We have previously covered on this blog many aspects of the business of interior design often focusing on sales and marketing issues. Mostly marketing on the internet using sites like Facebook but also covering sales issue for interior designers with retail spaces. The following articles give more…

Let’s start. Facebook, by default, will not do all the bits that I would imagine you would probably want it to do. After you have created a basic page for the first time you will probably struggle to figure out how to make it just right. You may well get confused and frustrated, I know I did. Then you will figure out that actually it’s not possible to do what you want to do on a default Facebook Fan Page. You will need to use Facebook Applications to change various bits of the page. There are a plethora of these applications, I’ll tell you the ones you need to know to produce a reasonable stab at a first IMPROVEMENT over what you already have.

OK here are the various key parts of the page that you will have to alter and work with (point number 1 you should already have done yourself). I list the parts of the screen first and then tell you afterwards what to do about each.

1. Get your business name and image added to the top left hand corner. Add you contact details and the like to the info tab.

2. Your vanity url eg KOTHEA’s is www.facebook.com/kothea. Here is a blog post I wrote earlier on this potentially tricky subject.

3. If you have read all our posts over the last year or so you will know that we keep saying GET A BLOG AND WRITE EVERY WEEK. I won’t dwell on the subject, you just need to do it for a plethora of reasons. However once you have a blog you will need to put it on Facebook as well as where you originally write it. you will need to use an application to avoid duplicating your effort. Like This.

4. Tabs. You will need to add new tabs containing the information about your organisation that you consider relevent. e.g. compare   this “traditional info” tab to this “additional info” tab . (Traditional vs. Additional). The frist one is from Pepsi and at first you might think what a poor show they have made of the tab. They have not. the problem is facebook. pepsi put the minimum amount of information on a page that Facebook says you have to have. Then, like KOTHEA, we put all the juicy bits onto another tab that we have control of. Far from perfect but that’s life.

5. Then you will want to customise the bits in the left hand side column. Again, www.facebook.com/kothea shows you some buttons we added on the left hand side to link to our twitter account, our real blog, our flickr feed and a final button to prompt an action to contact us via our real web page. You get the idea and can probably see scope to add many more buttons or actions or images that we have not considered.

How do I do those 5 things?:

1. You should have figured this bit out yourself. on your fan page just look for a mini “pencil” like image appearing near the bit you want to change. click it and change it. Get a nice big logo on there.

2. I refer again to this post <here>.

3. A Facebook application called SOCIAL RSS is used by about 500,000 people. This is how you get the RSS feed of your blog onto a new Facebook Tab. Just click the “Go To Application” button on the top left hand corner. It’s free and it works. There is also a slightly better/faster paid-for version, probably not worth the extra yet.

4. For an “extended info tab” you will need the aptly named EXTENDED INFO APPLICATION – click to go there. Again it is free. Here is KOTHEA’s example. The application works by creating a BLANK TAB, you then use the application to create all the fields (bits) on it. It is NOT straightforward to use. I would say 3/10 difficulty (with 10/10 being impossible). So persevere and you will get there.

5. To create new fields on the left hand side Facebook have kindly produced the Static FBML application. Click here to go to the page and add the application to your profile with the button in the top left hand corner. FBML is a bit like HTML. So if you do not know any html you will find this DIFFICULT (9/10). But if you already know HTML then Facebook and their application will only confuse you for a little while before you figure it out (3/10). I would imagine that with FBML you can give your Facebook fan page a similar look and feel to your web site – if you really want to do that.

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But let’s go back two steps.

Firstly, in the UK Google is THE dominant search engine. We, KOTHEA, advertise to interior designers and I run similar campaigns on Yahoo and Bing. I can tell you that 95% of the impressions and clicks come from Adwords. So if you are short on time just focus on Adwords. It is a similar scenario in the US but Google’s monopoly is not so great there and Yahoo is more prominant.

Secondly, advertising through Facebook and Adwords is different proposition. This is because the audience that sees your ad has arrived at your ad through a quite different process. In Adwords you get put in front of people who type in the keywords you believe to be relevant to your product/service offering ie people who are actively looking at your keywords NOW eg they may have just typed “Find Interior Designer In London”.

Whereas in Facebook the users’ profiles are analysed so you can choose their demographics or select by keywords in their profile that match your target market eg keywords “Yacht Owner” and age profile 20+. Your ad is then displayed to all 20+ year olds who own up to being – or who claim to be – yacht owners. The Facebook ads are displayed periodically (and repeatedly) and could be displayed when the recipient is organising a cinema date with friends – or it could be displayed when they are researching interiors products for their yacht, you just don’t know.

I appreciate that my description is a little negative towards Facebook but there are benefits and dis-benefits of each approach to audience selection. In some scenarios Facebook will be better for you. So you, the advertiser, must appreciate that when your ad is displayed the person seeing it on Facebook will probably be at VERY different point in their interior designer selection process than someone who sees your ad on Adwords.

So if the abovementioned Yacht Owner is typing in “Find Interior Designer In London” into Google then I suggest it is likely that he/she is VERY interested in your services as an interior designer NOW. However if your advert is displayed to them in Facebook there is no guarantee WHATSOEVER that the Yacht Owner is interested in having anything interior designed at this moment, or ever, BUT they might be.

So think about the AIDA model ie Awareness-Interest-Desire-Action. The AIDA model represents a potential customers interest in your service. Your initial contacts with customers create awareness of your interior design service. You then hope to move them through the ‘customer voyage’ by increasing their interaction with your organisation to a point of action when they decide to commission you. I would suggest that your Facebook ad is more geared towards ‘Awareness’ part of customer acquitision whereas your Adwords ad is more geared towards an impending purchase-related ‘Action’.

Furthermore it might be a generally reasonable assumption that Facebook “Yacht Owners” probably own yachts and you can refine that to indicate the owners possible levels of affluence (eg simplistically to: Superyacht Owner). However someone typing “Find Interior Designer In London” could be very affluent or not. They could be someone like me who works for a fabric house trying to prospect for customers or they could be a potential customer looking for a designer for a restaurant or hotel or villa or, well lots of reasons. What I am trying to say here is that lots of types (segments) of people using your keywords in google may NOT match your target audience even though they are typing in the ‘right’ words to the Google search engine. So you are faced with the difficulty of writing copy that attracts only the right people and does not cause expensive clicks from people who are never going to buy from you. You are also faced with the dilemma of how to tailor your one ad to many segments (hotel-villa-yacht-restaurant owners etc). Also the further dilemma of what keyword-ad combinations actually work.

There’s more to go into on this subject but I’ll distill the rest into some recommendations. So without further ado here is what I think you should do:

1. Facebook

• Write an ad that is positional of your services. More of an ad to further your brand awareness rather than selling your services today.
• Use graphics where possible.
• Be truthful.

2. Adwords

• Write LOTS of different ads and get Adwords to rotate them and for it to choose the best ones.
• Use the keywords in the ads as keywords get highlighted in the ad.
• Really, really think what your customers will be searching for. Ideally ask some existing customers so you know for sure.
• Take Adwords suggestions for capitalisation. eg it suggests I use KotheA and neither KOTHEA nor kothea. This draws the eye to the ad by using mixed capitalisation.
• Use graphics where possible.
• Be truthful.

If you search through my blog there are other related posts on these subjects. Look at the category “The Business of Interior Design” or the tag “Sales & Marketing In Interior Design” – they may well also pull up related blogs by other people.

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Maison & Objet said: 2010′s trends are for Grey, Linen, Pink, Natural Wood Finishes, Metalics, Over-scaled Motifs, Stripes & Ethnic.

Kelly Hoppen said: LINEAR SHABBY CHIC,

Colours:  neutrals still rock and always will. But with added bits like art, photography etc. can be anything and everything

Carpets and rugs: PATTERN, SHAG and THICK PILES with a comfortable sinking feeling.

Walls: seductive and edged and capped in metals. Wallpaper will be also be massive this year and it will all be textural.

- Floors: there will be a lot of wood in all colours

Farrow & Ball said:

industrial colour trends – earthy shades of stone, clay, chalk and brick. Soft grey neutrals and inky darks. Uplift with splashes of citrus shades.

aquatic trends: subtle natural colours contrasting with strong inky blues

urban decay: strong vibrant colours with a vibrant edge, use dark and dramatic colours and inject zingy bright colours.

glitz and glamour: use rich opulent shades alongside shimmering metallics. Exotic combining colour and excess. The key is a myriad of colours.

We say: Interior Designers do not normally push particular products. Manufacturers have a bias towards what their R&D (or whims) have told them to sell. I’d always give more credence to what designers like Kelly Hoppen have to say. Fortunately for here she took the time to write those thoughts on her blog and unfortunately for many of you…you didn’t. HAVE MORE CONFIDENCE IN WHAT YOU DO, tell us about it and trends blog post is the easiest thing in the world to do.

Unfortunately after a few weeks you run out of things to write.

So…

DESIGNERS: “WHAT DO I BLOG ABOUT?”

Let’s go.

1. Original content. Whatever it is it MUST be original. If you copy articles or republish them Google ‘knows’ that. It won’t help you one jot in your position in search results.  It might be of some benefit to your readership though but why not just post the link to the information preceded by your professional opinion about what is in the link and why is worth visiting? Add value, don’t plagiarise.

2. Apple iPHONES? So many people blog about technology and how wonderful it is. Perhaps, I would suggest, many of those conversations don’t get far over the dinner table or at parties. Why? Mainly because they are of limited interest. And, let’s face it, those discussing technology just use the technology they don’t actually invent the darn thing! HOWEVER you design amazing interiors for houses. That’s interesting to many people, they live in them funnily enough, it is an area that is very interesting to many people. So talk about your job, its one of the few jobs that people envy and are interested in. Don’t be embarrassed!

3. So blog about your last job. More importantly make your last job into several blog posts. Focus on specific aspects of about 200-300 words for each post. Talk about; products, services your approach to the project, what your client thought, how good certain contractors were. Honestly you could go on for a few months based on one project alone (remember short posts with images ideally).

4. Talk about design in general. What’s good, what’s not. And I want to hear YOUR GENUINE opinion please, not a re-hashed version of something that someone told you was “cutting edge design”. True originality and creativity is rare -people with money want to buy that (oh yes, that’s right they are your potential customers).

