Best Practices for Blog Post Creation to Drive Audience Engagement

You already know that marketing your interior design firm is essential for sustained long-term growth and establishing good relationships with prospective clients. One area where business owners often feel overwhelmed is running a blog. Clients look to your website for key information that can help them make a purchase decision, and creating quality content can help drive traffic and boost your audience engagement.

How do you write an effective blog post that will bring in more audience engagement?

Why Blogging Matters for Your Business

If you are focusing on growing an interior design business, you need a marketing strategy that is proven to work. Digital marketing through blog work on your website is proven to be more effective than online advertisements alone.

According to DemandMetric, companies with blogs get an average of 67% more leads per month compared to companies without. The same survey found that 82% of customers feel more positive about a company when they read custom content, and a whopping 60% of people enjoy reading content that they feel is relevant to their needs.

A few of the other reasons that blogging matters for your business include:

● Helping search engines to find your page
● Extending the lifespan of social media campaigns
● Giving your audience shareable content
● Adding credibility to your resume
● Converting web traffic into solid leads
● Building links to boost your rankings on search engine results pages
● Promoting your design services in a less pushy way

When you are ready to tap into the unlimited potential of blogging for your content marketing, here are a few guidelines you should follow.

What You Should Include in a Blog Post

For many interior designers, staring down the blank page of their potential new blog feels too intimidating to get started. Content marketing overwhelms many would-be marketers when they have no framework to guide them. The good news is that blogging doesn’t have to be overly complex.

You should include a few basic things in each blog post and structure your articles in an organized, highly readable way. This will help you on your path to growing an interior design business. Consider following this simple recipe to make your blog posts the best they can be.

Introduction and Hooking the Reader

The first place you want to start with your content marketing is a catchy introduction to hook potential readers. This is the first time your readers will connect with you and your blog, so the hook is essential to keeping them around long enough to finish the article and reach your call to action.

Writing a great hook involves tapping into the pain points that your clients may have around their home design. You might want to start by asking a question that gets to the heart of what your blog post is going to be about. This is a great way to attract readers from the first sentence.

If asking a question seems too obvious, you can start by cultivating a connection with the customer. Give them a glimpse into who you are as a person, make a bold claim, or give them a fresh perspective they may not have heard before.

Your intro is your first and possibly only chance to convince readers to stick around and return for more content in the future. With that being said, many blogs lack a good hook.

One expert tip to help you craft a killer introduction is to write the body of your blog post first. This allows you to see exactly where the piece is going and its relation to your marketing strategy. A strong opening can give you more clarity about how best to connect with your audience surrounding the main idea of your blog.

Remember, a good introduction should be just a paragraph or two long. Hook readers immediately and lead into the rest of the article with a short sentence or two as a follow-up. Keep in mind that a blog should be roughly 1,200 to 1,800 words or even slightly longer, so your introduction doesn’t need to be super lengthy to get your point across and convince readers to stick around.

The Body Text

The body of your blog is where your digital marketing comes into play. It should be the meatiest section of a blog post, but you also want to make sure your readers will stick around for the end of the article and your call to action. The secret to ensuring that eyeballs stay on your page until the very end is to write a captivating body section.

When creating a blog post for interior designer marketing, you need to think clearly about the searcher’s intent. What type of information are they looking for? What questions might they be asking about your topic? The body paragraphs are where you will establish your business as an expert on all things related to interior design.

Format your body into several smaller sections with H2 or H3 subheadings. You might even use questions as your headings so that your audience will know precisely where to find the answers they are looking for.

Many of your prospective customers will be looking at your content on their smartphones or other mobile devices. This means that you need to keep your formatting in mind when organizing the body section of your work. Beyond breaking it up into subheadings, you should also ensure that your paragraphs aren’t too lengthy.

The variation in how your text appears on the page is essential to helping your audience process lots of information fast. Anything longer than two to four sentences appears as a wall of text on a small screen, making it too difficult for the reader to wade through. It can also be a good idea to incorporate bullet-point lists to make your article more scannable by readers in a hurry.

