How to Use Video to Build Your Interior Design Brand

It’s not unusual for local interior design professionals to retain much of their business through word-of-mouth advertising. When customers are satisfied with the results of your work, they’ll want to share their experiences and outcomes with their family and friends. Still, you can’t solely rely on the grapevine, so to speak, to keep your business steady. 

You need to make efforts to increase your brand awareness, conversions, and sales, and crafting your brand identity is a big part of that. It not only informs public perception but serves as the foundation that runs through all of your marketing and advertising efforts as well.

Incorporating video as part of your overall brand strategy is a great way to expand your reach, engage your target audience, and drive long-term success, but before you do so, you need to know what branding is first, as well as how to start your own brand, and what you stand to gain by adding video content to your strategy.

What Is Branding?

Branding involves efforts associated with defining your company, promoting your business, and connecting with its consumers to build your reputation. Your branding conveys value to the consumer public by creating a consistent and familiar image and identity based on your core values and goals.

When learning how to create a brand, there are a few types of branding you may want to incorporate into your overall strategy, including the services you offer, products you sell (affiliate or private label), region(s) you serve, and of course, your personal brand. It’s vital that you project an image of authority, innovation, and customer care, as you’ll be responsible for designing spaces in which your customers live their lives.

Why Branding Is Important

Before you assemble a checklist for how to establish a brand, you need to know why it’s worth the time, effort, and expense to do so. In other words, there needs to be some kind of clear return on investment (ROI). With that said, branding is so important for your interior design business for the following reasons:

Creating a Consistent and Recognizable Customer Experience

When customers have a positive experience with a particular brand, they’ll often want to repeat it instead of rolling the dice on a new company, all while sharing what their service was like as a means of gaining social currency. 

Effective branding, in turn, works to create a measure of consistency and familiarity that makes customers feel comfortable and confident choosing you. It helps attract and retain loyal customers by conveying the core values at the heart of your operation while also building credibility, authority, and trust. You need to create an identity that consumers are able to relate and connect with, and branding helps you accomplish that by effectively personalizing your business.

Distinguishing Yourself from Competitors

While every designer has their own unique set of skills, knowledge, experience, and perspectives, it’s important that you set yourself apart from competitors, especially in a saturated market. Branding helps you define your company in ways that create a distinctive value proposition for prospective consumers.

The Benefits of Video Branding

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is exponentially more valuable in terms of communicating with your audience. 

It’s likely you already know that the human brain is hardwired to process visual input, but what you might not realize is that visual information is processed 60,000 times faster than text. What’s more, viewers only retain about 10% of the information they read, while they retain as much as 95% of information delivered via video. 

As such, video makes for an incredibly powerful communication tool that allows you to convey your messages in a format that’s equally entertaining, engaging, and easy to digest. You can use it to increase your online and social media presence and enhance your SEO efforts while contributing to a positive and memorable experience for consumers.

How to Build Your Brand Identity

Now that you know why branding is important, it’s time to think about how to formulate your brand identity and implement brand strategies that will help your interior design business thrive. At its core, a brand identity comprises two key aspects: visual elements and essence. 

Visual elements include logos, fonts, color schemes, imagery, and layout and design rules that create a framework for your content creation, while the essence of your brand is a little more nebulous. It could include the tone and tenor of messaging, the characteristics you embody, and the expression of your core values, including what your brand represents and the emotional connection you hope to make with consumers.

Generate Your Mission and Core Values

If you don’t yet have a mission statement that serves as the foundation for your business operations, it’s time to create one. Doing so acts as the true first step when it comes to knowing how to start a brand, and it should briefly summarize the values and goals of your business entity. Determine what it is you stand for and how you can convey that information to your audience, as it will serve as the basis for developing your brand identity.

Define Your Target Demographics

Branding is all about defining your business identity, but it must be done with your target audience in mind. Many businesses want to appeal to a large swath of the consumer public, but engaging millennials is a very different proposition than connecting with baby boomers, for example. That is why it’s crucial that you define your core customer base, understand their pain points, tailor your solutions to their needs and preferences, and create a brand identity that speaks to them in meaningful ways.

