Lately, there has been increased speculation that we’re heading toward an economic downturn. When the economy suffers, interior design spending drops, leaving more designers competing for fewer and fewer clients. If you find these prospects intimidating, take heart, for:

1. Even in the worst economies, those who know how to adjust are able to thrive; and

2. The businesses that learn to thrive when times are tough are the ones that wind up killing it when the economy eventually recovers!

So how can you build your interior design business so that it thrives even in tough times? We’ll cover three core strategies.

Have you ever walked into a store, intent on finding one particular item, only to be overwhelmed by the size of the place? You cast about, surrounded by signs, banners, and products, but with no idea where or how to get what you came in for. Worst of all, the staff is nowhere to be found! Disoriented, you eventually become frustrated and leave.

If this has ever happened to you, then you’ve understood firsthand the marketing principle that “the confused mind always says no.” Yet in spite of this principle, the vast majority of interior design websites give visitors too many options and not enough guidance when they first land on the homepage. They see the options to check out the gallery, read the blog, or schedule a consultation, with no guidance for which to pick first. As a result, a potential client ends up becoming overwhelmed, closing the tab, and never seeing your website again. What could’ve been good business for your company is lost forever!

That’s why you want to create a straightforward path for your clients to take: The Sales Funnel.

Imagine:

In our store from earlier, a smiling clerk had come to greet you when you entered, equipped with knowledge of the store’s layout, product, and prices. Moreover, they cater directly to YOUR personal needs. That would’ve been a vastly different experience.

Like a real funnel, a Sales Funnel guides your clients to one course of action, rather than giving them lots of options to confuse them. The function of your funnel should be to ask one thing from your client, whether it’s to make a purchase or simply sign onto an email list. A great way to guide your client from start to finish is with the Hook, Story, and Offer. Let’s see how these three work:

The Hook

The average internet user’s attention span has been in decline with each passing year, especially with the advent of social media where mindless scrolling has become a common practice.

This means that, much like a physical hook, you need to catch your potential client’s attention with a killer marketing Hook. Be sure to be bold, brief, and connect to your audience and their design needs. Showcasing bright and compelling photos of your best work as a designer, or offering a free consultation, are great Hooks!

The Story

Once you’ve got your clients hooked, it’s time to hit them with your story.

The key word here is connection. Your Story is the perfect opportunity to connect to your future clients, and a great way to do this is with a video. Don’t be afraid to get in front of the camera! Tell your audience why you’re passionate about interior design, how you’ve come to understand your consumers’ needs, or why your design solutions are so much more potent and effective than your competitors’.

Unlike your Hook which should be on the briefer side, your Story can be a bit more detailed. Most importantly, your story should relate to your audience, eliciting interest and excitement from them. Put yourself in their shoes and write something that’ll captivate them and get them ready to hear…

The Offer

This is everything your Funnel has been leading towards! Your Hook grabbed their attention. Your Story showed them your expertise. Now it’s time to make them your Offer! Do you want them to book an appointment, schedule a consultation, or take some other action?

Now’s the time to ask!

Know now that because you predicated your Offer with your Hook and Story, your clients are going to be far more informed regarding you and your design services, and without any other distractions to take them off course they’ll be fully receptive to your offer. We’ll talk more about how to present your offer in our section on Offer Stacking.

Try this exercise:

Look at the advertising you consider most successful, whether it takes the form of a commercial, billboard, or website. Ask yourself: What’s the Hook? What’s the Story? What’s the Offer? The more you recognize this three-step pattern in other media, the more efficiently you’ll be able to reproduce it in your own marketing strategies.

Once your client lands on your website, all they have to do is scroll down as your Hook, Story, and Offer rise into sight. This linearity ensures that clients don’t get distracted by too many options, keeping their focus all the way up to your presentation of your Offer. But what’s the best way to showcase your offer so that even when clients are spending more conservatively, you rise above the competition to win their business over?

Ladies and Gents, I present to you: The Offer Stack and The Price Stack.

There are three numbers that are important to know when creating an offer to potential clients:

1. The cost to you

2. The price being paid by your client

3. The perceived value being received by your client.

Let’s take a look at how these numbers interact with each other:

New cars have notoriously slim profit margins. A car that costs a dealer $20,000 might sell for $22,500. Anyone buying the car would need to have a perceived value matching or exceeding that cost of $22,500 or else they won’t spend the money. But if the only thing they’re getting is the car itself, then there’s nothing adding to the perceived value. That’s why car dealers spend so much time trying to emphasize all of the extras that come with their cars, and all of the services their dealership provides.

Let’s contrast this with a digital product you might sell, like an online interior design course. There are certain fixed costs like the video production, and incremental costs which are incurred by each additional person who signs up for the course, such as credit card processing. Supposing it costs $5000 to produce the course, and an additional $10 for each person who registers for the course.