5. Trends. At the turn of the year I found VERY few designers talking about trends for the year ahead. And many of them were just rehashing colour trends produced by paint maker Farrow and Ball (or whoever it was). YAWN. So who is one of the most sought after media-savvy interior designers in the UK…Kelly Hoppen. Look here, she gives her professional opinion on the year ahead and writes in an engaging way. Trends are one of the easiest things to write about and few of you (with notable exceptions)  did it. Great job Kelly!

6. PLEASE think about your readers. Do NOT write something that will be of interest to all your staff. Why? They are not your customers. Write about something that your customers might be interested in. So we, KOTHEA, sell great fabrics to interior designers but I don’t tend to talk about that. I talk in this blog about stuff that might help you make more money (eventually) by doing better business. Eventually KOTHEA will stick in your brain and you will buy some of our fabrics!

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Note: Before you start make sure you will be working on your business page (fan page) and not your personal page. You really should be using a business page (fan page), be sure what one is before continuing as lots of people go down the wrong route and then have to start all over again, FB is not very forgiving in that respect.

OK I’m going to look at Branding, Promoting, Enhanced Navigation & Content. These are the main areas to add a bit of spice to your FB Fan Page/Business Page.

1. BRANDING.

a. You need a 200 pixels wide x 600 pixels high image of your brand. Maybe you have a logo, if so use that. Upload this to the area to the left of where it says “Wall”.
b. Header. This goes above where it says “Wall”. Change the text here so that it has your company name. What if you get the name wrong? Well if you get the name wrong you cannot change it, so you have to delete the page and start again (as at Feb 2010). So please get it right first time.

c. The same applies to the category of your page, that cannot be changed either. So when you create your page get the category right.
d. If your company is called XYZDesigns then you need http://facebook.com/XYZDesigns as your url. This article <here> tells you how to do that.

2. PROMOTING

a. You probably already understand groups on LinkedIn. Well Facebook (FB) has them as well. Start one or use existing ones like Interior Design Lovers (requires you to be logged in to FB). Promote your page in groups. BUT DO NOT SELL, SELL, SELL. Let people know about the information your FB page will provide them with. Remember further that few people are interested in your business per se, they are more interested in what it can do for them. So talk about solving problems and NOT saying how great you/your services are. The sell-sell way does not usually work.

b. User comments. Engage with your fans, reply to them. Promote yourself to these people and remember that they are already on your page and are taking the time to write something, probably to find out something, so they have more than a passing interest in what you do. Again soft sell not hard sell. Try to help them.

c. Facebook Advertising.

You may have tried Google AdWords advertising or the Yahoo and Microsoft equivalents (they are each very similar to one another). Maybe they have worked for you, maybe not. Facebook also allows you to advertise your services. They take a slightly different approach to the other 3 by targeting the FB user base. I particularly like how you can be much more specific about the region and demographics of the person you are targeting; FB also tell you how many people are in the demographics you specify. Worth a look especially for Interior Designers who are targeting the general public rather than other businesses. I will not go into this area in any more depth yet as it really comes under ‘advertising’ rather than building a better FB page for your business.

d. Make sure the information about your business on the left hand side really stands out. Get some good, engaging and genuine words about your company there.

3. ENHANCED NAVIGATION

a. You can administer your FB business page (fan page) <here>. You need to be an administrator of your business fan page.

b. Go to the wall. At the top of the left hand column you will see ‘edit page’. Go there and then choose “Wall Settings: Edit”. Change the default view to the correct page that you want a user to land on, could be your wall, could be your info page. This can be changed later if you make a mistake.

4. CONTENT

This is what will make people come back to your site. It’s really, really important! So you will need to have some new ‘stuff’ on your FB page to make it worth their while to return. That ‘stuff’ could be new videos, articles or whatever. it could also be the content of communication and engagement with like-minded design professionals working together to solve problems online…

The most obvious route is through your blog. You can display your blog as the ‘wall’ for your business page. You have a few options for example:

• Write your blog (the original content) in FB and post it everywhere else automatically from FB. You can even write your blog by accessing Facebook from your blackberry.
• Get your external blog synchronised into FB automatically (I use a free FB application called Social RSS and my blog is on WordPress)
• I prefer the second approach as WordPress also automatically publishes my blog posts to other sources such as Twitter. Apparently there is a FB Fan Page-to-Twitter application but I do not use that, sorry!
• Encourage your fans to add content (photos, etc.). That makes your job easier and makes your site content rich for others.

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The “Wordle” web site tool looks at your web site and then, I think, nicely presents what it thinks are some of your key words based on some mysterious linguistic algorithm. It probably places emphasis on strongly emotional words that you use.

As you can see from the image it picks up ‘loathe’, ‘discerning’ and ‘beautiful’ as well as words we commonly use like ‘Interior’ and ‘Design’. Although I’m not too sure about the visual combination of those words, which I can assure you I don’t! But it also makes me think maybe I should express strong positive comments like “love interior design” and not occasionally using strong negative words. Food for thought anyway.

Just click on the image and you can do one for your web site or blog as well. It takes a minute or two, not long.

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So…

1. Automatically Tweet your blog posts once a week – that’s a great way to start. If  you use a WordPress hosted blog (like this one) it’s just a case of ticking a box and you are done.

Or

2. Every day just go through your suppliers. As a designer you have lots of them. Tweet a compliment about a DESIGN RELATED supplier &/or one of their products/services.

Or

3. Maybe tweet a promotion

Remember

4. Tweets are eventually deleted from the net. So you don’t have to worry about keywords too much. If you are writing a blog post then that post will be permanent and the keywords in it are important. So with your Tweets just keep it simple, interesting and professional. Think “interesting narrative”.

But would you…

5. Tweet about your competitors? Sure if you want to help publicize their work (??) and sure if they reciprocate and Tweet back.

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2010: Sort It Out Now

With the benefit of proverbial hindsight the changes that have hit the Interior Design sector in 2009 were ‘obvious’. I’ll take a quick look at how some of the aspects of sales & marketing in interior design will affect ‘you’ in 2010. As always I’ll be practical and sensible and not carried away by the hype of technologies or media evangelists.

So prediction number one. I started my introduction by saying how it will affect ‘you’ with the you in parentheses. That means all of ‘you’, plural, not just you my dear reader. Well, very, very many of ‘you’ will do little different this year to what you did last year or the year before. So not much change there. But just because you refuse to change does not mean that change will not be forced upon you by the market. For example, many large design practices are now much smaller, the people who left are now starting innovative new businesses and stealing your customers. Action Point: Innovate and survive. Make a point to change something in your business this year, something important not trivial.

Prediction number 2. 2009 was an historically pivotal year. The time we are now living in will be looked back on by scholars as the period when the East truly began it’s economic ascendancy over the West. Not a nice prediction I know and I am not happy about it. Unfortunately, in 2010, the western economies will experience further serious difficulties. The American economy will trundle along and the UK economy will either stay in recession or double dip back into recession as massive, impending public spending cutbacks put government employees out of work. (The UK government has over the last year borrowed more money than all UK governments EVER ADDED TOGETHER that is a LOT of money and yes I have written it correctly and yes it really is true. The country and 6th ish biggest economy risks bankruptcy). This will impact you designers indirectly and directly. I doubt many of your clients work in government; however their businesses rely, in part, on the direct and indirect custom and spending power of government employees and government agencies. Action Point: Look at the type of customers you have and assess the risks to your future levels of business from that area. Survey the economic landscape in your target markets.

Prediction number 3. Many of you will start writing blogs because either it’s a good idea or because you competitors do it. About half of you will stop doing that because it takes up too much time. Action Point: Either write a weekly business blog  or, if you have not got enough time to grow your business (hmm?), use Twitter/Facebook to micro-blog.

Prediction number 4. Some of you will take a strategic view on where new customers will come from and prosper accordingly. Look where the money is. Bankers STILL get huge bonuses and many spend it on houses. There is less funding available for large capital intensive projects like hotels but, once started, hotels are usually finished. Multi-billionaires are still billionaires; they will still buy ski chalets, yachts and villas because they are still rich. Footballers and MDs of PLCs still get paid too much. Fewer people will buy second homes and overseas homes. The property market (sales not letting) might grow from last year but it will still be at low levels. B&Q recently reported good sales in 2009…indicative that people are spending money on where they live now and not that they plan to move. HOWEVER remember that all economic bubbles EVER in history ALWAYS burst. (South Sea Bubble, Dot come bubble, house price bubble,  footballers’ salaries!, etc.) also remember that just because an industry is in recession it does not necessarily mean it EVER will pick up at some point in the future. Action Point: Review and understand your customer segments.

Prediction number 5. No new marketing wonder solution. 2009 saw Facebook dramatically take over from MySpace. Facebook will continue to prosper. You should use it as a marketing channel if your clients ‘hang out there’. A mini-risk with Facebook is that adoption by the young and trendy is slowing as it is no longer as cool as it used to be, mainly because their parents’ updates keep appearing on their wall.  Even I remember that sort of thing is not cool (just like using the word cool probably). Action Point: Use Facebook for your customer networking remembering that you are trying to network with potential business partners or customers NOT the competition, it’s not the size of your network that counts.

Prediction number 6. Traditional advertising’s terminal disease will not improve.  Online advertising will continue to be adopted by designers. Traditional print circulations are falling, technologies exist to let us skip TV ads, etc. How many times do you get called with the latest greatest deal for a full page ad in some magazine you’ve never heard of? How many times does a new online web site try to sell you advertising space?. Why, for the first time in 23 (TWENTY THREE) years has Pepsi stopped spending on advertising on the Superbowl and switched to an alternative online media campaign? Advertising is intrusive, usually annoying, often irrelevant and we can now avoid it as well as ignore it. If I owned a small design business I would not entrust my money with an employee marketing manager to spend blindly on advertising. If I controlled my own media spend I would review closely every penny I spent on traditional print advertising and I would want proof that it worked. And that proof would not be forthcoming. Unlike Google AdWords, for example, which tells me exactly what happened and only charges me for success. Unlike this blog post that I know will get at least 500 hits. Action Point: If you do not advertise do so online with a limited budget. If you do advertise in print consider switching a significant chunk of your spend to online.

Prediction number 7. Although Twitter is rubbish. People will use it more and more in 2010 because, for the time being, it fills a need. The need is broadly defined by the ease of connecting with people, simple quick messaging, and convenience of use with technologies like mobile/cell phones. Action Point: You should really use Twitter for your business.

