Marketing Planning For Interior Designers

If you run your interior design practice alone, or employ only a small team, you might think a marketing plan isn’t a necessity. But you don’t need to have a large business or employ someone in a marketing role to benefit from a marketing plan. The smallest of interior design practices can profit from a plan because it enables you to assess how effective your marketing is and thus spend precious time and money on the right activities.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a document that describes the promotional activity you’ll undertake in order to reach the goals you have for your practice. Typically, it covers a time period of a quarter or a year. It differs from a business plan because of its specific focus on promotion. A business plan takes a wider view including essentials such as financial projections and long term strategies as well as marketing.

While it requires time to create a marketing plan and this can feel like a distraction from your professional practice, it is worth plotting out, tracking and measuring the results of promotional activities. It can result in a schedule that’s straightforward to follow rather than having to interrupt work to decide on activities day to day; it can aid you in attracting and retaining the type of clients you want; and it will provide evidence that will help guide your expenditure on marketing.

Write a marketing plan

A marketing plan should contain a number of elements:

Target market: Think about the clients you want as only with this information can you market to them effectively. Who are they? What are the problems they have in relation to interior design services? What motivates them? It’s often recommended that you represent your ideal clients with personas, which will help you refine your promotions to them.

Offering: It’s easy to miss this element out because you know exactly what interior design is and what your practice offers. However, many people will need an explanation of the services you provide and how they can benefit from them. At the same time, even the most knowledgeable potential customer needs to know that your practice can fulfil their specific requirements.

Analysis: It’s important to understand your position among the interior design practices you see as your competitors and how you might differentiate your practice. How are rivals marketing their businesses? What services do they offer? Do they provide pricing which you can compare with yours? Typically, this type of analysis follows the SWOT format where you identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats so you can see how your practice could stand out.

Marketing channels: Think about how you’ll promote your practice. There are a host of options including social media, blog posts, advertising online or in print, email campaigns, PR and more. Once selected, these aren’t fixed for all time. A marketing plan will enable you to review their effectiveness against defined goals (see below) and adjust as necessary.

Goals and timeframe: It’s vital to identify what you hope your marketing will achieve. Goals should be precise rather than vague wishes such as ‘more clients’. They should also have a timeframe (for instance, in six months, by the end of the year). This will ensure you can judge whether your marketing plan is producing the desired results and make changes if necessary.

Budget: Set a budget, which should take into consideration costs such as advertising, but also those for PRs, or other contractors.

Put the plan into action

Once you have documented all the essential elements of your marketing plan, you’ll need to put it into action and, to do so, it’s useful to use a spreadsheet or planner. This should schedule all the promotional activity you’ve decided on to remind you or other team members so nothing is missed. Remember to plan in the time for activities such as writing posts, emails and ads as well as when they should be sent or published. By keeping to a schedule you’ll be able to judge if your efforts have met the goals set in the plan.

Review the plan

Any marketing plan should be reviewed regularly. You can then alter it according to results. Bear in mind that reviews can also be required to accommodate any changes you might make to your overall practice objectives. Be mindful, too, that it can be necessary if external circumstances change, such as costs of advertising, the state of the economy, or alterations to algorithms that make social media posts or your website less effective.

Further marketing resources: How To Market Your Practice, Why Employ A PR Agency?, Make Email Marketing Work For Your Practice