If 50 people sign up for the course, the cost to you would be $5500, or $110 per person.

If 500 people sign up for the course, the cost to you drops to $20 per person.

The price of your course is $100, which means its perceived value needs to be at least $100. But if we increase the perceived value of the course, your consumers are more likely to buy it. For example, what if along with the course you offered a free copy of your eBook, a collection of your favorite color combinations for design palettes, and a private one hour consultation to talk about your client’s business. These add-ons can have enormous perceived value for your client, making the price of the course a steal.

This, my friends, is:

The Offer Stack

The Offer Stack perfectly suited to make the gap between the price of your design service and the perceived value as large as possible. The larger this gap is, the more likely your clients are to buy your services, even when the economy is down. After all, who doesn’t like a great deal?

Note the differences between the add-ons in the Offer Stack above. The eBook and palette collection can be ready to go and require no extra time or money on your part to get into your clients’ hands, whereas a consultation takes an hour of your time. If you find ways to add-on that come at the least financial or time cost to you, while still providing an appealing product for your client, then you can deliver massive value in ways that cost you next to nothing to deliver.

So how to do this in practice? Ask yourself: What problems are my services going to cause, and how can I provide a solution?

You might find that question jarring. Problems? My services don’t cause any problems. Yes, they do! All services do. But this is not a bad thing; on the contrary, it can be a very good one. For instance, here at Knobs.Co, we sell cabinet knobs. Our customers will receive a package of hardware that needs to be installed. The very act of buying our products means that they now have a next step that they’re going to have to deal with: how to install it.

So how can we turn our client’s need into an opportunity to add more value? We can offer a free cabinet installation guide; this could be a digital product that we only need to create once, so the production cost would be minimal and the printing cost non-existent. The client pays nothing extra for the guide, but it has a strong perceived value. Another potential solution includes creating a list of Knobs.Co-recommend installation professionals.

The Price Stack

Another great way to create perceived value lies in your pricing margins. When the economy takes a turn for the worse the expectation is that consumers will spend less on luxury products. You could be forgiven for concluding that an effective way to cut costs would be to remove some of your more expensive products and services so as to make your business as a whole seem more affordable to your consumers. The fact is that this may be hindering you more than helping you.

Any old business is guaranteed to have products that cover the spectrum of price, from economical to expensive. The average consumer wants to think of themselves as a savvy spender; they won’t go for the cheap option for fear that the product itself won’t be lasting, nor will they pick the expensive one because it’s out of their price range. I’ll choose the middle product, they think, the best of reliability and affordability. This is an entirely different kind of “stack”, one of high, middle, and low products.

Let’s say you often pitch your clients on high end cabinet hardware, say a custom made to order brand like Rocky Mountain Hardware, and the majority end up going for a more popular middle-tier product such as Top Knobs. If you were to remove the high end product from your lineup, then your middle-tier product would become your new top-tier product, meaning your customers would seek out an even cheaper option. By keeping your top-tier product around even when consumers aren’t ordering it as frequently, you ensure that your clients’ “middle product” ideal in your product stack doesn’t drop in quality and profitability.

When you increase the perceived value of your design products and services using Offer Stacking and Price Stacking, you’ll change the mindset of your clients and make them feel like they’re getting a huge deal out of your design options!

Being a great designer does not guarantee that you will become a well-known designer. The truth is, there are plenty of mediocre interior designers that have very strong public profiles, not because of their design skills, but because they know the secrets to getting themselves out into the world.

The stronger your personal profile, the less likely you will want for clients even in the tightest of economic times. And even if you already have more work than you can handle, strengthening your profile can still allow you to increase your rates. So whether you’re a gifted designer, or just an average one, don’t ignore the opportunities to strengthen that profile. Here’s Dave Mason, our company CEO, with a couple of tips to help you make the most of your public profile.

Micro-Publishing

In a marketing course I recently took with Russell Brunson (details below), he claimed that if we published every day for a year, it would change our lives. So my wife and I each decided to take up the challenge. We each committed to doing 250 videos over a one year period (a little short of the 365 that Russell asked for, but we wanted to give ourselves a little leeway).

So what constitutes publishing? Russell told us that we could do a video, a podcast, or a blog post, and encouraged us to choose the area where we are strongest. Since I’m a writer (and more than a little camera shy), I initially thought I’d write daily blog posts. However, the second instructor in the course, Stephen Larsen, contradicted Russell’s advice: he told us to publish in the media that we most like to consume. Since I rarely read blog posts, and I love to watch videos, that meant doing videos.