Prediction number 8. Search engines have changed and continue to so do. They now look more at the instant chats and posts that your customers are making. Maybe they evangelise about your business or are less than kind about it. Either way that sort of up-to-date pertinent information will find it’s way up Google’s ranking and you really, really (yes REALLY) should know what is being said about your business. Action Point: Review weekly what is being said online about your business.

Is that all so far fetched?

You can read more of my sales & marketing for interior designer post here.

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Great Fabric By KOTHEA, Great Design By McVitty

As an interior designer you appreciate the beauty of the things you design. So how can this flimsily-named Twitter-thing have any beauty? or any use for that matter with the constraint of 140 characters. How can it be a professional marketing tool?

Well it is and I’ll tell you why. I should also let you know that I am from the original anti-Twitter brigade but have been converted as I wrote late last year.

1. Many of the readers of this blog are owners of small to medium-sized interior design firms. We just don’t have that much spare time, right? You’re probably worried about how often your web site appears in Google and have (correctly) been told by the technical people that you need content on your web site. A blog is a great way to do that BUT you haven’t go the time to write frequent mini-essays. You will probably find a lot of your competitors have started blogs but only made one or two postings…pointless them even starting! How many text messages did you write today? I would like to bet that either you wrote a few or could have at least spared the time to write a few. So you have time to Twitter and all that means is that you really do have the time to write short thoughts and comments that your clients might be interested in. Your job as an Interior Designer IS INTERESTING, you meet lots of clients, see lots of fantastic products and installations. Share your thoughts and comments.
2. Did no-one read your last mail shot or you got not response to a mass e-mailing? On Twitter you can EASILY make connections. You follow people, they follow you. It requires little time. OK it gives a flimsy contact at first. BUT A CONTACT NEVERTHELESS. Grow that contact, Twitter makes them aware of you it’s then up to you to convert that Awareness into an Interest / Desire / Action on what you do. Twitter is MUCH easier than email and calling. Much. Keep doing your ‘normal’ marketing, no-one is saying you should stop that.
3. Monitor who is talking about you on Twitter (eg SocialMention.com). When someone mentions you then find out if they have a blog. If they do get them to write a blog about some aspect of your company, they are probably looking for ideas for articles (just like the ‘real’ press). So your network expands so does traffic to your site, so your reputation and awareness improves. At the same time so does Google’s pagerank view of the importance of your website, so you appear higher in Google results. Win, win, win.
4. Once you have enough potential clients following you, do a Twitter promotion “10% off this Saturday”, whatever you like. How long does it take to write 140 characters? Even if you get one sale, the maths and profitability metrics are conclusively simple.
5. If you do write a blog use Twitter to promote your blog. Like I do with this WordPress blog which posts automatically to http://twitter.com/kothea and then onto other places like our Facebook account http://facebook.com/kothea or our FriendFeed account. (If you want a cool Facebook url like mine here’s how). Find out how your clients like to communicate, some might like email, some might like Twitter over their Blackberries – business is about doing what your clients like not what you like.

Of course you could just sit back and let your competitors get one over you.

If you liked this article please comment, it motivates me to write on a cold and windy day. If you want me to write on any business related area to interior design please let me know – if it’s marketing related we’ll certainly try to do it. We’ve already written lots of such articles here.

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BUT “What are the pitfalls?”. “What mistakes do interior designers make?”

1. Facebook Groups: These are a way to communicate with people with like-minded interests, join the same groups that your customers might or start your own group. The problems here are that you end up talking to your competitors or trawling through voluminous amounts of irrelevant comments and receiving lots of spam. The mistake is to join too many groups that are not really relevant to your business intentions.

2. Vanity URL. One common mistake here is NOT obtaining a vanity URL for your business on Facebook. What is a vanity URL? Well ours is www.facebook.com/kothea , you want one like that.

3. You are foresighted enough to write a blog to support your business. However you copy and past your blog to your Facebook page (when you remember). Use Facebook apps to automate this process eg Social RSS

4. You do not clearly display your contact details. You do not have a ‘call to action’ throughout the page. Think what a visitor would want from you next…and provide it.

5. You only put text on your blog. Spruce it up with photos and videos if you can.

6. You only use Facebook. Use it in conjunction with other tools like Twitter.

7. Thinking it is the same as linkedin. It’s not. Facebook is a place where you will more likely be able to reach your customer base more easily.

Great Fabric By KOTHEA, Great Design By McVitty

If you target the general public as an interior designer then you MUST have a facebook page for your business.

In previous posts I’ve wittered on about Twitter and given a few pointers on improving web sites. However I cannot stress the importance of Facebook to interior designers. It’s quite an important marketing channel now and it will become increasing important over time as it becomes more prevalent throughout the lives of your customers.

Let’s start off by trying to work out if you need to do something for your interior design business on facebook. Are your clients mostly businesses like restaurants or commercial offices? Are your residential clients technology averse? If the answer to these is YES then the ‘market segments’ (types of customers) you are targeting will probably be out of reach by Facebook. However that still leaves an awful lot of people who can potentially view communications about your company on facebook.

You say, “Facebook is just glorified email, right? I can’t see how Facebook is a professional communications channel for my business.”

Well, people do use facebook for what could otherwise be achieved by email, that’s certainly true. But it’s a whole lot more than that. Facebook can be a proxy for a web site, it can be a customer service platform, it can be a portfolio showcase, it can be a design blog, and so the list goes on. It’s more than email, in that email is really a one to one type communication and it’s largely controlled by the initiator which, in the case of an email marketing campaign, is you. Facebook is a web of interacting ‘communities’ engaging in mass digital conversations.

But the world is changing away from the email we’ve all mostly got used to. People want information when they want it. They don’t want it when you want to give it to them. And they want it now. And that means immediately not tomorrow.

So let’s go back to your beautifully crafted email communication offering your services. It looks great and you were convinced into doing it because it is so cheap to do compared to paper mailshots, right? You send it out but…oh what a shame, the client’s project has just started with a competitor! If only you were quicker. Or maybe they will be starting their project in 6 months time and might mislay your email in the meantime. Maybe, as is more likely the case, they will treat your email with disdain and bin it without even reading it. So an ‘email-shot’ was cheap to do but it cost you your time and it maybe wasn’t effective.

So instead, already having your design service offering and a online portfolio might have initiated that first contact towards winning the business. And totally new potential clients might have found your company facebook page because you write a blog with interesting content about home interior design issues and they discovered it through searching on google.

All well and good, but isn’t that a web site?

Yes, sort of! but there’s more. A  blog is the first element of interactivity over and above a regualr website. It allows potential customers to comment to you and each other about what they think about the issues you are raising in your interior design related posts. That buzz you create in digital communities creates your brand awareness.

But people might complain and everyone will see it? Well yes that’s true but you should have done it right in the first place. This gives you a second chance to rectify the problem and to show people that customer service is important to you. You get the chance to stop people complaining about you when you are not there to influence it.

Writing a blog from within Facebook is free. Hosting your digital portfolio on Facebook can be free to do. Creating a Facebook page for your business is free. Compare that cost with the cost of doing it on your web site.

Oh and there’s another thing. Have you noticed those flashy Blackberry mobile/cell phones and Nokia equivalents? I’m sure you have. They are becoming more and more common. People are using them for all sorts of communications and soon they will be using them to do their research (eg to find an interior designer) on google much more than they are now. So you’ve just invested let’s say £$10,000 on a cool new web site. Fantastic. However. First of all you probably cynically or intentionally forgot to put a blog on there (and even if you did you probably won’t keep up writing it for too long) and secondly I’ll bet if you borrow someone’s Blackberry and try to look at your new site 0n it then it will look awful. Great showcase for your business?…not.

So you’ve spent all this money on a web site. But have you tried typing “Interior Designer” into google and seeing where you rank. Probably not that highly. So how are people going to find you? Well you could spend more on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) but that’s a whole new and expensive ballgame so let’s not go there right now. Let’s do the effective and free stuff first.

Well once you built your network on facebook you will find people discovering your site inadvertently though your connections. For example Facebook will automatically tell a friend-of-a-friend that the friend is a fan of you, yes you the interior designer. So when the friend-of-a-friend is contemplating looking for an interior designer they discover that you have done a great job for one of their friends. It really is informal networking and digital PR, the sort that you used to do face to face and the sort that you used to pay for to get coverage in magazines.

So look. I’m not saying you can build an interior design business based on Facebook networks. What I’m saying is that it is a potentially cheap, new and effective marketing channel. Use it alongside your traditional methods that have already been shown to work.

And that’s another thing. With digital marketing you can see the metrics. When you placed an ad in a magazine you had no idea how many people saw it. all you had at best was an over-inflated circulation figure. You can now count the clicks. You can count where the clickers came from and you can track where the clickers clicked to. Be warned I’m watching you! (Digitally of course!)

So  Interior Designers how do you correctly use facebook?

Here’s 4 ways to get you started.

1. Create a vanity url, a business page and make sure that someone can see the ‘fan’ functionality.

2. Either write a blog in facebook or get a free facebook application to copy in the content of your blog to facebook.

3. Use one of the free applciations to add extra info about your company.

4. Build your network. Friends, family, colleagues, clients – the bigger nework, the better.

This article considers a few easy ways to ethically get more information on your competitors and then show you how to easily integrate all that information into your web browser so it’s there to use on an ongoing basis whenever you have time in the future. Fantastic long term investment merely for investing your time.

We look at:

1. Google Alerts;
2. Competitor News Feeds;
3. Industry News Feeds; and then finish by
4. Putting it all together in one place using Netvibes.

Skip to the end of the article if you want the URL for the example created.

Let’s create a real life example by pretending that we are a Hotel/Hospitality focussed interior design and architecture practice. Now, I’ve only been to LA once so with my very minimal internet research I’ll pretend further that my main local competitor is Ralph Gentile Architects (www.rgastudio.com) – I don’t know this company  and  they seem to be in the hotel interior design industry. Also we will look at WATG (www.watg.com) who are a leading design consultant for the global hospitality market.

We are looking at the business area here called “Competitive Information” or “Competitive Intelligence”. It’s part of your research. If you are a small or even medium-sized business then you will probably not do this in any structured way as, historically, it has been both time-consuming and often expensive. Maybe you only did it when you started your business and never since? Well it’s time to change! Let’s get going!

1. Getting the information: A google alert for www.rgastudio.com.

Your competitors and their customers use the internet widely and create much useful information. It can be a huge amount of information, so the trick is to find a way of just getting the information you need.

