Social Media Marketing for Interior Designers (Darla Powell)

Welcome to the Creative Genius podcast, Darla. Hi, Gail. Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure. it’s pleasure having you. So tell us about Wing That Social. How did that come to be? wow. How much time do you have? My goodness. Okay, well, let’s settle in. I was born. So long, very long story. I’ll make it very short for you. I was a police sergeant for the Miami-Dade Police Department in Miami up until 2017.

And I retired early because I wanted to follow my love for interior design, which I had been doing off and on in an amateur semi professional kind of way over the years. My marketing efforts for the interior design firm, did I say Darla Palinteria’s menopause brain was was pretty aggressive. And I was turned out that I was kind of a savant unbeknownst to me at marketing, digital marketing, particular, social media marketing.

And I had other interior designers saying, how am I seeing you everywhere? You’re in designers today and our ad pro. And I told them, you know, it’s just through my social media efforts, my social media marketing. they said, okay, well here, I’m going to pay you to do that for me. I said, are you kidding me? I don’t have time. I barely have time to do my own. So when I did get really busy with the design firm, I decided, you know, I need to outsource my social media marketing. And I went to ABC marketing firm, one size fits all.

kind of marketing firm and said, Hey, can you do my social and some Google ads for me? And I was super excited about it. And it ended up being awful, really bad. Like the, the creative, the content, their whole strategy was they had zero idea of an interior design business, how it is that we work, what our sales funnels and flow look like. And it was such a miserable experience. And I still had designers coming to me saying, you know, what are you doing? What’s your secret that my wife and I at the time,

looked at each other and said, you know what, there’s a there’s room in the market for this for someone who knows what to do in this niche. And very long story short, wingnut social was born, it was a DBA under the design firm for a while there. And then my wife at the time, which you may have picked up on was at the time. No longer pass. We were about we were running both businesses and really burning both candles at the end, right? We we separated, got divorced, and I had to pick

one, I had a really good business coach. said, if you had to put a gun to your head and pick one, which is kind of violent, I guess, immediately I was like wing nut because it just offered me so much more flexibility, freedom at the time, a lot less headache and mobility. could work from anywhere and knowing my current situation and here we are. So not doing design at the moment, although sometimes I still say, I want to do that again? I figure it’s like having a baby. You you forget the pain and just the beauty of the baby.

But here we are. Winged and social is here. huh. And so how did you become this maven that you are a social media? You just said that you just naturally had a talent, obviously, but yeah, it’s kind of like what comes, what came first? The chicken and the egg, right? So in an authentic way, I just kind of fell into it, right? From being a cop. clearly I’m not really doing a lot of self promotion for being a Sergeant, right? Of the police. But I knew starting a business that I would need to grow my

name, reach and awareness, starting out with the Facebook groups and community groups. And I started teaching myself by, you YouTube studying, going to webinars, going to seminars, going to events and finding out that I had a real knack. And I don’t know you can see behind me, I’m kind of a geek. I have all my little my adult grown adult woman, child, toys, action figures and stuff back there. So I’m kind of a nerd. And I really enjoyed, you know, the the

technical side of it, you know, the social media marketing and it just just grew. I’m just self taught really. But my team at Wingnut, however, I don’t do the actual marketing. They all have their degrees in marketing. So don’t worry about that. you know how to run the business. Exactly. I’m like what I did with the design firm, right? I’m like the big picture person, the rainmaker overseeing all the big picture stuff. But the day to day, the nitty gritty, I’m delegating that.

I like to say I’m the queen of delegation and it works out well. Yeah. Yeah. So what this determines success in social media today, followers engagement. my gosh. Yes. Yes. Yes. And again, I guess this could be a, this could be a 10 hour show. so at the end of the day, the best metric of success for us, for our clients is growing reach and awareness. How many eyes from potential ideal clients are we getting on our

interior design clients accounts, how many leads from their social media are we getting to their sales funnels and that can be their website, their intake forms, their blogs, whatever that looks like for them. How many DMs with direct messages we’re getting from potential clients asking about their services and what it’s like to work with them. Engagement is really important. Followers are kind of important too, as long as they’re quality, right? Not quantity.

because those metrics help to grow the other two things that I mentioned. But there’s, those are the main ones. And of course there’s, there’s all, you know, when I say impressions and then reach and then how many likes you have, you’re kind of, you know, there’s an algorithm there that you have to kind of play the game. But at the end of the day, it’s, it’s a, it’s an investment, right? So you want to make sure that it’s paying off in a way. And those are the three main things that I look for when I go over my client stats or how many website visits are we getting?

