Online Marketing Strategies for Interior Designers – Revisited

online marketing tips

We’ve spent a great deal of time and effort during the past year working to educate and illuminate the ways in which online marketing strategies can help you grow your interior design business. Looking back, we can’t help but wonder if you have taken any of this information and put it to use for your own business.

You see, here’s the thing, the strategic marketing information we’ve shared with you over the past 12 months was not mere opinion. We’ve done the research and consulted the experts in internet marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing, as well as an expert in designer marketing. Based on what we’ve learned from them, we believe we’ve put together a fairly comprehensive list of strategies and techniques that, if used correctly, will enable you to:

• Increase traffic to your design website

• Enhance your online reputation

• Grow your email subscriber list

• Boost engagement with your audience

• Enable you to build relationships with both clients and prospects

These are all important marketing goals for any business with a presence online these days. But, they are goals that require a focused effort and consistent implementation.

New Year’s Business Resolutions

As we head into a new year, it’s important to remember that some 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail within the first 30 days. This is true of business objectives as well as for personal goals.

The reason for such a stunning failure rate is simple: New goals are often too general and vague. Successful goal setting requires specific, realistic objectives, combined with a comprehensive plan to achieve them. To say you want to “increase sales this year” is simply too ambiguous to maintain focus.

Instead, you should target a number: a percentage or dollar increase in the number of sales you want to make over last year, for example.According to HostGator.com, if you want to improve your design business in 2019, you should resolve to:

• Review and update your business plan

• Consider your staffing needs for the New Year

• Check in with your customers

• Revisit your pricing

• Research new software solutions

• Create a customer review policy

• Do a website review

• Improve your marketing plan

Of course, that last one is where we have been focusing all year and, to help you accomplish this most important goal, we would like to remind you of some of the many posts we’ve published about online marketing strategies for interior designers.

Click on the links below to read them again (or for the first time):

• Designer Marketing Tips – Interior Designer Marketing Plan

• Online Marketing Tips – SEO Basics

• Designer Marketing Tips – The Role of Content in Online Marketing

• Designer Marketing Tips – Facebook Advertising - 3 Types of FB Ads

• Grow Your Interior Design Business – Analyzing Your Market

• Online Marketing Tips – Why Video Marketing Work Best for Online Sales

There were many more than these few, of course. So, if you're still curious, feel free to visit the TD Fall Blog and take a look around.Looking for more about online marketing strategies, interior designer marketing tips, new design trends, and design product ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Online Marketing Tips – SEO Basics

We’ve been sharing some valuable information lately about the importance of organic SEO for your design business website. We’ve also shared some insight into the techniques and strategy for effective optimization of your content, whether your website pages or blog posts.In this post, we’d like to share some of the reasons you should be following this valuable advice, by offering some of the most basic SEO information you need to understand why it’s so critical to your success.How to Get Found by Google When you publish information to your website, the copy on your Home Page or a blog post, Google "spiders" (automated software) go into each article and scans the copy for "keywords." These spiders are analyzing everything about that page to determine where to index that page within the billions of pages in the Google search engine.For example, if you go to www.Google.com and search under the keyword phrase “interior design,” you will notice something like 1,750,000,000 pages are indexed in Google for this phrase in the search results (and this number is constantly changing).Google will rank a page or article based on over 200 sets of criteria, which can include: design elements, programming style, ease of navigation, popularity, and many more. Since Google is scanning your content, you can see the value of trying to give Google as much "help" as possible.Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about suggesting to Google where to index your content in their search results (SERPs). This is known as “optimized content.”If you want to be indexed under the keyword phrase “interior design,” then you need to repeat that keyword phrase regularly in your content, thus telling Google that your optimized content is related to the business of interior design.Since Google has the power to place you anywhere it wants in their SERPs, all you can do is optimize pages and posts to suggest to the search engine giant where you should be indexed for their searchers.If you are trying to get indexed on the first page of the search results for the phrase “interior design”, you must realize that you are competing with entire websites, more than 1 billion, in this case, that may have dozens of pages which collectively try and rank (or get indexed highly) for the same phrase. It would be nearly impossible for a single blog post to compete with all of those websites. It will be much easier to create content that ranks well for what’s known as a “long-tailed keyword phrase.”Instead of “interior design” (a broad phrase), a long-tailed version might be “interior design for 3 bedroom home” (3.9 million pages in the return). In other words, the more narrowly targeted the keyword phrase used in your content, the more likely you will rank highly in Google's search results for that phrase.The higher you rank (the best spot is page 1 in the top 5 results), the more people will click on the link to your page or post. The more people that click on your link, the more exposure you get, etc. This will be fun for you once you've optimized a few pages and posts – and have seen the results!For more, click here for a free SEO Guide from NGNG Enterprises.Looking for more interior design tips, trends, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Online Marketing Tips - What is Organic SEO?

It’s a new year, let’s learn something! Organic SEO is a strategy of using targeted phrases to direct the search engines toward the content on your website. The techniques for doing this vary, from “on-page” to “off-page” SEO.On-page SEO involves using assorted keyword phrases within the content you publish, such as titles, headers, images, and the page URLs. These phrases should also be placed within the “Metadata”, the information that exists “behind the scenes” of each page and post, but which the search engines use to identify and rank your content.Variations of your targeted phrases will also be used within the text you create, as well; this allows you to take advantage of a search engine feature known as “synonymous search”.Off-page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of your website through the act of getting links from other websites; a completely different strategy.How to get startedAn important step toward beginning an effective SEO strategy is to perform market research and keyword analysis. Finding high-value phrases that identify your website as a source for valuable information within your niche is critical to bringing the search engines, and an audience, to you. Since any number of phrases may be available to help you define your subject and purpose, it’s important to determine which phrases offer the greatest potential for bringing visitors to your website.A note on single-word keywords – Single word KWs are basically useless, as they tend to be vague yet highly competitive, e.g., “coaching” is vague. Do you mean football, basketball, baseball, life, business, health, wellness coach?As you can see, if you are a life coach who targets the single word, you will be competing with every type of coach in the world – not just with those in your niche. The use of 2, 3, and 4-word phrases is a far more effective SEO strategy. Known as “long-tail keywords”, such phrases are much more descriptive and are highly valued by the search engines.There are basically two levels of research and analysis:

• Basic – This keyword research is designed to discover related phrases that are actually being searched, offer the potential for traffic to your website and have manageable competition from other websites.
• Advanced – Advanced keyword analysis is a phrase-by-phrase study, designed to determine which of the phrases discovered present the greatest opportunities for moving up on the search engine results page (SERPs) for each phrase.

Basic research is very much about raw numbers, how many searches, how much traffic you might see, and how much competition there is from other websites.Advanced research and analysis, on the other hand, provides you with valuable information on how easy or difficult it will be to move into the Top Ten in the search results, for each phrase you may choose to target.Benefits of Organic SEOWhile offering no guarantees of placement in the search results, organic SEO is a proven strategy for gaining the attention of the search engines and bringing traffic to your website. It is cost-effective and, once a list of high-value keywords has been developed and the techniques have been learned, is fairly simple to implement. However, it is not an overnight solution. It requires patience and a commitment to consistently implement the strategies and techniques outlined above.Compared to pay-per-click advertising, however, organic SEO has two great benefits: it is less expensive and your placing in the search results will hold greater value with your target audience (since they tend to heavily discount the paid ads seen in the search results).Looking for more new design trends, tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.