An easy, quick and cheap way to do this is with Google Alerts.

In essence to create an alert you first create a search eg “interior designers hospitality Los Angeles / london” or a search for a specific company such as your competitor “Ralph Gentile”. When Google finds new information on this search they alert you to it. Hence Google Alerts. Simple enough in principle right? And you see how it only gives  you new stuff not 1,000s of pages that might be returned by a normal Google search?

a. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts if you have not already done so you will need to create an account with Google. This is all free so go ahead if you need to before going to the google.com/alerts page.

You can play around with the few options that are presented to you, I just chose a comprehensive alert that looks at all sources of information; videos, blogs, news, etc.. Click on “create alert”

b. OK now you’ve done! Now you have to be able to look at the alert. Google creates an RSS feed to do this. Technical phrase, sorry. An RSS feed is a stream of information, you can tap into this feed of information whenever you want it’s under your control. You can use any number of tools to do that including Microsoft Outlook 2007 and your Facebook page. It really is nothing special. The difference here to marketing of the past is that you tap into your customised bit of information when  you want it NOT when someone else decides to send you an email or a letter.

Once you have created the alert Google will encourage you to use their software (Google Reader) to look at it. Feel free to do that. If you want to use something else then you need to find out what the special name of your particular RSS feed is. In the google column where it says “Deliver to” you will see the word FEED. Right click on that and copy the location (if you are using Firefox). You will get something like http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/07075794331265745468/15166974667481998431 . That is the name of the feed and you can use it anywhere. Remember this, we’ll come back to it soon.

2. Competitor News Feeds

Sometimes a competitor will do all the hard work for you. They will have a blog or a RSS news stream. I’ve taken the easy example of watg.com just because larger companies tend to have these information streams, Ralph Gentile Architects do not at the time of writing. WATG already have a blog where you can take an RSS feed from, it’s hidden away a bit but can be found at http://www.watg.com/?rss=067f5578-3048-7b3d-c5276d2a3b2d0291. Again, remember this.

3. Industry News Feeds

There are LOTS of these sites out there which give you feeds on specific business areas. My favourite for the example we are considering is IDFX magazine. They have a feed specific to parts of the interior design industry, helpfully one on hospitality at http://hotel.worldinteriordesignnetwork.com/rss. Again, remember this.

4. Putting it all together.

All those web addresses/URLs look a little ugly don’t they? Well we will pretty it all up now. This next step should take ten minutes from start to end. You can skip to the end of the article to see the example I have left on the web for you to look at.

a. go to netvibes.com and open a free account. They are a reputable company and their kind of product will become big over the next three years I believe.

b. Create a page and make sure it is private. Spies don’t normally let people know what they are doing!

c. Click the big green “ADD Content” button

d. Click the orange “Add a feed icon”

e. Paste in one of the feed urls you remembered earlier

f. The feed is checked and a little box appears (the box is called a widget, again you WILL hear much more about these over the years to come) which you then drag onto your page, sometimes they automatically appear on the page.

g. Repeat d, e, and f for each feed.

Sorted! i’m sure you can see how you could have a page for: each competitor; each product area you work in; each major supplier; and so on.

Here is the finished PUBLIC netvibes page: http://www.netvibes.com/kothea#CI . I’ve added a few more feeds as widgets and also used an HTML widget to display Ralph’s web site. If you look at the associated tab for KOTHEA’s public page you can see that you can integrate images as well – might be useful if one of your competitor releases new designs on their blog? There are very many more varied widgets that you can add, hopefully you can see how useful information really is available out there. Just work out the sources, what you need and why then once you have built a PRIVATE netvibes page you can share it securely within your organisation and, more importantly, you’ve now done all the hard work you just go back to that one page in the future – you don’t have to keep going from page to page all over the web. Of course you can refine and add as your thinking moves on.

A closing thought. Of course competitor intelligence requires more information that is not available electronically. I’m not suggesting this is the panacea. You will still gain much valuable information from trade shows and customers. This is just part of the picture. I may also be returning to netvibes later in the year as a way of monitoring your brand identity.

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If you sell to the general public then the consensus amongst marketing professionals is that your marketing strategy must include Facebook. Facebook will work to promote your services through your network and through the networks of your network members.

If you sell to businesses (eg if you are a hospitality interior designer specialising in restaurants) then I’m not convinced that Facebook is the best medium. However, and its a big however, many of your clients will be using Facebook already so maybe you should use it to help them consume the information that you produce and to help them interact with your organisation in a way that suits them. It’s not what is easiest for you that should be the way forwards, it should be what is the easiest for your (potential-) clients.

Let’s get started then. Here’s what you need to do and it will cost you nothing other than time:

1. Create a personal Facebook account if you don’t already have one. If you have one, use the one you have.

2. Create a business page for your business – sometimes called a fan page. Listen up here!

• Don’t create another personal page.
• Don’t create a group – you don’t need to know what one is.
• Create a business(or fan) page: http://www.Facebook.com/pages/create.php

Make a note of your default business page ie the URL that Facebook gives you. KOTHEA’s is http://www.facebook.com/pages/London-United-Kingdom/KOTHEA/129265851209/ and yours will be similar, make sure that there aren’t any superfluous bits on the end, it should look similar to mine. Yuk, looks awful I know; we’ll deal with that in a minute.

One thing you can do with your existing web site is to redirect traffic from one folder of your web site to your Facebook business page. eg look at this www.kothea.com/facebook.You’ll have to ask your hosting company to do that or your web administrator. It might be free to do that but some hosting companies charge.

If instead you want something like http://www.facebook.com/kothea then do steps 3 and 4 below.

3. Get 25 fans. You must have at least 25 fans of your business (ie NOT 25 friends of your personal account). You must do this to get a vanity URL.

4. Create a personal/vanity url for your business. This is sometimes referred to as a fan page. You probably want it to appear like: www.facebook.com/yourcompany. I’ve already published an article how to do this and it is <here>. Read it carefully as there are some disastrous mistakes you can make if you do not do it properly.

5. Get a (free) tool that lets you add more about your business to the “Info page” than is allowed by the standard Facebook section eg the application “More Extended Info“

6. Blogs: This can be seen as a ‘wall’ for your business. You have a few options for example:

• Write your blog in Facebook and post it everywhere else automatically from Facebook. You can even do that by accessing Facebook from your blackberry.
• Get your external blog synchronised into Facebook automatically (I use a free Facebook application called Social RSS and my blog is on WordPress)

Don’t do this

• Copy and paste all your blog posts into lots of different places. Too time-consuming.

7. Get lots more fans and build your network. You’ll do the best job at that by regularly adding interesting, original content that includes video, images and words.

A closing thought. Think of your old mailshots, think of your newer email shots, think how most of them were probably unsolicited, unwanted and UNREAD. When someone becomes a fan of your business on Facebook they actively want information about you and/or your company – so send it. When their friends look at the profile of your fans it will sometimes say that they are a fan of your company…the chance for someone you’ve probably never met to be enticed to find out more about your business. It’s not a panacea for lead generation but it’s a great start.

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Some advanced FB suggestions <here>.

1. One for the owners and managers: interact on the sales force with your staff and your customers. Be visible and foster relationships.

2. The retail world moves forwards changing all the time. Don’t look back to the glory days. Innovate, take a view on the future.

3. Browsers. For all those people who just can’t be engaged by your sales people get the sales people to give these ‘browsers’ a flyer. The flyer (terrible word) can be a discount voucher, an unadvertised promotion or a brief look at a new product, anything of value. Keep it succinct.

4. On weekends when you are particularly busy ensure that a senior staff member greets entering customers and tries to engage with leaving ones (who have not purchased) to ask them what they were looking for that they could not find.

5. Make sure your best sales people are selling on busy days. Ensure they are properly incentivized to SELL. Customer service is great but you want the money, right?

6. Consider a promotional event that is invitation only for your best customers (and anyone they want to bring along). Make sure there is genuinely something in it for the attendees.

7. Ask your salespeople what can be done on a practical day-to-day level to sell more. More products? Better layout? Different incentivisation or promotion?

8. Work your networks. Through Facebook; through staff, friends and family, email list.

Share & Enjoy!

This article looks at the very narrow area concerning how to make your Facebook URL for your interior design business appear professional. Specifically how to create a proper ‘vanity URL’ for your business fan page.If you have already done that then here are some more useful additions to the business side of your Facebook page.

Many Interior Designers who sell to the general public see Facebook as just one way of lead generation – to some it is more important than others.

Ok here goes. This is a real life example where KOTHEA’s MD set up her personal username on Facebook incorrectly, there was already a Fan Page for KOTHEA. This article takes you through the steps we had to take to get the ‘vanity’ url correct both for the individual and for the company. Our MD inadvertently set her personal username (vanity URL) as ‘KOTHEA‘. So if anyone typed www.facebook.com/kothea it took them to her personal page rather than to the ‘proper’ company page. This situation got progressively messy as she started to use Facebook more for personal matters with business messages appearing in the same place as her personal ones. The result was that many of her friends kept seeing fabric related articles when they were not interior designers. Hopefully you get the picture!

So we start with the erroneous situation:

www.facebook.com/kothea as her personal name

and the rather unwieldly

http://www.facebook.com/pages/London-United-Kingdom/KOTHEA/129265851209

as the original name for the company as it was assigned  by Facebook. Note for this all to work you must already have created a business page or FAN PAGE for your business.

What we want to do is threefold:

• Release the facebook.com/kothea name so that it can be re-assigned to the business page
• Change her vanity url/username name to something more like what it really is
• Assign the proper company name to be KOTHEA.

Before we get started in earnest there are five critically important points: firstly, the person making these changes must be an administer of the business page and logged in to that page via THEIR PERSONAL ACCOUNT;  secondly, you can only make changes to names once so be very, very careful; thirdly you must have at least 25 fans of your business page; fourthly, your business page must have been created as a Facebook PAGE not a group or anything else, it must be a page!; and finally Facebook sometimes requires that your personal account has been verified by mobile phone before any of these changes are allowed to be made.

If you are creating a page for the first time BE VERY CAREFUL some Facebook Fan Page setting CANNOT BE CHANGED (Jan 2010).

Here are the steps to go through:

1. Check to make sure what settings have already been made

Type in this exactly: www.facebook.com/username ie do not put in your username put in the word ‘username’. You will get a message like the one below.

This confirms that KOTHEA is my MD’s username.

