A surefire way to have success and enjoyment in your interior design business is to attract ideal clients. When your style, goals, and values align with the expectations, needs, and values of your clients, magic happens! An ideal client leads to projects that are more fulfilling, but also more profitable, especially in the long term. A client who had a great experience may refer your services to their family and friends, as well as come back for future projects. On the flip side, a non-ideal client will butt heads with you, cause unnecessary drama, and make you doubt your abilities. In this ultimate guide to attracting ideal clients, you’ll learn how to identify your ideal client, attract them, and retain them!
Define Your Ideal Client
Before you can start marketing to and attracting your ideal clients, you need to define them. But where do you start?
Start with the basics. Consider demographics like age, gender, income level, marriage status, and geographical location. Then consider psychographics like values, interests, and aspirations. These traits help build a fictional, idealized character that represents your ideal client. Be as detailed as you can be, and don’t be afraid to make a few different profiles, though try not to make more than two or three distinct ones. You should even go so far as to give these characters names, and you can even use some stock photos to visually represent them.
It’s critical to write down where these ideal clients spend their time. This will help determine where you should market to them. This can include physical locations, like where they shop and what associations or local clubs they are part of. It should also include online spaces like their preferred social media platforms, communities, and news sources.
The importance of identifying their goals, aspirations, and challenges is so that you can address them. How do your design services solve their issues or help them reach their goals? While being specific in defining demographics, don’t be afraid to create non-specific emotional or psychological notes.
If you’re having trouble creating these ideal client profiles, look to your favorite traits about past clients. Those clients don’t have to have been perfect, but there were likely aspects of the project that you thought went well, and can be applied to the construction of your preferred client.
Demographics Starting Points
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Education level
- Occupation
- Life stages (relationship status, children, homeowner status, etc)
Psychographics Starting Points
- Values
- Interests and hobbies
- Lifestyle
- Personality
- Purchasing motivations
- Pain points
Create Your Unique Value Proposition
A unique value proposition (UVP) is a clear statement that explains how your firm solves a customer’s problem and why you do it better than the competition. It’s about showcasing the value that you provide for the specific situation your prospects find themselves in. Finding a niche and specializing can seem scary because it feels limiting. But by niching down and being specific, you are actually more likely to stand out and attract the specific kind of client that suits you.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating your UVP:
- Don’t try to please everyone. You don’t want to be a jack of all trades and master of none; otherwise, you won’t stand out. You’ll never be able to market to everyone, so don’t strive to.
- Study the competition. To contrast yourself with the competition, you need to first understand them. Know what your competitors offer, and how they sell it. See if you can find any gaps in the market, and aim to fill them.
- Identify your unique talents. What do you already do well or differently than everyone else? Highlight these traits, because anything that makes you special can make you stand out, even if it feels irrelevant.
- Define your promise. Clearly define what it is you will do and how you will positively impact the lives of your clients. Make sure it really conveys why someone should choose you over the alternatives!
- Incorporate the UVP into everything. Make sure your statement can be worked into all of your marketing and messaging, so that it permeates all aspects of your business!
The more specialized or unique your services, the better chance you have of becoming the go-to in your field!
Pre-Qualify and Learn to Say No
The truth of the matter is that some clients just aren’t ideal. You can’t please everyone, and you shouldn’t try to. When identifying your ideal client, be sure to also identify a non-ideal client. Mark down the traits that indicate someone is a poor fit for your business, including specific goals or pain points that you can’t solve. This can even include specific interior design styles that you are not knowledgeable about or have no interest in working on.
Use an inquiry form to pre-qualify potential clients. Certain answers to key questions can filter out non-ideal clients with minimal input. For interviews or discovery calls, have a pre-set selection of questions and keep in mind what answers are deal-breakers. There are a few easy ways to have potential clients self-eliminate themselves. One such question is a dropdown selection for their budget range. If you’d like to rule out projects below a certain budget, simply don’t include that as an option. Or, you can be more upfront about it and clearly state your minimums. It’s also useful to ask what services the client is looking for. If they’re simply looking for someone to help them pick paint colors or provide a mood board, they are likely not the kind of client you’re looking for, and you can disqualify them.
Knowing when to say no is a challenge. It can hurt to turn down potential business. But think about how a bad client can affect your daily life. Even if you get paid for the project, a poor fit can keep you busy by hounding you for updates, requesting multiple revisions, calling you at off-hours, and generally being a thorn in your side. Is the extra stress really worth the business? Probably not, especially if you can spend a bit more time and effort on attracting a client that will be a pleasant experience and refer business in the future.
Create Compelling Content
To effectively communicate and share your value proposition, you need content, marketing materials, and other ways to get your message out into the world.
Portfolio
Start with your portfolio. A prospect would likely want to see your body of work before deciding to work with you. You can curate your best work and specifically highlight projects and images that speak to the needs and goals of your ideal client. Utilize storytelling and case studies from happy clients to establish trust with prospects and allow them to relate to and see themselves in the shoes of your past clients. Don’t just focus on the aesthetics. Instead, show how you transformed a space! Your portfolio should look aspirational but attainable, and showing the process and the results is part of this.
Website
Your website can also showcase your value and message specifically to your ideal client. Guide website visitors along the journey you want them to take. For example, clearly display your preferred call-to-action, whether that’s booking a call or filling out a form. Make it easy to find your portfolio, and don’t bog down the homepage with distractions that take away prospects from the things that really matter. And don’t neglect to optimize your website with SEO best practices so that it’s easy for new prospects to find you.
Content
Content marketing is a great way to attract ideal clients while also addressing their pain points directly. Through blog posts, videos, and social media posts, you can express your creativity and answer the burning questions your ideal clients would have. Think back to their goals and aspirations, and speak to those. Always be sure to educate, inspire, and position yourself as the go-to expert, especially in your specific niche. If possible, incorporate client testimonials to showcase how you’ve succeeded in other projects in the past.
Create a Referral Network
The best place to find ideal clients is to get referrals from your existing ideal clients! Satisfied clients referring friends is always a fantastic way to keep building your client base without having to do much extra legwork, but a referral from an ideal client is more likely to result in another ideal client relationship. Like attracts like!
Build out a repeatable system for referrals. This starts by maintaining contact with and nurturing past clients so that they will continue giving referrals long after their project has ended. Next, create an incentive program for referrers, so you can properly thank clients who result in a lot of additional business.
You can also collaborate with partners such as architects, builders, suppliers, and contractors to refer business to each other. If you’re comfortable working with other designers in your region, you can even create relationships with them and refer prospects to each other when a potential client just isn’t a good fit. Sometimes a little bit of goodwill can go a long way!
Working with only ideal clients will drastically increase your everyday enjoyment in your interior design business. A few strategic decisions and some prep work can weed out the bad fits and allow you to work exclusively with the clients who are the best match for your services. Do you need help identifying and targeting your ideal clients? Set up a discovery call with Pearl Collective here.