Firstly, it’s important that your content is purposeful and adds value to your audience, secondly that you share this on the right platforms. Producing quality content is a great way to improve your SEO, which means that Google will reward you by increasing your ranking and visibility on its search engine. Be creative and if the content is good don’t be afraid of repeating yourself.
3 – Analyse the results
While a strategy can help you get the basics right, analysing the results of your ongoing campaign and refining your plan accordingly are fundamental to growing your online presence in the right direction. Google Analytics can help you track your website traffic and measure your SEO success, while social management tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer can also provide you with a breakdown of your social media marketing performance. With digital marketing continuously evolving, feel free to try new approaches and keep improving by measuring and evaluating results.
Although there is much more that interiors businesses can do to grow their brand online, we believe that getting the basics right is the most important step to getting ahead of everyone else.
If you need help to develop your digital marketing strategy for your interiors and design business, drop us a line at hello@contrasto.co.uk.