2. From the facebook menu go to SETTINGS and then to “ACCOUNT SETTINGS”. You will see something like the following where we now want to change the Username NOT the name.

3. Click on the word “change” the one next to USERNAME. ie the one above the word KOTHEA in my example. You are then prompted for a new username. It must be unique and there are various limitations to what you can have (sorry I don’t know all the restrictions but Facebook seems to disallow certain names even though they might be unique – for example i think only one ‘full stop’ is allowed). Be very sure what new username you want. Once you have checked its availability and confirmed your selection you will have something like the following, which shows your new username and you will have also freed up the old username:

4. Now go again to step 1 and type this exactly as I show here ie using EXACTLY what I have written: www.facebook.com/username

Where it says Page name choose your business page (the one you have already set up before reading this article!). Type in your desired Fan Page name in the box to the right of that and check the availability. If it is available (and it should be as you just released it) you can select and choose it and a message will appears as follows:

Sorted.

Good Luck.

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Advanced FB suggestions <here>.

Problems?:

FB is not great to administer. I don’t work for them.

Read the article carefully. You MUST meet ALL the criteria to perform this. eg Are you really an admin user? YOU MUST HAVE A PERSONAL ACCOUNT AND THAT PERSONAL ACCOUNT MUST BE AN ADMIN USER OF THE PAGE.

Try making someone else an Admin user of your page: Goto fan page: choose “edit page” (top lhs underneath logo); on middle rhs is Admins Add section.

If your desired business name is not available then  you have a problem. It is my understanding that Facebook will not allow people to use your business name if they have no connection with that business. So there is probably a way of getting that name back but I do not know how to do that. If there is a business with the same name in another country then I imagine you will never be able to get the control of the name

PS:

1. You need to have 5 characters in your chosen vanity url

2. You can choose for example mysite.com as the name of your vanity url but facebook translates it to be mysitecom, so it kind of ignores the full stop/period. And sometimes it doesn’t. Hmmm.

3. Also check your privacy settings if some people cannot see the vanity after you appear to have successfully created it.

Posted in The Business Of Interior Design Tagged: interior design, sales and marketing in interior design ]]> http://blog.kothea.com/2009/12/12/facebook-vanity-url-username-fan-page/feed/ 82 Verity du Sautoy Add to Facebook Add to Digg Add to Del.icio.us Add to Stumbleupon Add to Reddit Add to Blinklist Add to Twitter Add to Technorati Add to Yahoo Buzz Add to Newsvine http://blog.kothea.com/2009/11/12/pitching-winning-managing-business-for-interior-designers/ http://blog.kothea.com/2009/11/12/pitching-winning-managing-business-for-interior-designers/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:16:16 +0000 KOTHEA - Passionate About Fabrics For Top Designers http://blog.kothea.com/?p=920 ]]> I have worked on, sold and managed many projects in the corporate world as well as in the interiors world. It strikes me that the nature of ‘projects’ is very similar across all industries.

Often how you propose to engage with the client to tackle the project will win you the business. Price and competence are obviously important. New clients might not trust you enough to feel they can commit to your services for the full duration of the project; so bear that in mind. Sometimes elements of risk in the project are high or unknown – you must deal with these in you proposal/pitch (Nugget 1: By highlighting risks where others haven’t could win you the project on the risk issues alone).

Anyway, the point of this article is to summarise different approaches to charging for projects. You’ve probably heard of most of them but maybe not all:

1. The design fee

“I’m an interior designer and I provide a fantastic service. I charge you for my skills and you benefit from me being able to buy things for you at trade price, I don’t make a profit on the things I buy for you”.

This is a fair and honest pitch. Well done, I’d think about buying from you. It probably won’t differentiate you from anyone else though.

2. The markup

“I’m an interior designer and I provide a fantastic service, I’m going to do it for free for you though. I have to make a profit so I’ll make that on the difference between trade and retail prices for the things that I buy for you.”

I really don’t like this and yes I know it is widely used in the industry. Firstly your service is so good that you are giving it to me free? Really? Things that are given away free are generally valued very lowly in business. This approach might appeal to a cash strapped buyer though, so don’t dismiss out of hand. Secondly can I trust you to charge the fair and correct margin? Probably not (I don’t know you, how can I trust you?), you probably won’t have any degree of transparency on your purchases and their true retail and trade prices. Besides a savvy client can get many things at trade price anyway, buying is easy (ish) – selecting and creating is more the art, that is where the value lies.

3. Fixed Price

This is the best way to make money. Read on, I know you don’t believe me!

Many of the top consultancy companies in the world manage their fixed price projects very, very carefully and in great detail. They win the projects essentially because of their low price BUT that price is conditional upon lots of conditions. Once those conditions cannot be met by the client then the price goes up (a lot). After committing to a company the client finds it very hard to pull out later and change suppliers. In any case they share the blame for not properly specifying the project at the outset, so in itself that really is not a reason to think of ditching the new supplier.

(Nugget 2:) For this to make money, lots of money, you have to really understand what you have to deliver, in detail. You have to know all the risks and where things can go wrong and how you will handle those eventualities. You have to be clear about what is and what is not included. (Of course add-ons for what was not originally included will cost a LOT, later on when the client changes their mind!)

This relies on you being organised and the client less so. In the corporate world many buyers are themselves now very organised and so this approach to projects is consequently becoming less profitable. These projects often become acrimonious unless one side gives in over points of contention that arise “I thought XXX was included” – you’ve been there.

Remember that when you are extracting every ounce of $/£ out of your client, at least be nice and polite and friendly about it. Seriously.

Of course if you’re new to the industry you might just go for this approach to win the business and you MIGHT just strike it lucky based on little or no detailed preparation. Or you might not.

4. Phased Approach

This works best where there are unknowns that the client appreciates exist, it’s a good and fair way of making money.

You identify the phases of the project: scope, functional design, technical design, aesthetic design, etc – whatever you choose to call them are unimportant.You come to a financial arrangement for each phase before it happens. When the first phase finishes you definitively quote for the subsequent one. You might have earlier given an indication on the cost of all phases but you make it clear up front that you have a chance to revise prices as some of the risks become more clear.

The great things about this approach are inertia, deliverables and risk.

‘Inertia’ because clients are unwilling to change suppliers unless really annoyed – in which case it’s probably a good time to move on as you’ve messed up and lost their trust.

‘Risk’ because you MUST plan for all risks in this approach. Your prices include the risks, you say you are charging a lot for phase H because of risks X, Y and Z.

‘Deliverables’ because when you revise (typically up) the cost of a subsequent phase it’s because the deliverables have been changed by the client (no matter how small the change).

Oh and of course its easier for the client to commit to small sums of money rather than the whole thing.

5. Mentoring

Here’s one you probably haven’t considered.

Sometimes you just know that a client is fishing for ideas for their project. You just know they are going to do it themselves. (Nugget 3:) Well if you know that then why not tailor your proposition around that fact? “Look Mr X, here are the 8 phases of an interior design project, you can probably do much of them yourself but you are not experienced. I am. Let me work with you on a half-daily basis to help you along in the various stages. If there’s one bit you are not happy with like instructing builders or architects I can do that bit for you”

“I really like this approach,” says client A. “I’m not a designer but one day might like to be, it can’t be that hard and yes I know I don’t yet have all the skills, so having someone to help me along would help.”

Of course many clients will find their project too time consuming or their skills lacking. That’s fine though because they have already committed to you when they realise that and so you will be there to take over and finish it. At a price of course!

The secret of this one is to snare the project that others have no chance of winning because of their approach.

6. Selective Phase Bidding

I don’t like this one.

You essentially bid for just the phases that you are expert at. Essentially if you do this you will rarely win.

Many clients do not want to deal with many suppliers, they want one monthly invoice.

Yet you might not feel comfortable to handle all aspects. The solution is partnership with another supplier. Partnerships are fraught with danger but can sometimes work out well. (Nugget 4:) Make sure you work with someone you trust and make sure they know that partnership involves reciprocation ie they have to get you involved in their next project.

7. Capped Price

“I will charge you based on my time and the cost of the materials. However you have a budget so I promise I will not exceed it.” Crazy, don’t get involved in this type of project unless you are desperate. How do you benefit when you are taking on all the risk, this could lose you thousands.

8. Floor Price

This sounds more like it! A minimum price! However you have to sweeten this with discounted rates above the floor price so the client understands that if the floor is exceeded then you are making much less than you normally do and that you will strive to avoid that situation happening as you want to only do profitable work.

This one can work well, get your numbers worked out before you start.

9. Time Boxing

This is a great approach for the creative bits of a project, less so for converting your designs to their built and installed reality where potentially huge sums are involved.

You accept a fixed time limit and a fixed budget to deliver, say, anything from a colour scheme or a concept apartment. You identify all phases of a project where such an approach is sensible. The great thing is that deadlines are met and budgets are adhered to for your client. Your client might not get quite as much as they really wanted or you might have had to throw more resources at the project than you would have liked but in either case the loss will probably not be that great in the grand scheme of things. This works well if you have a genuinely trusting relationship with the buyer.

Make sure that you combine this with a LIMITED list of ‘must haves’ for the time box you are working on. This must have list places a risk on you, but in this sceanrio I think that is fair.

It’s also quite an innovative way of managing projects and so is a good differentiator for you when you are pitching for work. It gives you an aura of managerial competence to even know about such an approach (maybe!).

10. Risk Sharing

You identify the risks in a project and if the risk materializes you agree to share the risk burden over and above the costs already agreed. I don’t really like this approach. Try to avoid it by arguing for a separate piece of work to assess the risk in detail so it can be properly bid for. The real problem with the approach is that you will get a financial hit for something that you have little knowledge or control over. Probably not too fair on you but acceptable if the risks are small as a goodwill gesture perhaps.

Some similar articles ..more>>

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Posted in The Business Of Interior Design Tagged: interior design, sales and marketing in interior design ]]> http://blog.kothea.com/2009/11/12/pitching-winning-managing-business-for-interior-designers/feed/ 26 KOTHEA - Passionate About Fabrics For Top Designers Add to Facebook Add to Digg Add to Del.icio.us Add to Stumbleupon Add to Reddit Add to Blinklist Add to Twitter Add to Technorati Add to Yahoo Buzz Add to Newsvine http://blog.kothea.com/2009/11/06/marketing-strategies-interior-designers-consider-these-areas/ http://blog.kothea.com/2009/11/06/marketing-strategies-interior-designers-consider-these-areas/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:28:06 +0000 KOTHEA - Passionate About Fabrics For Top Designers http://blog.kothea.com/?p=911 ]]> Interior Designers need to understand their whole marketing strategy and how each of its 7 constituent tactics work together to grow the business.

