5 Key Strategies That Interior Designers Need to Take Control of Their Future

Many times, running an interior design business can feel like you’re not really in control of anything. This gives you a sense of insecurity, making it difficult to plan for the future while also not allowing you to focus on what you love doing because you’re constantly worried about all of the other aspects of the business.

Fortunately, there are key strategies that can help you learn not only how to start an interior design business, but also how to continue growing it. Learn what five of these strategies are and how they can make a difference in your interior design business.

1. Build Your Brand: Marketing Strategies for Interior Design Businesses

As with any other type of business, you have an individual process and style that makes your company unique. Your branding and how your business is represented to the public play a crucial role in who finds your business and who considers turning to it for help.

Your brand has to represent your values, your aesthetic, and your dedication to your clients. Your brand also helps to differentiate you from your competition. There are 64,290 interior designers in the United States, so what makes your business stand out? Your brand should speak to what your clients will get out of turning to you.

Develop Your Vision

One of the most important things you can do to put together your brand is to ask yourself what your vision for your business is. The answer requires clearly identifying your goals and values so that you can align your marketing efforts to suit them.

Having consistent branding throughout marketing materials is essential for brand recognition. This also means maintaining a clear voice throughout all of your social media accounts and your website.

Consider finding a niche. Specializing in a niche lets you target a specific audience. This is also something that allows you to distinguish yourself from general service providers.

You can begin by putting together a website that showcases your interior design styles. This can give you an idea of the color schemes and even wording that you will want to maintain throughout social media and promotional materials.

2. Leverage Technology: Running a More Efficient Business

When looking for how to get interior design clients, grow your business, or just run it more efficiently, you will need to turn to technology. You have to be able to collaborate with suppliers, clients, and vendors from all around the world, so relying on the latest technological advances is vital.

Marketing for interior designers often relies on social media. Social media content has become essential for all kinds of businesses, with 80% of consumers stating that social media significantly impacts their buying decisions. Collaborations with influencers and affiliate marketing also make a difference, and both require turning to social media.

Use the Right Software

Managing all of the social media accounts can take time, however. The solution is to work smarter, not harder. By turning to the right software options, like Later, you can automate daily social media tasks and get the analytics you need to make the right marketing choices.

Design software is another important type of technology you can rely on to help improve your business. They help you make optimal use of your time, resources, and money. Computer-aided design (CAD) software, for example, allows designers to create technical drawings while adhering to building codes and guidelines.

Some design tools offer sophisticated 3D modeling, allowing you to visualize images in real-time. There are also excellent project management tools that can help streamline many processes that require time and effort. With these tools, you can track budgets, communicate with clients more easily, and make better use of your time.

3. Develop Multiple Revenue Streams: Going Beyond Project-Based Work

As an interior designer, it’s essential that you have more than just your project-based work to depend on for your income. You want to have recurring revenue streams that can work for you and don’t require very much effort on your part.

You can go for affiliate marketing, which is an advertising model that involves a business compensating third-party publishers to generate leads or traffic to the company’s services or products. As much as 15% of e-commerce comes from affiliate marketing.

You can also develop recurring revenue through offering online courses. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to have online packages that people can purchase or have actual classes that you have to moderate in real-time. Either option can provide a significant amount of steady money.

When you choose to go beyond solely depending on project-based work for your revenue, you can gain stability. This stability allows you to be able to focus on ways to improve and grow your central business.

4. Ask For Help: Avoiding Burnout

Burnout is real, and it can easily happen if you run your own business. Burnout is a state of emotional, psychological, and physical exhaustion that results from dealing with stress for a prolonged period. It can affect your entire life and lead to anxiety and depression.

If you’re trying to do everything yourself in your interior design business, it’s likely you’ll have to deal with burnout. The answer is to ask for help.

Find things in your business that you can delegate or outsource. One option is marketing services. Marketing strategies can take time to plan and execute, so relying on professional marketing services that can do the work for you not only helps prevent burnout, but it can also offer better results.

Look through the tasks you perform every day. Can anything be automated? Can you rely on someone else to do it for you? Although it can seem like you’re giving up some control, you’re helping your business improve by allowing yourself to focus on what you do best.

5. Continuously Educate Yourself: Always Gaining Skills

By turning to online courses, attending conferences, and seeking other ways to continue your education, you can keep honing the skills you have and gaining more. When you advance your skills, you have the chance to offer your clients better and wider services, while also being able to charge more for what you offer.

If you become an expert in a particular aspect of the business, like rendering 3D models, you can become the go-to person not just for regular clients, but for other interior designers who may not be as proficient as well. You can help yourself achieve this by taking the right courses.

Revit Mastery courses, for example, teach you how to build 3D models, maximize project collaboration, produce intricate documentation, and so much more.

Attending conferences or in-person courses also allows you to start building your network. You can develop professional relationships that may impact your business in a variety of ways, including being able to collaborate with other experts in the industry.

These kinds of collaborations lead to more people engaging with your brand because they can reach different audiences than you would normally interact with.

Behind the Design: Helping Your Business Grow

Running an interior design business takes determination and serious skills. Even if you have experience in interior design and excellent training, your business can falter if you don’t take advantage of what technology, clear branding, and marketing can offer. Another way you can stumble is by trying to do everything yourself, leading to burnout.

At Behind the Design, we deliver the help your business needs to grow organically. We provide marketing services that allow you to delegate the difficult tasks associated with getting your name out there so that you can focus on the parts of the business that you love most.

Give your interior design business the boost it needs to succeed. Contact us to learn more about our marketing services today.