Building your finances is a lot like weight loss or weight training: What you do consistently will show up as results in the future.
If you consistently get on your bike for 15 minutes a day and skip your favorite mocha latte, you will reduce enough calories to see measurable weight loss. The same is true of building up your bank account, where habits like consistency and discipline make all the difference.
What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is a document that lays out concrete actions and timelines for promoting your firm’s work with the purpose of capturing more business. A well-organized firm prepares—or has someone prepare—a marketing plan for the year ahead. (It’s also something most design firms don’t have!) It covers all activities and projects related to promoting your business. These could include a website update, social media posts, Google ads, newsletters and more.
If you want to earn more money, start by creating a 90-day plan of your own. Here is a list of the top four marketing tactics that should be included in your plan:
- Do outreach via personal emails to past clients for referrals or new business
- Do outreach to referral partners, including builders, contractors, architects and influencers
- Update your website with new project photos
- Develop a social media content plan, including Instagram posts, stories and reels
And don’t stop there. Once you’ve successfully executed a three-month plan, turn your momentum into a rolling 12-month plan.
Make your marketing plan work for you
You don’t have to create your marketing plan in a vacuum. In our company, the vice president of sales and marketing creates a plan on a spreadsheet first. Later, each element of that sheet is added to Asana so that the tasks are assigned to team members.
Outsourcing your marketing tasks is a great option if you have fewer than four people on your team. As your business grows—and especially once you have eight people or more—you may want to bring marketing in-house by hiring a part-time or full-time marketing assistant. (Your revenue should be around $2 million per year before hiring a full-time person in this role.) This way, you ensure that your brand voice is consistently used and shared with your followers.
Even if you have help, you still need to spend about 10 hours a week on marketing if you’re the owner of your firm—this time may be for planning, strategizing or networking. It’s like brushing your teeth: Brush the ones you want to keep.
Remember: What you do consistently, and with discipline, will turn into results. If you pause your marketing efforts, your pipeline will go dry at some point in the future. So once you get into a rhythm, keep it up!
For insights and analysis on how designers across the country run their firms, download the 2023 Interior Design Business Survey report, presented by Pearl Collective, Interior Talent and Business of Home.
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Gail Doby is co-founder of Pearl Collective (formerly Gail Doby Coaching & Consulting), an interior design business consultancy that helps designers, architects and other creatives increase their profitability. Doby ran her own design firm in Denver for nearly 20 years and has a degree in finance and banking. Since 2008, she has been helping designers scale their businesses profitably and reach financial freedom. As a coach, mentor and business transformation specialist, she shares innovative ways to overcome the roadblocks, challenges and detours creative entrepreneurs face. She is also the bestselling author of Business Breakthrough: Your Creative Value Blueprint to Get Paid What You’re Worth. Her goal is to empower design industry clients to differentiate themselves, drive measurable results, achieve business projections, and create personal satisfaction through game-changing strategies and business practices.