This article is a checklist. Go through each of the points I’ve listed and apply it to your sales and marketing in your business. My opinion on what are particularly important marketing communications for interior designers are highlighted in bold and might differ if you target business rather than the public. Let me know your thoughts:

1. Search Marketing – Get your prospect at the time of their decision-making.

• Search engine optimisation (Higher rankings)
  
• Paid Search / Pay-per-click (Google AdWords)
  
• Paid for inclusion / feeds

2. Online PR – Create Awareness of your brand by getting it mentioned.

• Industry Portal Representation (eg Thehousedirectory.com)
  
• Social Media (blogs, feeds, communities)
• Media Alerting Services
• Brand Protection

3. Online Partnerships – Link your brand WITH OTHERS IN YOUR INDUSTRY

• Affiliate Marketing
• Sponsorship
• Co-branding
• Link building
• Widget marketing

4. Offline Communications – You should know these.

• Advertising
• Personal selling
• Sales promotion
• PR
• Sponsorship
• Direct Mail
• Exhibitions
• Merchandising
• Packaging
• Word-of-mouth (your old clients are your best and cheapest salespeople)
  

5. Interactive Ads

• Site-specific Media Buys (only if you target businesses)
• Ad networks
• Sponsorship
• Behavioural targeting

6. Opt-in Email

• House list emails (your clients and prospects)
  
• Cold (rented lists)
• Co-branded (share the marketing load wisely and boost your brand image)
  
• Ads in 3rd party newsletters

7. Viral Marketing – Electronic variants of traditional ‘word of mouth’

• Pass along emails
• Word-of-mouth (eg using the share & enjoy functionality below)
  
• Buzz marketing
• Generating media mentions

What do you think?

And as a PS I will follow this up with 2 more articles; one about different ways of engaging (financially) with clients; and a second about using facebook for an interior design business. The first comment, below, reflects a theme running through many questions posed to me: website designers (techies) and ad agencies (space sellers) are trying to get you to part with  your hard earned design fees; I would read a book on digital marketing that comes more from the marketing end rather than the technology end eg “Mastering Web 2.0 bu Susan Rice Lincoln”, that’s a good way to start. DONT’ SPEND £10k/$15k on a new web site think about your customers and how they behave, your marketing communications need to latch into their behaviours.

Photo Credit: McVitty (Designer)

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Great Fabric By KOTHEA, Great Design By McVitty

Love it or loathe it Twitter is here to stay.

Many interior designers just can’t take Twitter seriously as a business tool. Until recently I was a dissenter too; I’ll tell you about my epiphany in a moment, but it just seemed plain wrong that the self-obsessed media could be right about something they love, for once. And it just made matters worse when Oscar Wilde’s famous phrase “The Witterings Of A Wit” could oh so easily be changed to “The Twitterings Of A Twit”. And then I was further annoyed because everyone says that that was an Oscar Wilde quote and yet Wikipedia said it wasn’t  (so it can’t be one of his). And then, really anyway, it should be the “Tweets Of A Twit” and that’s just silly.

And then I calmed down a bit and thought rationally.

Twitter is just a bit of technology with a silly name, we must all agree on that as a starting point. But if, for little or no cost and effort, I can get more potential clients to visit my blog or my web site by using Twitter occasionally then who is the Twit…my competitor who uses it? or me, who doesn’t?

Then Ceil Petrucelli commented on one of my blog posts saying that one of her friends had tweeted my post and here she was reading it and, in the post-modern vernacular, loving it. She’d never heard of KOTHEA fabrics before. So some other kind person had been doing my marketing for me, which is great, but I felt that maybe I should be making more of an effort myself. And then I realised that I was writing yet another blog post and I was anti-blogs a year ago! Did that make me a Twitter-blog tweeting, blogging hypocrite? (My surname is Seuss, by the way).

But is it easy? Well, from a technical viewpoint I’m sure you can automatically generate a tweet from most blog posts or from within Facebook. So we can probably all produce Twitter output SOMEWHERE in our digital marketing without any ongoing additional effort. (In fact this post has been automatically tweeted, apparently).

So  I’m going to make an effort and start to use the KOTHEA Twitter Feed/Page thing that I had already set up some months ago; just in case I  might need it. In fact I’m already doing it because, as I said, I made it automatic.

Having done my extensive research on how to Twitter and how not to, I thought I would share it with you and also tell you what the “Lazy Marketer” would do to get the most ‘bangs for the least bucks/time’. So now you too can avoid the “5 & A Half Ways That Interior Designers Twitter Badly”. Without further ado they are:

First: By not knowing your goal. Are you on Twitter to socialize or to make money? Each has a different approach and knowing what you want in advance can save you precious time and energy when incorporating Twitter into your marketing plan. (The lazy marketer will just automate Twitter and forget about Twitter goals)

Second: By following everyone that follows you. Don’t, all you should do when you are notified about a new follower is to look at their profile to see if they are worth following back. Don’t follow everyone that follows you, wha tis the point?  (The lazy marketer would not even check who is following them, they would set the options in Twitter to ensure that they are not notified about new followers).

Third: By worrying about how many people are following you. Don’t worry, it is obviously better to have a small number of quality followers than thousands of poor quality followers but it is notoriously difficult to ascertain quality. (The lazy marketer would not even know where to get this information, let alone worry about it).

Fourth: By spamming your new followers. Don’t use Twitter’s Auto Response to welcome them; apparently most people find this kind of Twitter-spam annoying. (The lazy marketer never spams, it takes up too much time)

Fifth: By spending lots of money to make Twitter look nice. Don’t, most people will see THEIR background when reading your tweets, so there is very little point in paying for nice graphics linked to your Twitter account. (The lazy marketer certainly wouldn’t spend extra money here)

Fifth & A Half: By not Twittering at all. Don’t Not Twitter – Do Twitter. (The lazy marketer Twitters automatically)

Having hopefully got past those double negtives, here are some other thoughts. How about:

a. Add a “Share on Twitter” button to your web site? When you see my appear on the right hand column of this blog or KOTHEA’s web page ask me and I’ll tell you how.

b. Monitor what people are saying about your company on Twitter. You can use a RSS feed from the Twitter search engine to do this look at this link <<here>> which tells me when ANYONE mentions KOTHEA on Twitter.

c. I’m not an interior designer and so I don’t sell to the public. If I were an interior designer selling to the general public I would probably quickly get Twitter ticked off on my to-do list investing a couple of hours of my time at most and then put MUCH more effort onto a Facebook fan page …but that’s another post.

d. I’ve become reconciled to Twitter because it just seems like publicising my site another way with little additional effort.

e. In a way, a Twitter feed can be similar to receiving a summarised electronic newsletter. Many people prefer to receive information on their mobile/cell phones in that short, tweet-like-format ie where Twitter works well – I realise that people are different from me and that is what underlies marketing – understanding that difference and catering to it.

If  you enjoyed this then <<here>> are some similar articles to this for you to enjoy. The buttons below let you share this with others as deos the ‘addthis’ button on the right hand menu.

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Great Fabric By KOTHEA, Great Design By McVitty

Great Web Sites are important for Interior Designers. Often they are just too great-looking and neglect to do a proper all-round job.

As an Interior Designer you have a web site for numerous reasons, those reasons will almost exclusively be related to sales & marketing.

Your web site must personify your brand at its highest level, it should probably showcase your work and maybe it should showcase some of the talents of your most trusted and valued staff. It must look wonderful.

So far so good?

I can show you many sites where Interior Designers have done just that. They have produced the most amazing works of art almost. But why? I’m not saying it is wrong to do that I ‘m just asking why have you focussed all your efforts on creating a work of art? Who exactly is going to see it? Where is the audience to your work of art? Who is the audience? What is the purpose?

Often the web design agency have made matters worse. Their creative staff have wanted to do just that; be creative. There is much merit in creativity but only as part of what your customers are looking for.

Maybe the web site has to look good to make your staff or management proud of working in your organisation. That’s a valid reasons too, in part.

Has anyone considered your potential customers? Your existing customers? Has anyone considered at what moments in the customer’s decision making process they are likely to look at any given part of  your web site? Definitely not in many cases.

Ask: “How have your (potential-) customers got your web site address?” If it is from your business cards then the role your web site should play at that time is to support the image, the brand journey you have already started to create with them. If the customer is a longstanding one then they may visit your web site as a sort of post-purchase gratification – maybe they want the project you did for them showcased to the world? If it is a potential cusotmer, that you have not yet even contacted, then they have probably got your web address from a search engine. They will need some degree of showcasing BUT these potential new clients are looking for information, something to make them more interested in your company and they need something to make them be reassured of, and desirous for, your services.

So you’ve probably done a lot right in creating a tool to help the sales process along but you have probably not also created a marketing tool that plays a significant enough role in new lead generation.

What, in detail, have you done wrong then? (not you, sorry, those other interior designers!). Most of these are really very important points and not just designed to make up a list:

1. Publically invisible – there are a lack of quality inbound links to your website;

2. Picture rich, Word poor – insufficient content/information on your web site, instead you have too many nice images;

3. Gorgeously bland – if you changed the name of your company on your web site to that of your biggest competitor would anyone really notice? Do you share their language? When you write in media-speak you do not differentiate your company from anybody else. You are marketing yourself in the same way as everyone else, if that is true then you are trying hard to be average!;

4. Lost in space – your site should be easily navigable, leading visitors from one thoughtful insight to the next breathtaking interior  (or at least to the contact page). On several interior designer sites I have visited the first page presented has no obvious form of navigation to suggest where to go next;

5. Even the IT guy got confused – lack of meta-tag and headings, too much flash-content that search engines cannot see at all; and

6. Hide and seek - lack of search functionality. Without search on your site you are making it as hard as possible for your potential customers to find what they want. They will be used to using a search engine for finding information – just like you are.

There are more things interior designers do wrong with their web sites but those are ones that should be rectified ASAP.

