Interior designers are no stranger to Instagram. It’s a visual-first social media platform, and interior design is all about the visual element. Designers love sharing their beautiful photography, and design fans love to see those photos. Instagram is a long-standing social media powerhouse, and it’s still an effective marketing tool. Ambitious Instagram users may be able to book clients with a combination of great content and great communication. But even you don’t, it’s a great platform for building brand awareness and showing your expertise.
Setting Up For Success
Succeeding on Instagram starts with your account creation. But even if you have had your account for years, you can still follow these steps now.
Here are the basics:
- Choose a great Instagram handle. Ideally, this is easy to remember and easy to discover. Try to use your business name and keep it short.
- Write a short and compelling bio for your profile. Stick to the basics, like services you offer and your value proposition.
- Add your website link. You can also use a service like Linktree to create a customized page that houses all of your important links including other social media profiles. This can be useful if you want to be able to push followers to specific links, since links don’t work on Instagram posts.
- Use a high-quality profile picture. Your business logo or headshot will work great.
Be sure to switch to an Instagram Business Account. This will give you access to a few features that you can use, but won’t change how your content gets seen. You will gain access to insights which will give you an idea of where your followers are from, when they’re online, and what posts are performing well. This will allow you to tailor your content specifically and see the results of your posting efforts. This also unlocks the ability to run ads and promote posts, which can be very useful for expanding your reach
Building a Content Strategy
Before posting on Instagram, you should decide a few important things. How often will you post? What kind of content will you post? What kind of content will you not post? What are the visual guidelines for your content?
Content Pillars
Start by identifying a few content pillars, or types of content. These will make up the majority of your posts and will be your guiding light.
Popular content pillars for interior designers are project showcases, behind-the-scenes, client testimonials, educational content, and brand storytelling. You may decide that you want to focus on project showcases but never sit down to make an educational piece. Or, you might decide that educating about interior design is how you can make the biggest impact, and you may focus on that type of content. You may also decide that behind-the-scenes photos are off-limits, and you will only show finished products. It’s up to you, and there is no wrong answer. But it’s critical to know what is on the table.
Aesthetic Consistency
A consistent visual identity is important for any Instagram account, but in a creative field like interior design it can be even more critical. Choose a color palette, a set of fonts, and a shape or texture motif. This shouldn’t be hard. All of these elements should come from your brand and be consistent with it.
It’s important to have a consistent look so that your posts are instantly recognizable in someone’s feed. These days, there is less of a focus on having an aesthetic profile as most users will scroll through their feed rather than visit your profile directly. But it can still be visually impressive to have all of your posts look like they belong together.
If you’re having trouble getting a consistent look, try using a tool like Canva to get Instagram templates.
Stories and Reels
In addition to regular posts, Stories and Reels are also important.
Stories are a special type of content that disappear after a day and are pinned at the top of an Instagram feed. This is a great place for engaging content like polls, Q&As, or behind-the-scenes photos that you don’t feel fit the aesthetic of your main feed.
Reels are short-form videos. Video content is powerful on Instagram, and can often outperform photo content. The downside is that video content often takes more work to produce! Interior designers can use reels to showcase before and after transformations, talking-head tips and education, or participating in social media trends.
Growing Your Audience
Attracting a following can be the most difficult part of social media. You can create the best content in the world, but if you don’t post it in a discoverable way, it may get lost in the ocean of other content that’s out there.
Hashtags
Hashtags used to be the end-all-be-all of Instagram strategy. These days, they are less powerful, but using them strategically can still be helpful. Hashtags are essentially keywords that you can add to your posts to make them more discoverable and help Instagram recommend your content to the right people.
When it comes to reach, the Instagram algorithm analyzes the content of the post to understand the full context, and hashtags are just used for broad categorization. Gone are the days of hashtags being an easy hack for growth and reach!
So instead of filling your posts with any tag you can think of, instead focus on identifying a handful of relevant industry keywords. Then use no more than 5 per post. Don’t bother with generic hashtags. Instead drill down into specifics and niche concepts that relate to your post and your business.
Quality content is more important than hashtags. Rather than trying to trick Instagram into recommending your content, make content that’s worth sharing!
Engagement
Engagement is the name of the game for winning at Instagram in 2025.
If someone comments on your posts, especially if they ask a question, be sure to reply to them. It doesn’t have to be much. A simple emoji can do the trick if you’re only acknowledging a positive comment.
You should also strive to engage with potential clients, other designers, and other people in your network. Not only will this build rapport with these people and businesses, but it will make your name more visible.
Collaboration
A collaborative post with other designers, realtors, or other influencers in the design space can help boost your following and spread your name. Instagram has a feature that allows you to collaborate on a post with another user. This post will show up in the feeds of both accounts’ followers and have both profile names attached to it, expanding the reach of the post and making it easy for users to interact with both you and whoever you collaborated with. This can be used to great effect when showcasing a partner company’s work in a home you designed.
Leverage Insights
Remember the Instagram insights that business accounts have access to? Use those! You’ll be able to learn about your audience’s activity and habits, and be able to post content at the ideal times. While much depends on the will of Instagram’s algorithm, you only make it easier for yourself if you post when your followers are likely to be online. You can also narrow down your content pillars by identifying any types of content that are consistently underperforming. As you gain followers and make more posts, your analytics will become more detailed.
Using Ads
Instagram ads are very useful, as the parent company Meta has detailed data on its users, as well as a robust ad platform that allows you to target precisely.
Before taking advantage of ads of any kind, you need to identify the traits of your ideal client. Writing down their demographics, interests, and lifestyles will make targeting them easier. From there, you can target as specific as you like. As an interior designer, you will likely want to aim ads at people who live in your local area. Another important consideration may be income level, so you can filter out potential clients who likely can’t afford your services.
Conclusion
Instagram can be a powerful and fun social media tool for interior designers. The visual focus should make designers feel right at home, and many creatives will be sitting on photos and videos that they’re just dying to share with the world! As with any marketing effort, diving into Instagram marketing requires an upfront investment in creating a strategy, as well as a daily or weekly effort to create, post, engage, analyze, and adjust. If you need expert guideline in developing a marketing plan for your interior design business, don’t hesitate to book a call with our coaches at Pearl Collective.