You know, the reach and their awareness follower account for me is the last that I look at for sure. Okay. Okay. How do you get to the point where you have lots and lots of followers and how do you do that quickly? I know that’s a big million dollar question. Everybody wants to know that a lot of crying. Are there any hacks? Any ticks? No life yet. Well, okay. So Instagram, when I started Darla Powell interiors,

which is no more. Right. So, I mean, there’s a website for it, but it’ll link you to wing that social. and in 2017 was pretty easy to grow in an organic way. Right. So I went from like zero to 30 some odd thousand followers in a year and a half, something like that. now it’s very difficult because you know, Instagram is owned by Metta and it’s a publicly owned, publicly traded company, right? They want to appease their shareholders and that means making money.

So what they’ve done and they’re doing constantly, it’s always changing is they throttle their algorithm to the lowest part where you can go organically. That’s why you might be seeing like one or two or three or four followers in an organic way. If you’re not using a strategy per month on your account, because they want you to pay, right? If you, if you’re familiar with Instagram, you’ll see you, you see boost this post or, you pay, put money behind this post for some more engagement. And that is a really quick,

way to do it. If you want to throw 20 or $30 behind there, if you want to gain followers, and it can be good or bad and bad because you can just throw money behind a well performing post and you’ll gain some interest in some reach. But it’s better if you can actually go in there and run those ads from Facebook manager and target your audience to your demographic, right?

But that is a nice workaround and you don’t really have to spend a lot of money to do that So that’s that’s like the fast track if you want to spend money, right? That’s almost the answer to everything in life The slow track is to have a really solid strategy long-term strategy for organic marketing and that is to make sure That you have your content pillars down your voice your messaging your positioning. You have your hashtag strategy You’re using SEO searchable keywords in your captions

and being consistent, right? I’ve seen so many clients, not just interior designers, but vendors, architects who said, you know, I tried Instagram for a month or two and it just didn’t work. There you go. Yeah. It’s not going to, know, you have to be, you have to be consistent because interior design is not a small ticket item. Even if you’re on the more affordable side, right? It’s, it’s a lot of money for people and they, you have to have on an average

Like say you’re getting a widget or something, six or seven touch points with people to get to know and like and trust. But for interior design, it can be double or triple that just because there’s so much at stake, right? There’s a lot of money. There’s a lot of, people get very intimidated by inviting someone into their home, right? To judge them, which is essentially what we’re doing, whether we say we’re not, we are not. So that it’s all very long term.

lay and you just have to be consistent, put your face out there, build those relationships with your followers. You can’t just throw stuff up and not respond when they comment. There’s, mean, I could go on forever. There’s just so many variables that plug in to any given account that count for their success, which is why we’re, it’s so important that we do the strategy piece. The strategy is the key to everything. Otherwise, if you’re just throwing tactics at the walls, like

throwing spaghetti at the wall, right? Yeah, you wouldn’t write a book without an outline, right? Of how it’s going to begin, middle and what the end looks like right to you. So marketing is it’s very similar. You want to know what you’re writing in the book, what the plot line is and what your desired outcome is. Are you seeing designers getting a lot of clients from their social media? Yeah, a lot. I have clients that have been with wingnut for

I want to say going on three or four years, but it might be even four or five years now who are constantly getting DMS in their Instagram. And they’ll tell you Julie Anne Hendrickson of Hendrickson interiors is one and she’ll, she’ll be the first to tell you she gets, I might be pulling this number. wouldn’t say like 75 to 80 % of her clients from Instagram, from her Instagram presence. And that didn’t happen overnight, right? Which I’m going back to the long game.