So what exactly should you do? I’ll answer that by answering the ‘mistakes’ listed above:

1. Get quality inbound links. This is a traditional PR exercise but applied to digital media rather than print media. You want links from sites with a higher page rank than your site’s page rank NOT reciprocal links. Find out what pagerank is and put some time into creating inbound links, at first play catch up by seeing what some of your best competitors do (not KOTHEA, we are not a competitor)

2. More content: describe what you do and how you do it and why you do it. Google rates your site based on this type of content rather than pretty picture content.

3. Speak in plain, conversational English. You are not a management consultant, although your client might be.

4. Get your friends or kids (even better clients) to work through your site and watch them do it without helping. Getting around should be intuitive. Also think about the term “call to action”, wherever your potential client is on your site there should be an obvious call to action, an obvious thing for them to do next such as sending you an email or telephoning you for a brochure or appointment.

5. Keep the nice flash bits if you have them but get your IT guys to talk to you about meta tags/keywords, titles, sitemaps,  and h1/h2 tags. (Actually get them to JUST talk to you about those first of all and as soon as they mention web 2.0 just glaze your eyes over and pretend you don’t want to understand! That’s next month’s marketing job for you, don’t let them distract you!). Look puzzled and concerned when they tell you why some of these technical bits are just not possible on your site (they are not be fully truthful) and then ask them why the site was designed and implemented like it was as surely that is the cause of the problem. with the exception of inbound links, all of the things on this list really should have been done when  your site was designed and built, I would almost say that if they were not done then they should be corrected for free if they were done by a paid ‘expert’.

6. Introduce site search. This can cost thousands or it can be free. It depends who you talk to!

I hope that helps. These really are genuine, important problems with many sites and not just an excuse for me to write another list. You can read more of my articles on the business of interior design <here> the articles tend to be about sales and marketing issues rather than technology though I answer questions on either!

PS: This following link is written by Google, it covers related areas of interaction between you and your potential online customer. It is more geared towards selling over the web but you will get the idea of what you should be doing by inference: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/conversion/ebook.html

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Great Fabric By KOTHEA, Great Design By McVitty

You probably use Google (if you are in the UK as Bing or Yahoo are seldom used) and you probably normally click on results that appear on the left hand side and you probably do not click on one of the adverts on the right hand side. You probably also usually only click on things from the first page and perhaps only occasionally from the second or third page if there is something really hard to find. Well most people are like you in how they search!. That’s the good news.

So you want to get your company website listed as high as possible on the left hand side part of the main results, right?

Well here is the bad news; so does everybody else.

Even worse news, it’s not easy.

But the good news is that it is not rocket science. You CAN get better results with a little bit of effort and time.

You can pay people to do this for you. Be careful though many of them are not reputable organisations who can deliver.

So what do you need to do?

1. Have great relevent content on your web site. If there is lots and lots of good and up-to-date info about your services as an interior designer then google will rank you highly. Having bland media-speak sentences that could apply to any of your competitors WILL NOT WORK. The relavent content will include repeated uses of the keywords that people will be using to find interior designers eg “Interior Designer”, your ‘location’, your style “contemporary/traditional”, your projects “villa, hotel, private residence” and so on.

2. Have a properly constructed web site. All the techy bits need to be right. For example, each page needs to have the ‘correct’ title and the right ‘meta’ keywords in the page (meta bits cannot be seen by users but are seen and used by Google). There are several other technical bits that need to be working properly too.

3. Get your site listed in lots of places. Some of these you will  have to pay for but choose wisely – most of the paid for site listings are a waste of money. However, thehousedirectory.com, bida.org and touchlocal.com are good places to start.

I won’t want to go into too much detail in this article about what to do in points 1. and 2. from above. I’ll let you know if you contact me directly from your work email address as I do not want to share this information with MY competitors! They will eventually figure it out but I want them to take as long as possible!

For point 3. ,  you will probably hear about reciprocal links. This is where some company says “if you put me on your site I will put you on mine”. This used to work but now Google will PENALISE you for doing this. So, don’t do it. Don’t worry about it if you’ve done it once or twice but do not use this as a strategy, it will not work.

What you need is links TO your site FROM good, reputable sites. So if you get links from the bbc or timesonline then that will boost the reputation of your site (from Google’s point of view) a lot. But of course that is hard to do.

Q. How do you know what a good site to be linked from is?

A. Download the ‘google toolbar’ into your web browser, it tells you the PAGERANK of the site you are currently on. Pagerank is a mark out of 10, for example the bbc.co.uk is 9/10. your web site is probably 2 0r 3 out of 10. Which is not as bad as it sounds! The most a smallish company is likely to score is 5/10. If you get listed on a site whose pagerank is higher than your then that boosts your page rank.

Pagerank information is only updated every few months so you will  have to wait to see if you are being successful.

As a tip: most of the reputable fabric houses have a stockists page.  That would be a good place to be listed, of course you actually have to be a stockist!

Briefly how pagerank works: when a user types “Interior Designer London” into Google then the Google search engine will find all occurances of those terms over the whole internet. It will order them based on what it thinks most appropriate. Sites with a higher pagerank get a higher position, pages with a high occurance of the searched for words get a higher position, and so on through several other factors.

Hope that helped.

Great Fabric By KOTHEA, Great Design By McVitty

This article is targeted at the smaller interior designers in the UK and consider how to get potential new customers on your web site.

We assume you already have a web site up and running. We will just now look at how to let the world know about what you already have.

There are two things you can do. Firstly you can advertise, that costs money. Secondly you can publicise your web site, that mostly takes time. Today we’ll look at advertising. “Internet advertising 101″ for interior designers!

In the UK, as things stand in October 2009, Google are the only advertising search engine to use that is worth your while using. Use Google AdWords. There are other interior design sites where you can advertise, we’ll look at those another time, we’ll just look at advertising through the google search engine this time.

If you type in Google “Interior Designer London” I’m sure you are familiar with the results. The bit on the right hand side is paid-for advertising. It’s simple to use and I think reasonably effective – just one tool in your marketing arsenal.

How do I get my company name on the advertising on the right hand side? I’m nervous and don’t want to spend too much money.

It’s not too difficult. Open a Google AdWords account. Write a mini advert that points to  your site. Create an “online advertising campaign” in AdWords; IMPORTANTLY set a budget for the campaign, say £1 per day, then you will not expose yourself to costly mistakes.

Now here is the tricky bit. You have to ‘know’ what words your customers will type into the Google search engine when looking for an interior designer. Hmmm. If anyone KNOWS the answer to this of course they would be rich. You will get many companies calling you up claiming to know the answer – trust me NONE of them do. Use your common sense or even better ask a client or friends. What the potential client types in are called keywords or key-phrases; you pick individual words or phrases, probably the latter is best; such as “Interior Designer London”.

You can fine tune your campaign for days of the week, time of the day, location, etc. etc.. But do that when you are more familiar with what is going on.

Once you have created your ad campaign then the ad appears for FREE (good for your brand awareness even if there is no click!). You are only charged when someone clicks on your advert. The click takes them to your site (you told the ad how to do that when you created it in the campaign). That click might cost you 5p or it might cost you £5. So you now need to give some consideration to how much you want to bid for various keywords.

Let’s go back to the Google user who typed in “Interior Designer London”. Everyone else interested in that 3 word phrase, including you, will already have had to bid what they wanted to pay for a click after the ad has appeared. Generally, whoever bids the most comes up first in the list (Google will fine tune it so if people click you more often they will put you higher as they will get more total revenue ). Simple enough. It might cost you 50p per click for that phrase but if you want to be less specific and bid for “Interior Designer” it might cost you £3. So you have to be specific – would you really want someone contacting you from Aberdeen ie if they had types “Interior Designer Aberdeen”? And that is important. You have to be really specific and really target people who realistically will be your customer, you have to get in their minds and figure out how they will look for an interior designer to commission their next project with.

I gave you the example of being specific by the area where you operate. That will work in many cases but not always in larger towns or cities. In fact it probably won’t work too well in London. Why? Because there are a lot of interior designers in London, literally thousands, all trying to do exactly the same thing as you which means that to appear on the top of the list for “Interior Designer London”  you might have to pay £1 per click. You will need to weigh up the many numbers of people who will type that who will never be a client against the profit from winning one such client. So try instead to choose keywords/phrases that match the kind of projects you do eg “traditional country homes interior designer” or “contemporary docklands interior designer” or “minimalist interior designer”. If you are in London then try, something like: “Interior Design Bayswater Traditional”, that would be specific enough. Then you need lots of other combinations too.

You will need to review what  you do at least monthly. Remember also that even if by doing using AdWords you put yourself ahead of your competitors they WILL catch up sooner or later. You have to innovate and stay one step ahead.

That’s about it really. Give it a try, a couple of hours should be enough to get things running.

As a closing thought; think how much time and money it would have taken historically to produce an advert for your local glossy magazine or for a 1/8 page in the back of one of the national interior design magazines. With those you operated on ‘faith’, you would never really know if anyone even saw your ad. It would take days and the artwork would cost you AT LEAST hundreds of pounds. AdWords is different it IS fair and honest and open, you only pay for what your business needs ie you only pay for someone to look at your ultimate advert which is your web site.

Please ask questions through the comments section below, if you are one of our clients we will gladly discuss (in private if you wish) any details of promoting your interior design business on the web.

Still waiting?

You might have to wait a long time for your next piece of work to fall into your lap. Here are a couple of thoughts for the weekend about being more creative and proactive in your search for new client projects.

1. Your existing clients. They know you. You know they already spend money on interior projects. You know they already spend money with you and probably trust you. That sounds promising. You might even know some issues that exist with other rooms or other properties owned by the client.

My suggestion here would be to put together some conceptual proposals (at your own expense) on how to solve these problems. The chances are your client is already aware of the broad issues but not the solutions. Move the thought process on.

2. Plan with your clients. Talk to your clients about their plans for the coming year. It will be good to make them think about uplifting additions to their life or business and it might even get them to start planning next year’s projects and expenditure with you. Remember that although you may well think about Interior Design 100% of the time, your clients do not. Sometimes their thoughts need putting on the right path! As you talk about their plans you will have more information to come back with proposals over the coming months and in the worst case you may even have reminded the client about you rather than that other pesky interior designer who keeps calling here all the time.

Still waiting?

Great Fabric By KOTHEA, Great Design By McVitty

Following on from my last article I’m continuing the trend of unusually numbered lists. So, today’s list is: “Nine and a half ways for interior designers to make more money.” The list is at the end of the article so you can skip the next few paragraphs if you want but the list is not a summary of what I am writing about so you will miss some pearls of wisdom by so doing!!

