Hiring someone to do your marketing can sound like such a relief.

Finally, someone else can deal with Instagram.

Not to mention write the emails, fix the website, figure out SEO, and make all those vague promises about “increasing brand awareness” while you go back to choosing tile and answering emails about why the sofa still isn’t here.

There is just one small problem.

Before someone can effectively market your interior design business, you need to give them a business they can actually market.

When I was running my interior design firm, I learned this the expensive way.

For years, I hired marketing people expecting them to be magicians. “Here is my business. Please do your magic.”

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that marketing doesn’t work like that.

A good marketer can help you clarify a message, package it beautifully, distribute it strategically, measure what happens, and keep showing up consistently.

What they cannot do is make all the fundamental business decisions you’ve been avoiding.

Your marketer should not have to decide what you sell

I recently had a call with Caroline Lewis, owner of Lawson House Agency, a marketing and design agency that works with small service businesses, including interior designers and architects.

I wanted to understand exactly where her work and mine overlap, so I asked her:

“If an interior designer comes to Lawson House for marketing help, how much can your team help them figure out their target audience and positioning? And how much would you prefer they already know?“

Her answer was refreshingly clear:

She’d rather they do that foundational work first.

Don’t get me wrong. Lawson House has a well-developed Blueprint process that can help a business refine its target audience, sharpen the message, and figure out how to speak to those people. But there is a line.

As a marketing agency:

• Lawson House can’t tell you which interior design services you should offer.
• They can’t decide whether you want to manage procurement or hand clients a design plan and wave goodbye.
• They can’t decide whether you want to spend three years lovingly shepherding a whole-home project or finish a room design in six weeks.
• They can’t decide whether your best client is renovating a $3 million second home or desperately trying to make 1,400 square feet work for a family of five.

Those aren’t marketing decisions. Those are business decisions.

And if you haven’t made them, you’re essentially asking someone to amplify a message that doesn’t exist yet. Which is exactly the way to find yourself wasting a lot of marketing money. 😢

Know who you’re trying to attract

One thing Caroline said especially caught my attention: her ideal interior design client has a defined audience.

She doesn’t mean they need one rigid demographic or one sharply defined aesthetic (we both agreed that a niche is made up of multiple facets), but they have at least made some thoughtful decisions about what kinds of projects and clients they want more of, and which specific services they want to be hired for.

• Maybe they specialize in second homes.
• Maybe they understand families combining households.
• Maybe they are brilliant at making modest homes work harder.
• Maybe they’re the person you call when you want an old house to function beautifully without stripping away everything that made it interesting in the first place.

The more clearly you can describe the people who most need your particular expertise, the more effectively a marketer can help those people find you.

“I work with homeowners who need interior design” and (my personal pet peeve), “I help make people’s homes tell their story,” give them very little to work with.

Know what you’re asking people to buy

This sounds painfully obvious… until you look at ten interior design websites. 😒

• Can I hire you for a consultation?
• Do you offer design-only?
• Do you procure furniture?
• Do you manage contractors?
• Do you work on kitchens?
• Will you help me furnish one room?
• What geographic area do you serve?
• What sort of investment makes sense for your service?

A potential client shouldn’t need the investigative skills of Jessica Fletcher (did I just age myself? 😂) to figure out what you’re selling. Neither should your marketing team.

Before you spend money trying to get people to your front door, make sure there’s something easy for them to buy when they get there.

Give your marketer an actual point of view

This is the part designers often skip.

• They know they need a logo.
• They know they need photos.
• They know someone keeps telling them to make Reels.

But ask: What do you believe about good design because you’ve done this work over and over again?

And suddenly everyone goes quiet… often because they don’t want to offend anyone.

But your point of view doesn’t have to be controversial.

• Maybe you believe a beautiful material that makes a client’s daily life harder isn’t a good material for that client.
• Maybe you think most families need less open storage, not more.
• Maybe you’ve learned that renovating before understanding how a family actually lives is a fantastic way to spend a lot of money solving the wrong problem.

THAT provides useful marketing material without requiring you to manufacture some hot take just to stand out.

The point: A marketing team can help turn your POV into website copy, articles, emails, social posts, ads, pitches, and SEO content. But first, you need to figure out what you actually want them to put into the world.

Know what’s already working: collect data

Caroline also described the kinds of questions her team asks when a business owner says, “I loved working with this client. I want more clients like them.”

Great!

• Where did that client come from?
• What made them reach out?
• What worked?
• Can we replicate any of it?

It’s never too early to start tracking key information in your business. My best advice? Get your incoming-client tracking set up while your business is still quiet, so the habit is established once you’re busy. That way you’ll have good information to help move your business forward efficiently.

Once you have that information, you can look backward before you spend forward:

• Which clients were profitable?
• Which projects were enjoyable?
• Where did those clients find you?
• Who referred them?
• What did they respond to?
• What did they already understand about you before they called?

Your existing business has data, but you need to track it for it to be useful.

And yes, you gotta know some numbers

You don’t necessarily need a sophisticated CFO-approved marketing budget before hiring help, but you should know enough about your business to understand what you can reasonably spend and what result would make that investment worthwhile.

And don’t forget that your time counts as marketing spend.

If you’re spending ten hours every week writing blogs, making graphics, fiddling with your website, sending newsletters, and trying to understand what Meta wants from you now, your marketing budget is not zero. You’re paying for it with your time.

Eventually, paying someone else to do some of that work may be one of the smartest ways to grow. When you ARE ready to outsource, make sure you’ve gathered the data and made the decisions your marketing team needs to actually get results.

So when ARE you ready to hire marketing help?

You’re probably ready when you can hand a good marketer some reasonably clear raw material:

• You know the clients you want more of.
• You know what you’re selling.
• You know roughly what kind of projects, price point, geography, and service structure make sense for your business.
• You have opinions and expertise worth talking about.
• You have at least some understanding of what’s currently bringing people through the door.

And you know what you want marketing to accomplish. Like: “I want six people a year to hire me for a colorful whole-home remodel in the North Seattle area. I want them to have a renovation budget of at least $125,000.” THAT is something a marketing team can sink their teeth into.

You don’t need to have it all figured out.

It doesn’t all have to be perfect. In fact, a good agency should help you refine it. But there is an enormous difference between saying:

“Here is what my business is about. Help me communicate and market it better.”

and:

“I don’t really know what my business is about. Can you please make people want it?”

The first is a marketing problem. The second is a business strategy problem that looks like a marketing problem. Knowing which one you’re trying to solve can save you an extraordinary amount of money, time, and frustration.

Before you hand your marketing to someone else, make sure you know what you’re handing them.

If you’re realizing that your audience, services, point of view, or marketing message aren’t as defined as you’d like, Nail Your Niche is the two-week intensive I created to help interior designers figure out exactly what they want to be known for and give themselves (or their future marketing team) something specific to market.

The next cohort starts September 14, and then I’m putting the program on pause for a year while I focus on writing The DECIDE Method. If you’d like to find out whether NYN is the right next step for your business, you can book a free Diagnostic Chat here.

Thanks to Caroline Lewis of Lawson House Agency for the conversation that sparked this article. Lawson House provides branding, websites, and ongoing marketing support for service-based businesses, including interior designers and architects.