She’s been with us for quite a while. I don’t have her metrics in front of us, but it It took a hot minute, right? And building her up and following those best practices. But now she’s plug and play, right? She’s just coasting on all of that work that we’ve done and we just keep maintaining it and posting. But all the time I have guests on my show designed by wing net social all the time who are getting guests. Elisa Popka is getting, guest clients from Instagram. She’s not a client of mine, but just all the time. And

When designers come to me and they say, well, I’ll give you an example of a recent sales call I had. She came to me and she said, you know, I get all my clients from referrals and I’ve never gotten a single client from Instagram. I went, went to her Instagram to look at it and she hadn’t been posting from Instagram. She hadn’t been doing anything on Instagram. goes, I don’t believe Instagram works. I’m well, you’re, you’re self-fulfilling. Yeah. It’s definitely not working for you. Yeah. So.

Well, yeah, you just, it’s, it’s not like you can, no silver bullet here, right? You’ve got to put in the work to get this, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. how long does it take for a follower to typically reach out to a brand and engage with them? I know you said about seven, seven or up to 21 touches. Yeah. You know, it depends on the something you may have even observed yourself and something’s kind of funny is that I’ve seen a lot of the big ticket interior design clients.

won’t always engage. Right? You’ll be there and you’ll be constant and posting. And then they’ll pick up the phone. This happened to me with my firm, and I’ve heard this from clients, and they’ll pick up the phone and say, I’ve been following me on Instagram for a year, two years, three years, and I want to hire you to do a, B, C, or D. And I’m like, who are you? I’ve never seen you anywhere commenting on my, on my Instagram or anything. so that’s the answer to your question is, who knows, right? It really, there’s no set.

It’s going to take X amount of time because it really depends on who you are as a designer, who you, what you’re putting out as content, your competition, your service area, the nature of your content. There really is no, sure. You’re gonna, if you start posting this with this form, you’re going to get X amount of this, right? Because all those variables are different. Your, your work is different and they appeal to certain clients might be different, might be more niche. There might be less of an audience, but you know what I mean?

So even when clients come to me at wingnut because I do the sales for wingnut and they say, okay, how many followers can I expect after X amount of months? And I said, you know, I would love to tell you that you’re going to get this amount of followers or this amount of leads. And I could, I’d be blowing smoke. Right. And anybody that tells you that run, right. All I can do is give you the case studies from clients that I’ve had and worked with for a while, you know, and that have been successful.

I will say typically it does take anecdotally, right? My experience from what I’ve observed, it takes about three to six months of doing everything a hundred percent, you know, the way we do it with our strategy or just being consistent. Let’s at least start there, right? Before you really start building up that momentum. know, sometimes I’ve seen clients that get their first leads in a month or two. That’s not typical.

It isn’t. So it usually does take about three or six months. It’s, it’s, it’s a numbers game at the end of the day and how many people you’re reaching and, you know, learning your account and your ideal client. But yeah, there, there really is no set. is binary kind of thing. I wish it was and make my job a lot easier. I’m sure. Well, tell us a little bit about what services you provide to designers.

So our first major most popular services are done for you social media management where we do full service white glove, white glove, white glove, white glove, glove, social media management for designers, architects to the trade vendors, furnishing vendors, cabinet makers, that kind of thing. And that is where after we’ve done sat down and done your strategy, which takes us about three or four weeks to research put together, researching your market area, your ideal client, your competitors.

And by competitors, mean in a very, not like in a, you know, we’re out to get you kind of thing because a rising tide lifts all boats. fully believe that. But in the digital realm, you really need to see what your competition is doing because when we’re doing your strategy, we’re determining your positioning and your voice and how you can stand out among that noise. And we’re looking to see what rooms, what openings you have in order to get in there and be seen first.