So despite my fear of the camera, I started posting daily videos. Both my wife and I saw immediate results from putting out these videos. I found myself taking huge leaps in my comfort in front of the camera. I started finding my voice, finding my audience, and finding the topics that I most had to contribute. My wife had even more dramatic results: in her first two days publishing, she received two new inquiries from clients seeking out her coaching.

By the way, videos, podcasts, and blog posts are hardly exclusive. Stephen Larsen, the instructor I mentioned above, records videos several times a week. He then takes the audio from his videos, rips it out, and uploads it online as a podcast (which I’ve become a regular listener of). Then, he has the audio transcribed and published a third time as a blog post. One thought can easily be remodeled into three different mediums that can be repurposed for all sorts of things, like add-ons for your Offer Stacks.

Book Publishing

When I was a kid, self-publishing was a last resort that few authors wanted to pursue because the channels of distribution were all dominated by major publishers, leaving no room for the little guy. Few authors even tried to self-publish, and those who did normally did so as a last resort when their attempts at finding a publisher failed.

One result of this was that being a published author really meant something. It meant that you had impressed publishers enough for them to risk money and time by adding your book to their catalog. Authors automatically received a certain amount of prestige just by merit of having been published, even from those who had never read their books.

These days, publishing and distributing are ridiculously easy. It only takes a few days, and practically zero upfront capital to have your book available in both print and digital formats on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other leading marketplaces. These days, self-publishing is so cheap and has so many advantages that many authors, including myself, turn down offers from major publishers and choose to keep their books self-published.

But it’s a funny thing. You’d think that the prestige factor of having a book would have dissipated now that the barriers to entry are so low. The strange fact is that the aura of being a published author still exists. When I came out with my first book, I was shocked at how much it helped brand me as an expert, even amongst those who had never read it.

Soon after publishing, I shared these thoughts with a friend who had also self-published a book. She said that as soon as it came out, she was suddenly able to get herself booked on the radio and other media outlets that she didn’t have access to before. The book became her calling card, and the very fact that she was published absolutely transformed her public profile.

I know to many the idea of writing a book seems like way too big of a project to take on, so I want to reiterate that the book doesn’t have to be anything fancy in order to have a huge impact on your personal brand. One of the easiest ways to publish a book these days is to simply combine smaller pieces into one big one. I’ve seen many authors generate books just by putting together a collection of their best blog posts. So if you decide to do the micro-publishing I mentioned above, then you’ll easily get the content for your book.

Publicize with Precision: Your Dream 100

Publishing alone will boost your profile, but you can increase your web presence in even more effective ways by thinking about the types of clients you’re targeting. One outstanding tactic for this is to draft a Dream 100. Your Dream 100 is a curated list of 100 influencers in your field that you want to partner or be associated with. You likely already follow some of the people that’ll end up on your Dream 100, but there are plenty of ways to build up the list even further.

Start by asking yourself: who is my ideal client? How old are they? Are they a man or a woman? What’s their income class? Where do they live? Define their demographic as closely as possible; the more specific your ideal client is, the easier it’ll be to determine the following: who has their attention? Whose content are they consuming? Who do they follow? The answer to these questions are the influencers that you’ll add to your Dream 100. Then you can see who the people on your Dream 100 are partnered with and add them to your list as well!

Once you have your Dream 100 set, it’s time to make connections with them. A great place to start is by asking yourself: what’s a personalized way to reach out and build a bridge between you and the people on your Dream 100? Say you have a small blog following and one of your Dream 100 is a podcaster. Writing a review or leaving a detailed comment on why you appreciate their content goes a long way. You can even go further and write a blog post quoting or recommending them, then shoot them a message to let them know you gave them a write up. This’ll help you start to develop a relationship with your Dream 100, and make a strong impression on them; they may even link back to your blog post.

When it comes to your Dream 100, feel free to dream BIG! Don’t spend all this time and effort cultivating a Dream 100 to achieve small results. While it’s true that not every single person on your list will necessarily choose to respond to your outreach efforts, every connection made represents dramatic growths in your profile.

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Using these three core concepts, you’ll build a support for your business to flourish even when clients are scarce. Your Sales Funnel will lead them on a clear, straightforward path towards your Offer Stack, which will demonstrate immense value for an astoundingly low price. And your Prominent Profile will increase your web presence by leaps and bounds, allowing you to attract clients in ways you never could’ve anticipated. These strategies will ensure that when the economy turns upwards and clients are ready to buy big again, you’re one of the foremost players in the interior design market.

By the way, many of these concepts we first learned in a marketing course called the One Funnel Away Challenge. I have taken dozens of marketing courses over the years, and this one was not only the best, it was also the cheapest. If you are interested in learning more about how to take your business marketing to the next level, you can learn more about the course by clicking here.