Building a Brand on Social Media.
Getting off to a Good Start.
Every business needs an online profile to build, support and maintain their brand, and this is no different in interior design. Here Sophie Eastop-Scopes of Eastop-Scopes Virtual Assistants discusses how having a digital presence is a must for interior designers, and how you can utilise what social media can offer for free as a great way to boost your brand.
Do you know the importance of building a brand on social media?
Why Build a Brand Online?
With so many studios and designers competing for attention in the interiors’ industry, potential clients may need more than a name and portfolio to buy into your brand. Building a brand across social media showcases your professionalism, authenticity and builds trust with your audience. Brand recognition is key. The more they get to know you, the more they will like your style and what you say about yourself, and the more likely they are to trust you with their interior design project.
Getting off to a good start - brand identity.
Before you build your brand on social media, make sure that you have a brand identity to build. Consider the name of your business, your logo, brand colours, USP and values. It may be worth investing in help from a graphic designer to help you produce something memorable and personal to you, making sure it is professional and will last.
A visually consistent brand is recognised much quicker than one that is often changed or hardly used. Take time to develop a visual brand you can be proud of. When considering how this applies to social media, think of post templates you can create to build your brand.
Would they be recognisable without reading any caption?
Or consider phrases or key terms you can repeat in captions that reinforce your brand, for example Studio Ashby’s slogan “Start with the Art.”
Brand Strategy.
Once you have a solid brand identity you can develop your strategy.
Brand strategy encompasses lots of elements including brand identity, brand values, storytelling, voice and the overall look and feel of your brand. Be authentic, find a vibe you’re comfortable with and then get to work on social media, using your brand, logo and/ or key terms to reinforce your message.
Feel free to contact us via email if you have any questions about the information above.
What platforms should I be on?
There are benefits across multiple platforms for Interior Design. Here’s a breakdown of three key platforms we think you should be considering when building a brand online:
Instagram is a great platform to build a brand on. Engagement building organically can be done by reaching out to key accounts via commenting, liking and sharing posts. The platform remains a visual one, regardless of the move towards video in recent years, and is a great way to build familiarity and relationships.
LinkedIn can help you build meaningful business connections and showcase your expertise. It’s a great platform to consider building a brand on, as you will have the opportunity to develop relationships that could lead to referrals and opportunities as your business builds. The recommendation feature and article writing feature on LinkedIn are also great tools that can further develop a following, reinforce your brand and build a reputation.
Pinterest is a great platform for appearing in Google search results. Closely linked to Google Image searches, Pinterest is often used in the interior design industry, so what better place to build a brand.
Top tip – change up your strategy for Pinterest and focus on inspirational images of work, rather than “face behind the business” type posts. Treat Pinterest as a portfolio to showcase what you do, and let the platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram explain the why’s, how’s and where’s, etc.
How to build a brand on social media.
Once you’ve set up your profiles on your chosen platforms with consistent usernames, messaging, brand colours etc you need to start posting. Here are our top guidelines on how to build your brand on social media.
Keeping consistent
The best social media strategies are consistent and add value to your followers. Draw up a plan of when you will post to your followers and be realistic so you can stick to your plan. Ideally it would be great to post every other day on platforms like Instagram, but the most important thing is to keep a consistent frequency of posting. If you can’t manage more than one post per week, go with that, and if your stats are showing you that 3 days a week is when posting is most effective, implement this instead. Once you know how often you can post, then consider 3-5 content pillars to focus you posts.
Content pillars
Content pillars are topics of the same weighting you would like to make sure you cover on social media. The topics vary depending on your business and brand and could be anything from personal (your journey, USP, face behind the business), to key elements of your business, such as Design and Build, Interior Consultation, Colour Expertise, etc.
Once you determine your 3-5 key themes about your business, you can then build your brand online.
Adding value - Is this post right?
When writing captions and choosing images/video, ask yourself if this post showcases one of your key themes?
Does it bring value to your audience?
Does it encourage people to know, like or trust you?
Posts that answer yes to the above 3 questions are the perfect posts to build your brand.
And there you have it! You’re off to a flying start building your interiors brand online. Good luck!
For more information on how to build a social brand online contact Sophie Eastop-Scopes of Eastop-Scopes Virtual Assistants on info@es-va.co.uk