Right. To be seen first by not just anyone, but by your ideal client, right? Someone you want to work with and do the types of projects you want to do. Okay. And, and I think for a lot of people, they may not, they feel like they should be doing it in house. And a lot of people do even some of the top people. And there is a point when they should start looking at outsourcing when and why should they do that? well,

Certainly when you don’t have the time to do it yourself, right? Because you know, you’re, if you’re out, there’s a rainmaker for your firm or if you have top designers or people you’re paying 40, 50, $60 an hour, you’re making $250 an hour as a principal or more. You don’t want to be sitting on Instagram, right? And wasting that time. You want to have a bigger picture for that. That that’s definitely when you should be outsourcing. When you have enough of your marketing budget to spend to outsource on that for sure. You don’t want to be spending money. You don’t have on.

you know, marketing for your interior design firm, the anywhere from five to 7 % of your growth should be your marketing budget, depending on what you’re comfortable with there. That’s, you know, I, I tried to outsource mine pretty early in the beginning, cause I just didn’t have time to sit on Instagram and it was just me and one other person. So I think your mileage may vary there. We’ve, we’ve done consulting and we’ve done our hybrid plan and we’ve done strategies for firms.

who do have someone in house, like an intern, that to give them that direction to do that. So that’s one way we work with clients as well. So it really just kind of depends on you, your comfort level, your room for the investment and your knowledge, whether it’s your knowledge and expertise on actually doing the marketing, because it’s not a hobby, right? Or if you have someone on staff that like I do with their education and marketing and all of that thing.

So if you do hire somebody full time, like for marketing, you know, Susan McNuggets wants to hire a full-time marketer for her firm to do all of her social media as you’re looking anymore, like 60, 70, $80,000 for that, right? So you have to determine, you know, what that’s, what that’s worth to you. Should you be outsourcing? Should you do that in-source? And we do have some firms that we have grown to the point to where they took it back in-house.

Because we grew them so huge that they actually needed to have a media team in-house to do their own on-site video and all of the stuff that goes with their PR and everything, which I’m not sad about that. I’m actually very proud that we were able to take them there. So it really just depends on you, your comfort level, and where you’re at in your business. Okay. Well, and there are times that

I think we have a lot of our clients that don’t know, should I do social media first? Should I do PR first? Should I hire somebody? What should I do? But, is there a size of firm that you recommend should probably be seriously considering social media outsourcing? Outsourcing? most of our clients are at the million dollar mark starting, right? That’s usually where their sweet spot to where they have enough that they can budget it to have it done well and have it done right. And they’re not wasting their money, but we have.

Like I said, we started with Julianne Hendrickson and she said this on my podcast. I’m not giving away any secrets. She was at half a million mark when she started with us. So it really just depends on you, your profitability, where, know, where you can, how much you want to grow, how much you want to scale, where you want to put that budget counterintuitively. Although this, this is counterintuitive for a reason. Designers who are new to the business or designers who don’t really have a lot of work or reach and awareness or

should be spending a higher percentage of their budget on marketing because you have to grow, you have to get out there. Like I didn’t, I did it myself, but when I was starting my design firm, part of the reasons I probably got divorced is cause I was never off of social media. You know, there were so many hours put into that. So if you equated that to marketing investment, right, it’s a little higher. So yeah, it just, it just really depends. would say that for us,

The sweet spot is probably the million dollar firm, there’s first firms that are a lot smaller that are more profitable. So it really just depends. And if you want to scale. Sure. Yeah. Cause you don’t, you don’t want to have too many clients coming in if you can’t handle them. Exactly. So that is a factor that will happen. If somebody has the option, should they outsource or should they do it internally? If, if you’re just being really honest with them.

Yeah. Well, it depends. It depends on their skills. It depends on how much time they want to spend doing it or how much time someone on their staff can spend doing it. Cause it really is a full time job, even just doing Instagram well and doing it to where it’s profitable is a full time job. And of course you add other channels on there. I mean, if you have someone that has their masters in marketing or their degree in marketing on staff and they’re not too busy doing design work, do it in house, but, make sure that they have.

strategic vision in mind, right? And that does include the positioning, the market research, your competitor research, your content pillars, what that looks like, how it’s appealing to ideal clients, there’s so much that gets baked into there. And it’s a lot, it can be very overwhelming. The biggest pain point that I see from designers who are coming to me are just like, I’m just overwhelmed, I don’t have time, I have no idea what to post, when to post it.