Isn’t profit a terrible word for some people? They’re almost ashamed to use it. In some design companies staff are angered about large profits. Well its profits that pay your wages, even if you work in the voluntary sector your funding comes from someone else’s profits and even if you work for government your salary comes from taxes which in turn come from profits. So now we’ve got the socialist utopianism off our chests let’s talk money.

Here it is in simple terms: “You have to sell more and spend less” and you might want to make your profits more certain by “reducing risk”. However you dress it up that, pretty much, is business. Customer service is important but it is just a way of cross-selling more products and increasing customer retention. Fun is nice, but you rarely get paid for having fun.

So moving into a little more detail but still keeping it at quite a high level.

For starters, you know your business better than I do. But I’ll bet it follows the Pareto Rule – that’s the one that very many businesses follow regardless of the industry they are in. It’s not really a ‘rule’ but it essentially says that 80% of your ‘stuff’ or outputs usually comes from 20% of inputs. So 80% of your sales will probably come from 20% of your customers, 80% of your overall costs will probably come from 20% of your cost items and 80% of your business risk from 20% of your activities and so on. Use this ‘rule’ to focus your activities when you try to improve your design business.

So, with that at the front of our minds, we go on for some ‘quick wins’. Focus on the big ones, the easy ones, if you like.

A. Sales: Cherish, nurture and retain your biggest customers, they need great levels of service and must not be taken for granted. BUT event the richest client will run out of houses for you to work on after a while…you have to have an additional strategy in place for bringing on the new large customers of the future. These will be the ones that drive the profitability of your business tomorrow. You should be able to analyse your customers/prospects by their size in terms of profitability to you and their growth potential as a client. Ideally, you need a nice balanced mix o present day ‘cash cows’ and future ‘rising stars’ for you to class your business as healthy. Next make sure you organise your sales resources to squeeze all revenues from and make profit on those mature accounts; allocate proportionately more sales and service on the growth accounts and maybe on those small, futureless accounts you just say thank-you, goodbye and re-direct the time you have freed up. If your mix of customers is not well balanced then you have highlighted a risk to your business. Make a plan to change and innovate.

B. Costs. Your building and staff are probably your biggest costs. Maybe also transport, utilities and some marketing expenses like exhibitions. Reducing costs is tricky, made more tricky if you are a nice person who doesn’t put the business first. Your building lease has a fixed term so you probably can’t renege on that too easily and save money and even if you could there would be the costs and disruption associated with moving, your business landlord will also know that and will of course try to make rents higher at renewal. That’s your first dilemma.

More tricky still are your staff costs. It’s always best to lead by example and set expectations of high levels of delivery from everyone in your organisation. People need to be more productive whilst being creative. If your business is growing set the expectation of harder work rather than new recruits. New recruits increase overheads; management, training-up, the risk of them being an unknown quantity. If your business is stable or declining take a realistic look at where you are at today and then you might try outsourcing and sub contracting as a means of reducing headcount and overheads, it could make your business more straightforward to run and more agile in its response to opportunity. Sometimes you have to let people go, yes even the people you like who don’t contribute as much as those you like less. It can be a hard world sometimes but harder for you if your business goes under.

C. Risks. Few people in the design industry systematically review risks. Take a ‘risk register’ of what you think the major risks to your business are. Clients or suppliers going bankrupt? Key sales people leaving? Web site being hacked? Losing your prospect database? Specific fixed price projects? and so on. Most risks have two general elements 1. the likelihood of them happening and 2. the impact of them if they do happen. So an asteroid falling on your office is catastrophic…but unlikely. I would focus firstly on the most likely ones and work out what you might do if that risk materializes. Review your risk register, say on a quarterly basis. ,You will probably not catch all the risks but you will at least have the right mindset for methodically thinking of risks and you will probably also identify a few of the big ones that you knew existed but didn’t really want to deal with yet.

OK here’s the list, I could go on but I knew you were getting impatient:

1. Outsource: Outsource anything that is not core to your design business: accounting, IT, admin, some marketing but probably not sales.

2. Automate: Automate everything that you don’t outsource from voicemail, to invoice production, to invoice chasing, to order fulfillment, to customer service, to sales, to marketing campaigns.

3. Subcontract: subcontract key design resources where you have to: make a key resource freelance if mutually beneficial. You could try partnering as a means of getting access to certain resources but partnerships, in my experience, confusingly, always seem to end up being a one way road.

4. Negotiate realistically with suppliers. Your biggest and least risky savings will come from your biggest, longterm suppliers rather than by trying to eek out every last cent/penny from new, small suppliers (who will dump you as soon as a better customer comes along). But you will only benefit is there is a win-win. We are fabric suppliers. If you ask us for a discount on your first purchase from us you won’t get one! The best way, in general, for suppliers and purchasers to both win is if you negotiate an annual rebate deal based on certain levels of business. I will then know that, as your supplier, you are bonded in some way to me for 12 months. I know I’m going to get repeat business so what will I do? Probably give you even better service. The deal you negotiated will save you money but make me money overall as well because I get more sales from you than I otherwise would have done. Win-win. This is much better than individual deal-based discounts and many companies in our industry to not discount on a piecemeal basis in any case.

5. Increase productivity. Expect everyone in your organisation to increase their product by 50%. Yes really, do that. It would be nice to be disappointed if they only deliver 40% wouldn’t it? Your part of the deal is to give them the resources they need without the stress they do not need.

6. Add-on sales. What extra services can you provide around your core offering? If you just do design, offer a product selection or procurement service as well, or at least get an introduction fee from a partner who you recommend to do the bits you cannot.

7. Great employees. Keep the best, lose the rest. You know it makes sense. It’s a hirer’s market at the moment but never go too far.

8. Continually or quarterly re-visit how you deliver. Re-design how each of your internal processes work (ie how you work on a job) to minimise variable costs or maximise customer service – whichever is best for each process. In general the parts of your activity that the client sees should be structured to provide good customer service, for the bits they do not see, it is not so important: so cut the costs there if possible.

9. Innovate. Try something new and don’t be afraid to fail once in a while. Most top athletes in most competitive sports lose A LOT but they don’t shy away from the opportunity of trying again to win and neither should you. I’ll bet Usain Bolt lost a lot when he was younger.

9.5 Relax; have coffee, a spa day, a late start once in a while.

Similar articles are linked <here>.

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Most lists have 10 points or multiples thereof. So, for a refreshing change, here are nine common mistakes made by Interior Designers in their business generation and, perhaps more importantly, how to avoid them. The article offers some sensible advice for designers who have some degree of responsibility for selling and marketing of their organisation’s design service and, whilst not a comprehensive solution to all your sales and marketing woes, it might just help a little!

1. Not engaging the client: It is always great to understand what the client wants and deliver that rather than a variation of the last scheme you completed. You already knew that of course! However have you thought about the client decision making process? Try to understand that: your buyer; your consumer; and your decision makers could all be different people. Taking the example of a residential project (the principle also equally applies to a business to business project) your ‘client’ may be one partner but the decision maker could be the other partner and key influencers/users could be the kids. You need to engage with all parties to get “buy-in”.
2. Not listening hard enough: It’s easy to listen but often easy to not listen hard enough. In the sales process you may be inclined to talk too much. Ask questions, lots of them and make sure they are relevant. Try to ask open questions like “tell me about the sort of style you want to achieve” rather than closed questions which often do not get you correct information eg if you ask “Do you want red chairs?” your client may very well answer “No” but this has not told you that they want animal skin covered chairs!
3. Attempting to ‘create’ demand: You might have been asked to do a specific job, say on one room. In uncertain times you may be glad about that. Nevertheless it is still a mistake to miss the opportunity of trying to broaden the opportunity.
4. Don’t make too many assumptions: Well don’t make ANY costly assumptions. You might assume your client only has a certain budget. ASK those embarrassing questions about money and don’t forget that most clients have reasonable contingency factored in to their plans .
5. Risk: All projects entail risk. Always have a ‘risk register’ (list of things that can go wrong). In advance, plan what you will do in the eventuality of any of those risks happening. Also for those truly monumental risks that may well be out of your control (and fault) then agree up front with the client what will happen in those circumstances. Otherwise the client will expect you to sort the problem out when it happens at your cost as it is ‘not their fault’. A simplistic example would be the removal of an interior wall which you and your client assumed to be none load bearing. The removal of a non-load bearing wall is straightforward but removal of a structural wall is not and is much more costly.
6. Qualify new prospects: Your marketing campaigns, if well designed, should generate lots of leads especially if you have decided to invest heavily in those campaigns. After such a successful investment you will be energised to thoroughly follow-up all your leads. Great! Nothing wrong with that. Well nothing except that you only have limited resources to follow up the lead so make sure you focus those resources on qualifying the prospects and further refine your focus on the best prospects. Do not allocate equal resources. A simple rule for qualification is to follow ” BANT”: B – Existing Budget, or access to funds; A – Authority to approve and progress; N – A  Need exists to necessitate action; T – Timeframes are sufficiently clear.
7. Failing to follow-up: Once you have qualified your leads properly it should then be a crime to forget to follow them up! Yet we’ve probably all done it at some point. The price of disorganisation is missed opportunity. Get some sort of system that reminds you to follow up people at the right time; be it a diary, your email package or a contact management system. If you work for a large organisation then what if the lead generator/owner is ill? How will their follow up actions be acted upon if no-one knows about them? What if you lose your diary or your PC crashes? Such errors can cost you tens of thousands of dollars/pounds/euros – a lot regardless of the currency.
8. Not understanding your own product or service: New products and materials and methods are developed every day. (At KOTHEA, www.kothea.com, we introduce a new fabric design on average every month rather than having spring/fall collections). Keep up to date with innovations in your market. The best sales and marketing campaigns are a mix of customer need and product understanding. Take time to read trade journals, visit showrooms and talk to customers. Always ask questions.
9. Measuring activity rather than outcomes: If your design practice is large enough to employ people at least part time in marketing or sales then you need to measure the impact of their activity.  Digital marketing is changing how business works. Is it best to have unquantifiable paper PR in World Of Interiors? Or is it best to send out 200 glossy brochures to past clients? Or is it best to have 300 clicks costing 50p/50cents each on Google Adwords? I’m not saying there is a right or wrong answer on this one but really, really consider the effectiveness of what you are spending and how you can measure it. Rest assured that your competitors are already doing that.

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