Focus on What Sets You Apart from Competitors

When consumers look for an interior design business, they may not even fully realize what you have to offer, and it’s likely that they will also have some trouble differentiating between services. Part of creating a brand identity is figuring out what makes you different (and better) than your competitors and then effectively conveying your value proposition to prospective customers.

Create Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines act as a set of rules and standards that will define the logistics of implementing your brand strategies and creating a consistent image and identity. They tend to focus on practical parameters for creating content and interacting with the public, from the details of your logo to fonts and color schemes.

They may also cover the preferred grammar and tone for your written copy and incorporate elements like core messaging and goals for customer experience when interacting with your brand. Altogether, these guidelines help to create consistency and recognition.

Growing Your Brand Through Video

One of the most important things to focus on when you're considering how to develop a brand is the strategies that are most likely to spread your message, reach your intended audience, and deliver desired conversions. Video shouldn’t be a daunting medium to make use of — you just need to know how to get started.

At the most basic level, you’re going to need equipment like cameras, microphones, lighting, and video editing software. From there, it’s a matter of implementing messaging strategies and figuring out the logistics of telling your story in video format. Some businesses do it on their own, though others seek professional help, either via an in-house marketing team or by outsourcing to a firm. 

Here’s what you need to know to make video work for you:

Create Branded Video Content

Video is an important part of a brand marketing strategy because it represents your company and conveys your messaging in a format that is incredibly engaging and shareable. Your content should include recognizable elements that follow your brand guidelines, from layout and design to imaging, color schemes, fonts, logos, tone, and so on.

It’s also important that you incorporate calls to action (CTAs). You need to tell your audience exactly what you expect, whether you want them to join your mailing list, contact you with questions, schedule an appointment for a consultation, or like and share your videos.

Use Videos for Both Widespread and Individualized Messaging

As video is so mentally stimulating, it can help you to gain attention and spread messaging across your website and social media platforms. In addition to creating advertisements in video format, your marketing strategy could include specific types of content, like testimonials that offer a trusted consumer perspective or demos and tutorials that promote your company and add value without a hard sell.

These types of video content can display your authority and help generate trust and credibility. That said, you can also use videos to send more personalized content, such as follow-ups, updates, newsletters, and missives to your customer mailing list, staff, and business partners.

Tell Your Story Through Video

Whether you know it or not, there is a narrative concerning your company, and your branding efforts, or lack thereof, contribute to it, solidifying your reputation. It’s important, therefore, that you control the narrative, and video content is an ideal platform for nuanced storytelling.

Video can help you build your personal brand, communicating what it is that makes you unique, trustworthy, and valuable. Consider two similar brands, Nike and Converse. Both are primarily shoe designers, but there has to be something that makes consumers choose one over the other.

You could say that Nike offers elite athletic performance while Converse focuses more on everyday streetwear styles, but in both cases, marketing efforts reflect their core branding. Nike creates an image of quality and sophistication, while Converse takes an everyman approach that leverages its street-cred persona.

The point here is that each company tells its story in its own way in order to speak to a specific audience. Video content allows you to put a face to your business, convey ideas, and connect with consumers in more meaningful ways.

Create Training Materials

While most businesses put together an employee handbook that spells out policies and procedures, you can also create training videos that offer a more complete view of your operations and what you need employees to know. Engagement is a key component of effective communication, and studies show that video content increases information retention over written copy by a huge margin.

Branding Is a Pathway to Profit

There are plenty of reasons why branding is important, but at the end of the day, every penny you spend and minute you devote to your growth efforts needs to show some kind of ROI. 

Building a brand identity that attracts customers, generates rapport, and inspires loyalty is one of the best ways to drive sales and profits, and adding videos to your branding strategy can only help to define your identity, engage your audience, and increase brand awareness.

If you are interested in learning more about how to expand your branding efforts and increase success in your interior design business, Behind the Design has the impactful and innovative guidance you need. Check out our newly launched course. This is a 1.5 IDCEC credited course and is $49!