So if that’s something you just don’t want to deal with, you don’t want to be responsible for a W-2 for someone on your staff, I would definitely outsource it. But I would make sure that if you’re going to interview firms, especially for design, that they have experience working with interior design and that vernacular and how to write the captions and what that sales process looks like. Otherwise, you’re going to have a bad time. How do you find the right person to work with you as an outsource company?

to do the social media. When you’re interviewing interior design clients, right, you want to make sure that they’re a good fit, right? If they vibe with you, they’re your kind of people for one thing, you want to make sure that there’s someone that you align with that you want to work with. And you want to look at their history, their experience and other clients that they’ve worked with success stories, referrals from those clients to make sure that they do a really good job. But not just that the feed is pretty.

the bet that they’re actually they have case studies or they have metrics or they have someone that says, yeah, you know, I actually did get leads. I actually did get clients from that. And that requires doing some research, maybe reaching out to some past clients. But it really is. There’s a lot of I don’t want to disparage anybody or be smirking anybody, but there’s a lot of hobbyists that are out there that are purporting to do marketing finger quotes, you know, for

social media and marketing and they are right there throwing up images, they’re putting on a filter, they’re doing the thing, right? People are having content on their page, but there’s no real meat behind it, right? There’s no real strategy. There’s no real outreach behind it. So just make sure that they’re doing growth outreach, that they are following the metrics. They’re making sure that things are growing and not just followers, which seems to be the lowest hanging fruit of the biggest metric, but

you know, how many are website visits up website clicks, are people actually looking diving in deeper? Or is your engagement percentage going up, right? Because that’s one of the biggest metrics that anyone looks for if you’re trying to do influencer marketing, or if you want to get a licensing deal, if you want to be on HGTV, if you want to do anything like that, they’re looking at your engagement rate percentage. For the interior design industry last I checked this might may or may not be current.

The average engagement rate was like 1.7 % or so. like per like, see if you have a hundred posts or whatever, you know, that’s, that’s the engagement rate. And we’re able to get our clients in the four and fives, which is very healthy. And when big corporations look at that to say, Hey, Susan McNuckets, I want to hire you to be our spokesperson for, for this or to design a line for us. That is a huge metric that looking at. They want to see that more than they want to see a hundred thousand followers.

You know, they’d rather see someone with 10,000 followers with a very high engagement rate than 100,000 followers with a 0.025 engagement rate. Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, and I think those are valid things for people to be aware of because I think people are so focused on getting number of followers like top line revenue, which really isn’t as important as how much you keep, right? Yeah. So those are some of the things that you should be paying attention to if you’re listening.

Let’s talk a little bit about some of the other software or the other social media sites What’s happening these days with it does LinkedIn work for people does Facebook work for people? What this Pinterest dead what’s going on Pinterest is kind of dead for me. Yeah, it’s not I’ll tell okay So let’s start with you started you said LinkedIn first. So LinkedIn is LinkedIn is really great for commercial interior designers, right?

If you are a commercial interior designer and you’re trying to reach those businesses that might be your ideal client, it’s terrific. But my tip at this time, it could change, right? Is to not really do a lot of work with your business page because you don’t get a lot of reach from your business page. Like, you know, Darla or wing that socials business page. We put stuff out there, but crickets, nobody really cares. Nobody really looks at business pages. But if you are the,

face of your interior design firm, do your post personal page and post business updates from your personal page. It’s an engage. That’s a lot more. You get a lot more traction from that. I don’t, could change in their algorithm, but that is my number one tip there. And if you’re, if your clients are white collar professionals, that’s a really good place. Sometimes it’s a good secondary platform next to Instagram. Facebook is Facebook still relevant? no.

But also, yes, right. So Facebook is really good, we find for smaller firms, decorating firms, staging firms, firms that if you have time to get into those groups, all the little local groups in your service area and comment or get referrals, though, that’s still really kind of important. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of work there to be done for the payoff. Business pages there again.

