Guest Blogger: Important Tips – How to Brand your Interior Design Business

Guest Blogger #310, Entry #856, December 22, 2011

When it comes to building up your interior design business, you probably have all of your ducks in a row, from an amazing stylistic sensibility, to knowledge of your industry, to a solid business plan, to the financing needed to get your enterprise off the ground.  But if you haven’t thought about how you’re going to develop your brand identity, you’re missing out on a key element needed to make your professional undertaking a success.  If your image isn’t in tune with what you have to offer, or your name simply isn’t out there for potential clients to find, you are doing yourself a great disservice.  So here are just a few ways that you can go about branding your creative business for optimum exposure and appeal.

How will you brand your design business?

Image via: Flickr.Lifestyled Chic

Meaning behind your brand

To begin with, you need to figure out what your brand stands for.  Some companies create a mission statement to outline the objectives of their business as well as the principles that define it.  You don’t necessarily have to do this (although it’s not a bad idea), but you do need to sit down and think about how you want the consumer public to see you.  Do you strive to provide superior customer service and designs that suit the wants and needs of your clients while staying true to your sophisticated vision?  Do you care about the community in which you operate?  Is it your goal to grow a business through ethical and honest practices, reliability, and a confidence in the knowledge and skills you can bring to the table?  Now, how can you show that through branding?

Consider getting the word out through the internet

Image via: We Say How High

Getting the word out

Once you have an idea of what makes your brand significant and unique, it’s time to let people know that you exist.  Whether or not you are operating out of a real-world storefront, your best bet to get your brand to the public is with online efforts, so your first step should be to set up a website.  A web development company can help you to meet your marketing needs with your website, but you must be involved in the process to ensure that your site highlights both your professional goals and your creative aesthetic.  This is the basis of any branding effort.  You must show prospective clients who you are, what you have to offer, and why you’re better than the competition.

Brand yourself with coordinating information, graphics and social media

Image via: Aoifej

Social media can help

From there you need to expand the scope of your efforts through search engine optimization (SEO), which will increase your traffic and web presence, and set yourself up with the hottest social media sites (like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and so on).  But before you get too far into the process of spreading your tentacles on the worldwide web, you need to consider a logo design.  This is a visual symbol of your brand that people could come to identify with your values and service, so it needs to speak to who you are as a business person and an interior designer.  Although you work in a creative field, you should think about hiring a professional logo designer to help you here since it has more to do with marketing than aesthetics.  Now you just have to live up to the promise that you’ve made with your brand image in order to keep the business rolling in.

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