How to Beef Up the Body

If you are struggling to meet your word count goal for your marketing strategy, you might miss some key content. Ask yourself a few of these questions to help you make sense of what is missing:

• Why should your audience care about your blog topic?
• What are the most important things a reader needs to understand about this topic?
• When should they know this information?

Give yourself a very detailed and specific answer to these questions to help you narrow down your strategy.

Another key tip to help beef up the body of your blog post is to search for related keywords. If you are interested in growing an interior design business, you need to think about search engine optimization with each post. In addition to your main keywords, you can also look for related terms that might open new opportunities for more content in a particular article.

You can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner to help you pinpoint what your audience is searching for. Look for two to three variations on your main keyword to give your article the best chance in search engine rankings.

The Conclusion

Your conclusion is more than just a way to tie up all of the loose ends in your blog post. It is an essential piece of your marketing strategy where you can add your call to action. Marketing for interior designers can make some business owners feel like they are being pushy about encouraging people to sign up for a consultation or specific design services.

However, the end of an informative blog post is a great place to allow prospective clients to connect with your business in a meaningful way. Your call to action should be very specific, giving your readers a tangible step that they can take to interact with you further. This might mean asking them to sign up for your email newsletter or booking a consultation with you. No matter what the goal of your digital marketing might be, this is the time to put it out there for your customers to take action.

The rest of your conclusion should include a neat summary of the points you made in the rest of the blog and provide clear insight into why your topic matters. Make sure your call to action is clear and focused at the end of this section so that readers know exactly what their next steps need to be.

Types of Blogs Readers Want to Read

In addition to structuring your blog post according to this format, you also need to keep in mind the specific type of blog post that your reader is interested in. There are a couple of different types of blog posts that you can write, including response posts and pillar content.

Response posts are centered on a specific question that your audience is interested in solving. The title for your article may even be the exact question that they have been searching for online. This is a slightly shorter post, but it should still be at least 1,200 words long. The goal is to provide the most detailed and helpful answer to the searcher’s main query.

Pillar content is excellent for introducing your business to customers. It can include all of the details related to a specific topic and set you apart as an expert in this area. These tend to be longer posts as you have more information to cover on a broader topic. Interior designers should strive for a word count of 2,000 or more for this type of content.

In the end, you should have a mixture of different blog types to keep your readers interested in the content you are producing. You never know what topic may appeal to a new client, so make sure to cover all of your bases with both response posts and pillar content!

Helpful Tools for Interior Designers Who Blog

Interior designers are known for their insight into selecting the right colors and textures to make a space pop. The idea of switching gears and having to write about what you do might feel more than a little bit overwhelming. Fortunately, there are more tools than ever before to help you create quality content that sounds like a professional writer wrote it.

Grammarly

The most common tool that many aspiring bloggers turn to is Grammarly. This service goes above and beyond the basic spell check found in your word processor. It helps you write with increased clarity by eliminating wordy phrases, providing action-packed word suggestions, and generally helping to improve the quality of your writing.

A free membership gives you access to a few of the tools, but you may want to consider investing in a membership to take full advantage of all of the devices they give writers. If you feel a bit uneasy about your writing talents, then a Grammarly membership will be a worthwhile investment for you. 

Yoast SEO

If you are working on a WordPress website, you may want to download the Yoast SEO plug-in to assist you in making the most of your keywords. This helpful tool allows you to see just how your blog post stacks up when it comes to SEO. Yoast will help you determine whether your focus keyword has been included enough times to be effective. The tool can also help you set up a meta description and develop fantastic titles.

Everything about this app is streamlined to optimize your blog post for the search engines. They also consider the images on the page, your slug, and the number of links included to outbound or inbound pages.

Content Marketing for Interior Designers

Interior designers can benefit from having a digital marketing strategy that includes regular blog posts. Hubspot recommends posting anywhere from one to four times per week for a small business. Following this blog post design will help you structure the time you spend sitting in front of a blank page, wondering what to write.

Are you still unsure of exactly where you should start? Check out our list of 150 blog topic ideas that your audience wants to read to get you started!