They don’t really do a lot. Nobody really cares about business pages. Sometimes they’ll go and look. So it’s good to have so they can, you know, verify that you’re real, but no, not so much. Tik TOK is growing. We’ve had designers on the show that have really grown a nice following on Tik TOK just by showing reels of their befores and afters.

As far as from a local perspective though, in your service area, it’s a little more, it’s a little more challenging because you got to make sure you’re doing the hashtags and the, and the local marketing there. It’s, it’s definitely impactful on a national scale. And Pinterest is really, really good. If you have a good blog, right? If you’re really informative, if your blog is growing, if you’re a terrific writer and from the blog, getting traffic to your website from Pinterest, long as you have that.

post on Pinterest optimized exactly so that when they do go to your website, it is exactly what they thought they were getting and they don’t bounce right off. But bang for the buck, even for commercial designers, Instagram is hands down like the runaway train. And you’re trying to money there. Yeah, yeah, for sure. If you could only pick one, it would be Instagram, even if you’re a commercial designer with LinkedIn a hot second. Okay. And how about video over

just regular posts. a couple of years ago, excuse me, a couple of years ago, Instagram was really pushing video, right? Cause they were a feared of the tick tock, right? Cause tick tock was going crazy with videos. So they were really pushing the reels in the algorithm. They got a lot of pushback from celebrities and high, high grand muckety muck poobahs who said, no, put it back to an image source. That’s what we like about Instagram. We want to go see pretty images. So they throttled that back some.

But they still put a lot of weight on video on Instagram. And it’s not just the weight on one thing. It’s a, it’s a combination of weight. Stories get a certain amount of pull. Reels get a certain amount of pull. Carousels get a certain amount of pull at any given time. Static posts, you know, if you’re using trending audio on your reels, what that looks like. And it’s always changing. That’s why we, keep up with that with the metrics every month and we see, you know, okay, this post is working really well. Let’s do some more of that.

Let’s do less of the other and the next month it can be totally different. Well, it’s always changing. All the algorithms are constantly changing. So yeah, I like to call that job security. Yeah, definitely job security. All right. Well, we are almost at the end of our time and I love to ask people at the very end, what are three takeaways that you would like to pull out of what we talked about and share with our listeners?

Definitely the first one is you have to be on social media, right? Unless you’re going to be selling your business next year and you don’t want to do it anymore. You have to be on some form of social media and you have to be that’s one, right? There’s a lot of pushback still and you know, it’s still in the design industry about even being on social to well actually one a your ideal clients do live on social. Believe it or not older. There’s an older demographic on Instagram and people who are high end.

high end clients are people and they go on Instagram. Trust me when I tell you are number two is you have to be consistent. You can’t do it for a month or two, two to three posts a week and not get anything from it and say, well, I tried. I see. I proved it didn’t work. You have to be consistent. And number three, which isn’t something we talked about, which is something that is incredibly important though, especially if you are the face of your business is you need to be the face of your business. need to show yourself.

You need to get on video. You need to talk to your followers as if they were your client. And if you’re not doing that now and you start doing that, I know it’s a scary thing. I still get scared of being on video and I’ve done over 400 episodes of my podcast. Well, when you start doing that and then you start, the clients start seeing you and your personality and they start clicking with you and you’re going to start getting calls that are like, you know, feel like I know you. That’s why I called you. That’s why I want to work with you. I watch you on X, Y, or Z.

I think those would be the three biggest things in the time that we have when it comes to social media, biggest tips that I would give right now. Love that. Darla, great stuff. Thank you for being here and we appreciate your knowledge and you sharing some of those great tips, whether they come to you or they don’t, at least they have some things to take away. Thank you again. ma’am. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. My pleasure.

Thanks Darla for joining Gale on the podcast and sharing your insights on social media marketing. What are you doing for your social media? And did you get any ideas for future efforts? Let us know. Tune in next week when Gale chats with Jeff Standridge, a consultant who is an expert in innovation who will teach you how to apply innovative thinking to your business.