Content Marketing for Your Interior Design Website

Build Authority

When done right, a content strategy is going to help you build authority for your brand by enabling you to target your audience's specific interests and needs; offer on-point content; and make use of a highly specialized, niche writer who can bring their own experience to the table. The result is content that can't be matched by most casual blogs or smaller competitors, and you end up with loyal readers who happily spread the word about your brand.

Increase Engagement

Once you begin producing content informed by your content strategy, you'll wonder how you ever got by producing content without one. While content without a strategy can jump from topic to topic with no real connection between your blog posts, your content strategy will ensure lots of related posts that link to your site to keep readers continuously reading.

Moreover, since a content strategy enables (and requires) you to plan content across the platforms your brand is active on, it enables you to create themes and trends, connecting content to your other content and encouraging visitors to interact with you across platforms instead of on just your website or just your Instagram page. This increases engagement in multiple ways.

With relevant content linked together and a multi-platform presence, you'll be able to engage readers time and time again and give them something to look forward to every time they come back. This means better retention, return rate, and overall loyalty for your brand, and it's all thanks to great content.

Improve Rankings

By default, a content strategy means you're already going to end up targeting all of the major keywords your audience is searching for. On its own, this will help your content strategy in a big way. When you know your audience, topic research is basically keyword research. So, when you pair your content strategy with tools like Google Analytics along with on-page SEO techniques, you'll see your rankings improve organically, and that's something that will only get better with time.

While SEO does take some months to start getting big results, if you are consistently publishing content that targets long-tail keywords, you will see an impact on your organic traffic and other key metrics if you keep at it. These improved rankings only get better as your domain authority (DA) grows, making it easier for you to earn featured snippets and rank for keywords with a higher search volume, leading to a snowball effect to increase organic traffic to your website.

Grow Your Following

Chances are, your brand has often tried to take on a new social media platform or to post more regularly on the social media platforms you already use. With that said, you'll never see better engagement than when you're posting based on your content strategy. With your content strategy, you'll be posing consistently, and you'll be planning your content in advance, helping connect it to your other new content of that time and drive engagement across platforms.

The regular, more interesting content on your blog and social media pages means a growing following. As you write better content more often, you'll see shares, likes, and comments increase. Plus, part of your content strategy will involve engaging with the people who engage with your content, helping to build your brand and increase interactions.

Convert More Leads

No matter what role your brand fills in the interior design space, every website thrives on leads. You might be passing these leads on to partners or affiliates or marketing your own products to them, but in any case, they're likely the driving source of profit behind your brand. As such, having a content strategy that will help you attract, engage, and convert more leads is definitely a winning scenario.

By improving your rankings and growing your following, your content strategy will help you get more leads. By offering engaging content that builds your authority, your content strategy will help you hook and nurture those leads. Lastly, by being planned and structured in a way that meets your audience's needs, your content strategy will help you convert more leads. In other words, your content strategy's benefits in more leads, and profit, all the way around.

Profile Your Company

While it's all too often overlooked, before you go looking for content ideas or deciding how often to publish on your blog, you need to profile your company. This may seem like a no-brainer step that you can skip over, but in reality, most brands don't have clearly defined standards or preferences when it comes to things like how they want their audience to feel or what "voice" they want to come across when they write content.

Ideally, you'll take some time looking at your competitors, reviewing brand archetypes, and defining who you want your brand to be. If you're already well-established, you might just need to trim the corners and work out the little details. In any case, creating a brand book is a smart move. This resource won't just inform your internal team, but it can help anyone you outsource to, like a professional writer, immediately adapt to your brand's voice. This will ensure consistent, quality content no matter who creates it.

Create Your Customer Personas

Once you have clearly defined who your company is, the next step is to take a deep dive into who your audience is. If you're like most companies, you have a rough idea, but you need specifics. For this step, you need to create at least one customer persona, but most companies end up creating 2 or 3 to capture the majority of their target audience. These customer personas are almost like a fictitious Facebook profile representing someone who'd be an ideal customer.

In your customer personas, you'll need to perform in-depth research to go beyond basic demographics and actually understand the platforms they use, the pain points they're experiencing, the budget they're working with, and the type of content they interact with the most. Once you have that information, you're ready to start putting your content strategy together.

Define Your Platforms

Knowing your audience, you'll be able to determine which platforms your brand needs to be on. Ideally, you'll start with just 2-3 social media platforms, your website/blog, and maybe an additional platform if you have a need. Spreading your resources too thin is a surefire way to get behind on your content strategy or see the quality drop, so start small and add new platforms as the need arises and as you're able to grow to meet your capacity needs.

As you define your platforms, you should also think about the type of content you want to publish on each platform. For instance, while you can publish a plain text post on Facebook, videos perform very well there. Meanwhile, you can only publish videos on YouTube, and that might make starting or maintaining a YouTube channel above your current budget. So, find the platforms that fit within your resource constraints and plan to grow later.

Plan Your Content

You know your platforms, you know your audience, and you've defined the type of content you want to create. Now you need to bring all of that information together by deciding how often you'll publish what. This information is most easily represented and tracked using a content calendar. Once you have that content calendar in place, you can start filling in ideas.

Ultimately, many brands think that filling their calendar with ideas will prove to be the most challenging part. In reality, ideas will come easily if you've done your audience research because your content should be built around the questions, pain points, and search terms associated with your audience. The actual hard part will be executing your content strategy once you've put all that work into creating it. This is where most websites opt to outsource.