Interior designers dream of having a beautiful social media presence full of fantastic interior shots and a reputation for design expertise. They also dream of social media being a stylish and easy method of client lead generation. Wouldn’t it be great to ditch the cold calling and the email campaigns and have all of your clients reach out via social media? Well, with some strategy, effort, and consistency, you can definitely use your social platforms to acquire news leads, and even paying clients.
Create an Ideal Client Profile
Before you can effectively reach out to potential clients, you need to create an ideal client profile. This should always be step one when you’re starting to market or look for leads. This profile is a snapshot of the client you’d like to have. Based on your prior experience with good and bad clients, it shouldn’t be hard to build the kind of person you’d prefer to work with.
Start with demographics like age, gender, and income level. These traits can impact what language you use. Then move to psychographics, which is information about a client’s values, lifestyle, and goals. This can help you speak to their aspirations and what they view as important.
Other details may also help build out the ideal client. What are their purchasing habits, and how engaged are they with brands? If you’re targeting businesses, how many employees or how much revenue is ideal for you? What digital tools do they use, or spend time engaging with?
Finally, put all of the information together to create a fictional story about how this person may interact with a company like yours. They should be the type of person for whom your company provides the perfect solution!
Create a Top 10 List
If you can, identify about 10 people you know who are potential clients. This is something you’ll probably pick up on from other people in your network. For example, you may hear about opportunities from referrals or hear about recently sold homes in your area. You may even see something on Instagram, LinkedIn, or another social media platform about a colleague or friend of a friend who seems primed for a design project.
Once you’ve made your list, you can begin your efforts by targeting these ten clients. But don’t just start advertising to them. Instead, look for opportunities to engage naturally and build a relationship before trying to sell to them.
Use Social Listening
Social listening is simply monitoring social media platforms for how people are talking about your company or your industry as a whole. This is a step that many businesses skip over, assuming that they know their industry best. But often, what people are actually saying is different than perception. Just keep in mind that in many cases you will only see the extreme opinions: the very enthusiastic and the very dissatisfied. Consumers who had an average experience that met their expectations tend not to talk about their experience as much as those with strong opinions.
Some third-party social media tools provide social listening features that analyze various common platforms as well as smaller blogs and forums. If you don’t have one of these tools yet, you can still get started simply by looking at a word or hashtag on your social media platform of choice.
Engage with Potential Clients
Social media is a two-way street. You can’t expect to just post content and have instant success. When you receive comments or questions, engage with them! Even if the comment is effectively meaningless, such as a simple “Congratulations!” or “That looks incredible!”, liking the comment or replying with a short thank-you or emoji can go a long way. By engaging directly with the people who took the time to comment on your posts, you are encouraging them to do so again.
Tying this in to social listening, you may find value in contributing to conversations about your industry. Use your personality and your expertise to make a name for yourself in the comments. For example, if a brand or influencer in your space has not answered some questions in their comments, swoop in with your knowledge and help them out! However, don’t be explicitly promotional. It will come across poorly. Instead, think of it as a way for potential clients to start seeing your name come across their screen more and more often, until it’s stuck in their heads!
Move From Comments to DMs
Comments sections are casual and non-committal. But if you can move a commenter to your DMs (direct messages), then you have made a major step forward in lead generation! A direct message is more of a commitment to communicate, and since it’s private, you can actually start talking business. You should always encourage a warm lead in your comments to DM you with questions or further discussion about potential projects. Once you have them here, learn more about what kind of project they might be interested in.
Refine Your Presence
As you learn more about your audience, you’ll be able to refine every aspect of this process. Your content will improve and become better for your ideal client. You’ll master your own brand voice in the comments and form a more distinctive personality. You’ll become more comfortable with privately messaging potential clients. Make a conscious effort to audit and improve.
Use a Third-Party Scheduler
As an interior designer, you probably know better than most that inspiration does not always strike when it’s convenient. That is one of the many reasons why a third-party scheduling tool for social media comes in. These tools allow you to create and schedule social media posts across your various channels. They also often come with other features, including performance insights, competition comparisons, and social listening. Social media may often seem organic and in-the-moment, but it is not difficult to schedule a post and still make it seem authentic and timely. Tools like this will also help you post consistently, which is very important, not only for the users looking at your content, but the algorithms that analyze that content.
Measure What Works and What Doesn’t
Posting blindly and hoping for the best might work sometimes, but it won’t work consistently. Monitor the performance of your posts and identify trends in what worked and what flopped. The first statistics to look at are the basic ones, such as engagement numbers. From there, you’ll want to look a bit deeper, which may require additional tools. Click-through rate will tell you how many users clicked the links in your posts, which can usually be measured on your social media platforms of choice. But then you’ll need to continue tracking these users on your website by monitoring how many leads, conversations, and sales you generate from social media followers. These statistics will require tools that help your social media accounts and website communicate with each other.
Measure these metrics, and set goals for them. If you’re not meeting those goals, you can change your content or your messaging accordingly.