Love it or hate it, artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. Early on, many businesses — including marketing firms and individual marketers — were very concerned this emerging technology was going to take over their jobs.

The truth is that while AI can automate some processes, most of the time, you need a human’s eye and expertise to review the results. Essentially, AI is changing the interior design marketing world, but it’s not taking over. If anything, AI is handling some of the tedious tasks so marketers can focus on strategy and other high-level concerns.

Are you getting ready to launch your latest marketing campaign? Check out some of the ways AI can help with marketing for interior designers.

Brainstorming Topics

You know about writer’s block. But have you ever run into marketer’s block? You might have a real talent for executing marketing campaigns but struggle to get started.

When you have the help of AI, you gain a quick-thinking brainstorming buddy. AI can deliver a host of different suggestions nearly instantly. Some may be great, and some may be less so. But that’s the whole point of brainstorming — to throw out as many ideas as possible and select the best ones.

What kind of ideas can AI help you brainstorm? Pretty much any kind of idea you can think of. Here are a few examples of brainstorming sessions AI might be able to help with:

• Coming up with a tagline for a course you’re offering
• Suggesting a topic for a video you’re posting on social media
• Choosing the focus and creating an outline of a new blog post
• Developing ideas for new marketing campaigns

The key word here is “help” — don’t just rely on the AI’s brainstorming ability. When you brainstorm alongside it, you’ll have twice the ideas to choose from.

Assisting With Research

AI can be a great research assistant. However, if you aren’t too familiar with AI already, you might not realize that it’s less helpful than you might think. As a handful of high-profile cases have demonstrated, sometimes AI misinterprets sources or cites sources that don’t exist. However, this doesn’t mean you should write off the usefulness of AI altogether.

If you use AI for research, make sure that it’s citing actual sources and that those sources actually say what the AI thinks they’ve said.

You’re more likely to get great results if you research alongside AI. Often, human researchers can pick up on nuances that AI misses. Don’t miss out on some potentially great sources because you trust AI more than you trust yourself.

Creating Content

You probably already know that a great SEO strategy is critical to a strong marketing strategy. When a member of your target audience searches for a given keyword, a blog post or another piece of content optimized for that keyword will likely show up high on the search engine results page (SERP). Searchers are more likely to click on higher-up results, so they’ll discover your business.

Many interior designers hire content agencies or individual writers for this particular part of digital marketing. Some prefer to write blog posts themselves. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, but if you’re running short on money or time, you might look at using AI to write blog posts. Sometimes, AI can write a quality blog post in 20 minutes!

However, just like with most other uses of AI, there are some limitations to consider. For example, if you have a very clear brand voice, AI may not always be able to replicate that voice exactly. Depending on the topic you’re working with, the AI model you use, and the quality of the blog you already have on your site, you might find that the AI-generated blogs are better than before — but you also may find that they aren’t.

The best way to make the most of AI-written blogs is to ask the AI to draft a blog. From there, you can go over it and clean it up yourself or hire someone to do that for you. You might wonder what we mean by “cleaning up” a blog post. That might mean doing the following:

• Changing some of the phrasing to be more original
• Changing to outline to place more emphasis on certain parts of the article
• Adjusting the tone to make it more consistent with your overall brand voice
• Ensuring any cited sources are legitimate

Revising an AI post this way doesn’t have to take forever. Once you’ve optimized a couple, the process will get faster!

Developing Marketing Messages

You might already know that AI can help you create great interior design marketing taglines, but it can do far more than that. One of the best features of AI is that it can create ultra-personalized messages for individual customers — something that’s practically impossible to do yourself.

Just like AI can help you personalize your marketing messages, it can also help you determine the right timing for sending marketing emails. Ultra-personalization is one of the main focuses in digital marketing right now — and it’s a focus because it works. AI can place it right in your hands.

Analyzing Data and Offering Insights

AI can be helpful in creative endeavors, but it really shines when it comes to analytics. Customer data often includes insights that can help you optimize your digital marketing campaigns, but without the right analytics tools, you might never uncover those insights.

When you harness the power of AI to analyze your customer data, you’ll see two main benefits. For one, AI can process incredible amounts of data much faster than any human. It also can pick up on patterns that even the most astute human can miss.

Improving Your Customer Service

If you’ve ever visited a website with a 24/7 chatbot, you’ve interacted with AI-powered customer service technology. In the digital world, customers and would-be customers like to be able to ask questions and get answers as soon as possible. A chatbot helps them do so.

However, chatbots have their limitations. You might have interacted with an AI chatbot that eventually said it would connect you to a real person. These chatbots are generally able to answer certain types of straightforward questions, and they’re also great for lead generation.

For example, each time a customer interacts with your chatbot, you can program the bot to ask if they would like to leave their contact information for you to follow up. With a bot like this, you can collect new leads even when you’re asleep!

Mapping Your Customers’ Journeys and Identifying Pain Points

When it comes to marketing for interior designers, your ad campaign is only as effective as it is accurate. Identifying your target audience is part of the process, but if you really want to reach your potential customers and connect with them at every stage of the process, you need to do something called customer journey mapping.

Mapping customer journeys isn’t just about understanding customers' steps before buying — it tracks their emotions, frustrations, and challenges. The concept behind it is simple: the deeper your understanding of your customers, the better you’ll be able to meet their needs and ultimately boost your sales.

AI can help you with customer journeys in a few different ways:

• Identifying pain points and how they play into the customer journey
• Outlining customer journeys
• Generating survey questions and email headlines for collecting relevant information from your actual customers

Keep in mind that you may have more than one kind of target audience. For example, maybe your clientele is made up of young families purchasing their first homes and downsizing retirees. These two groups will generally have different processes, so it’s a good idea to map their journeys separately.

Need Help With Digital Marketing?

Marketing is an essential part of growing any kind of design business. However, when you’re focused on running your business, it can be hard to devote the time to learn and use the right marketing strategies.

When you partner with Behind the Design, you’ll get the benefit of our online marketing for interior designers and architects. At Behind the Design, we understand the unique challenges interior designers face when trying to market themselves. We’ll work with you to craft an industry-specific and business-specific marketing campaign. If you’re ready to start or you just want to learn more, get in touch with us today!