Interior design tips for Instagram
Top 5 ways to maximise your potential in 2022
With its visual style and appeal, Instagram continues to be a draw for the interior design industry and will continue to be in the year ahead. We’re here to help you make the most of the platform and its ever-changing demands with our five top tips for success.
Home decor is seeing a boom with people spending more time at home and using Instagram as a source of inspiration is commonplace with your target audiences. However, as interior design businesses, you are often so busy ensuring you are delivering for your clients, that managing your Instagram feed and ensuring you have a steady flow of social media content often falls to the bottom of the list.
With digital marketing becoming essential to the marketing mix, however, neglecting your Instagram account could mean you are missing out on potential clients.
So what can you do to give your Instagram page a refresh in the year ahead?
Tip 1: Know your audience
Before you embark on any type of social media planning (or reactive posting!), take a moment to step back and think about who you are creating this content for. What do you want it to achieve and who do you want it to reach? Understanding when those audiences are online and which platforms they are using too (including which features on specific platforms), are important parts of the planning process and will help you clarify your content plans.
This is a fundamental part of our strategy work with clients and allows us to better understand not just what people are interested in but also why they might want to engage with posts when they are likely to be online and so on, giving you a baseline to work from. Over time, using insights, you can start to build a better understanding of what appeals to your audience, what works and when you get the best engagement.
Tip 2: Embrace Reels
We know, we hear you…creating Reels seems like a huge effort but it doesn’t mean you have to be in front of the camera all the time, joining in with the latest dance craze.
Simple can be effective too and graphics can be used to highlight tips, step by step guides, design trends, before and afters for finished projects and so on without the need for spending hours on end creating them. We recently created some short Reels for a client to extend the life of their recent blog posts for example, with some short step-by-step guides.
It’s worth taking some time to look at other examples of Reels and start building a list of potential ideas that you can create over time. There are some great, user-friendly apps and websites that also can help to create graphic versions of Reels or help you combine images, video and text ‘off-grid’ so you can take the time to get it right. Instagram does let you save Reels in a draft but it’s still quite an unfriendly user experience to do it this way!
Tip 3: Think video
You will be used to taking snaps when on-site at projects or suppliers but don’t forget videos too. Behind the scenes footage, supplier displays or deliveries and other inspiration sources all add value for your audience and people love seeing what goes on day-to-day. These can be used again in Reels or Stories.
If you’re thinking a slicker finish would be better for your brand, consider setting aside some marketing budget for professional videography which will enhance your brand story. We recently worked with Gregory Phillips Architects to create a new series called Modern Matters which goes into more detail about his architectural approach and expertise, adding insight and value for potential clients. Working closely with photographer and videographer, Mel Yates, we developed concepts and themes for each area of the properties and ensured the narrative was tailored to the audiences we were trying to reach. It’s so far been a hugely popular series and we are repurposing content in different ways to make the most of the beautiful films and content.
Tip 4: Invest in advertising
Hootsuite’s annual social media trends survey states that 43% of respondents said that their biggest challenge was “the decline of organic reach and the need to increase paid advertising budgets”. Whilst we feel strongly that organic reach allows you to authentically connect with your audiences better, there is no denying that working ‘with’ the algorithms organically is much harder these days.
Targeted ad spend either for boosted posts or a more strategic ad campaign will enhance and expand your reach. However, making sure that you are reaching the right audience and not a ‘like for like’ approach is something that we’d strongly recommend. Test different audiences too and see which has the most success. Think about the text that accompanies your post before you boost it as it needs to appeal to the audience you are about to expose it to.
Tip 5: Boost your engagement
Consider using Stories stickers to encourage engagement with your audience. Engagement is king on Instagram so anything you can do to encourage it, be it asking questions, ‘this or that’ Stories and so on, will help to boost your profile and reach.
For example, take two images of a living room or dining room you have designed with different accessories and ask your audience which they think works best. Bring them on your journey.
Consider using the new ‘Add yours’ sticker feature which is a sticker that creates public threads in Stories to engage the wider community.
Well-thought-through interior design hashtags that are a mix of wider use and more niche hashtags will help you reach audiences that will find your content interesting too. They will be more likely to interact with your Instagram post or page and therefore boost engagement levels further. Take time to test and trial different hashtags on each post to see what works best.
Source: Instagram
What are my next steps?
So where do you start getting your plans in place and building up your Instagram page? It’s a great way to start sketching out your plans and deciding how you might be able to generate content or where you might be able to find inspiration. Each time, ask if your potential clients and audience would find this interesting or useful or if you just think it’s a good reflection of your brand.
As a final thought, we often work with clients to create blog posts that are great additional long-form content for your website. However, they can also be repurposed for different uses such as a feed post including a quote from the article, a Reel summarising some of the key points or a Story showing some examples from the topic discussed. All these things can be used in different ways to extend the life of the post and give added value to your audience.
Still feel overwhelmed? Don’t worry, Sandford can help! Get in touch with us to discuss how we can make 2022 the year you build growth on your Instagram account, create interaction from genuine and engaged followers, have a profile that is reflective of you and your core brand values and ultimately, maximise the potential of this platform as an essential part of your marketing mix.
