This is the situation where you have all that it takes to be an interior designer, a good eye, skills, and talent, but you don’t know where to begin. It seems like the beginning is the hardest part for most entrepreneurs.
The thing you need to do is research it a bit and just start. Once you start, everything gets easier and goes naturally from there. So, here’s an approximate step-by-step guide on how to start an interior design business.
1. Design Your Personal Brand
Before you begin your business, you need to come up with your brand. It needs to be something recognizable and representative. Try to present yourself in an ambient you designed. For example, you can create a charming seating area in your garden where you can record your intro video.
However, there are a few other things you need to consider for designing your personal brand and coming up with ways to present yourself to the public, and these include:
- Type of client: It’s important to identify your target audience as in any business, because these are the people you’re going to advertise your services to, and they’ll ultimately become your customers.
- Skill level: Think about what you can currently do, and what you can improve on. Your brand needs to reflect your skills, and it’s not that difficult to present it that way. You can come up with a name that speaks on behalf of the skills.
- Your niche: It’s easy to determine your area of specialty because it’s the thing that you can do best. It can be your bedroom decorating style or something that separates you from the competition. Figure out a way to present that to your customers.
- Social media identity: One of the easiest ways to develop your personal brand is to develop your social media identity. Make business profiles on networks that you think your target audience is using.
2. Showcase Your Skills Online
If interior design is something you do in your spare time, and you’d like to make money from your hobby, you need to make recording videos a hobby as well. Uploading video content to your profile that showcases your skills is a great way to promote yourself.
However, there are different things you need to consider before posting a video online. You can’t just record something irrelevant and post it. It needs to be effective in promoting you. So, the video needs to be:
- Short: This is a best practice piece of advice because smaller chunks of information are easier to consume. If you make your video a long one, it’s likely the viewer will skip the video and watch a shorter one.
- Well-titled: It’s important that you come up with a title that’s not clickbait because you need to gain trust with your target audience. Also, the title needs to be imaginative and interesting so that it attracts viewers.
- Captioned and subtitled: For search engine optimization purposes, we recommend you caption your videos. However, it’s also good to use subtitling software to widen your audience. Videos with subtitles get more views. As a rule, if a video clip includes words that resonate with the viewer, and those words are large enough, the video will stand out in the media. Moreover, subtitles make video content accessible for deaf or hard of hearing people and can boost your SEO power.
- Well-described: Make sure that you have a clear and comprehensive description of your videos. Also, use hashtags as well as you can because they will determine in which searches your videos appear.
- Focused on one skill: Don’t present all your skills at once. Leave room for more videos and consistency in posting. For example, one video can focus on your sketching skills, another on your knowledge of design software, etc.
3. Gain Experience in Interior Design
If you think you can benefit from gaining a bit of experience, we recommend learning how to use different interior design software. This is software that can help you advance your design to the next level.
However, you can always focus on different courses offered on course platforms, such as Udemy. Make it a habit to research the trends of your business and keep up with them at all times.
4. Portfolio and Services
Having your own website builds trust among your target audience. When you want to show that you’re a professional, you need to build your website because it shows that you put time and effort into presenting something to your customers.
Plus, the website can show the portfolio of the work you’ve done so far. It’s also important that you have the services you provide outlined on your website. This gives the people exactly what they need to know, and what you can or cannot do.
It’s also a great idea to present your skills in terms of which interior design app you’re familiar with. This might not mean a lot to your potential customers, but it makes you much more trustworthy. If you’re ready to start designing your own portfolio, Here are some interior design portfolio’s you can use as inspiration to create your own.
5. Determine Your Prices
When starting a home renovations or home design business, you need to think about the prices of the services you offer. This means that once you come up with the prices, you can’t stem from them.
They need to be consistent, and they need to be affordable. You can’t make them extremely expensive, but you need to determine them so that people know how much you value your services.
For example, a smaller scope interior design job won’t be valued at the same price as a smart home interior design job of a larger scope. Try to stick with the prices you set the first time. Set them differently only when you reach a certain amount of clients.
6. Explore Digital Marketing
Digital marketing includes all kinds of aspects of promotion online. When you start an interior design business, you need to make people aware of what you’re offering, and the best thing to do is to put it online.
If you’re the type that relies on social media more than on other platforms, you can promote your services through social media ads. However, you can also include different content marketing types, such as blogs, vlogs, case studies, checklists, etc.
The most important thing is that you make your presence known in popular online media. This way you contribute to building brand awareness, and you widen the target audience to increase the number of potential customers.
7. Network, network, and network
Finally, it’s all about networking. Even when you do everything well online, you still need to network as much as possible. LinkedIn is a great way to network, but you should do it live as well.
Nothing can compare with a person-to-person talk in networking. Even if you have the best possible website and the most comprehensive video content on your social media, you’ll still get the best possible results when you talk with someone.
Only through conversation can a person understand the full scope of your abilities and services. Although, you can also encourage people on social media to post questions about what you do, and you can answer these questions through video or written content.
Conclusion
The most important things when starting an interior design business are designing your brand and developing it, gaining experience and following trends, making a portfolio of your work and outlining your services, employing digital marketing as much as possible to showcase your skills and talents, and networking. Apart from great skill and talent, this should be all it takes.
