Interior Design Marketing - Why You Keep Putting It Off

We have no difficulty whatsoever doing the work a client is waiting for. We have no difficulty doing the work we enjoy.

This week, in an accountability group meeting, we alighted on a theme common to everyone's report this month: the challenge of turning intention into action.

But when the designers said they wanted help acting on their intentions, they did not mean all of them. They meant a particular few. And when we came to examples, the examples were remarkably consistent.

They were all about marketing.

The signature

The intentions that fail have one of two qualities, and marketing has the misfortune to possess both. 

The first is distance. Marketing done in Q1 will not deliver until Q4, and between now and then something more urgent will always crop up, because something more urgent always does. So the marketing waits. For many of my clients, their first concern, every time we meet, is pipeline. We discuss strategy usefully and at length, we make structured plans, and then something pressing appears and the plan goes on hold until the next meeting, when we circle back to the same question.

(If any of my clients are reading this and thinking it an indiscreet betrayal of confidence, it isn't. I'm not writing about you. I'm writing about half my client base.)

The honest answer, which I do not always give as plainly as I should, is that the marketing for Q4 was due in Q1. What you do this August will feed you at Easter.

That is not a rebuke. It is a lag, and it is simply how marketing behaves. But notice the trap, because it is more interesting than it first appears. The you of Q1 also had an urgent problem, and Q1 marketing lost that argument exactly as it was always going to. I do this myself, and said so in the meeting, more or less in these words: this isn't going to kick in for six or eight months, so I'll leave it till tomorrow. Instead, today, I'll do something that is due next week.

Each of those decisions is defensible on its own. The aggregate is a practice that never builds anything. And because the postponed work is precisely the work that would have prevented the shortage, the shortage is never resolved. It is relocated, and it returns next quarter slightly larger.

The second quality is unprovability. Even when the marketing works, you very often cannot say which piece of it worked. The client who turns up in Q4 cannot be traced back to the thing you did in February. If you knew with any confidence which activity had produced her, the whole business would feel more tangible and you would be considerably more motivated to do it again.

This is the quality people notice least, and I have come to think it the more corrosive of the two. Distance merely delays the reward. Unprovability withholds it altogether. It means you can do the long work, watch it demonstrably pay, and still not repeat it the following year, because nothing ever told you it was your doing.

What this rules out

It rules out ignorance, which is what most advice on this subject assumes. One of the designers had sat down with AI and worked out properly what she ought to be doing about her pipeline. Her verdict on the answer: "bleeding obvious." Others tell me: I know what I need to do, I just need to do it.

We have the right answer, we can see that it is obvious, and we still don't act on it.

My clients do not have a knowledge problem. Nor are they lazy: these are people who work extremely hard on everything that has a client attached to it, including the parts they don't relish.

The guarantee

If somebody could guarantee that the thing you did in Q1 would deliver in Q4, you would do it. Not reluctantly. You would clear the week.

Years ago I taught a student who told me she would not do the work for a project unless I guaranteed her an A. I said I couldn't predict a grade until I'd seen the work, and she replied that in that case she wouldn't bother. At the time I thought it a remarkable thing to say out loud. I have since come to think she was only being honest about a calculation most of us make silently: when the return is distant and uncertain (however large it might turn out to be) the effort is hard to justify, and instead we find something else to do now that pays a few pennies.

Nobody can give you the guarantee. So the useful question is not how to become more disciplined. It is: what you can build that does the job the guarantee would have done?

Three things that do some of the work of a guarantee

Behave as though it were guaranteed, while knowing that it isn't. A deliberate self-deception, and I offer it as one. Decide that the Q1 project is guaranteed to deliver Q1 clients, and act accordingly...while keeping a corner of your mind aware that it probably won’t, so that you are not badly disappointed if it doesn't. It sounds absurd written down. It works rather better than waiting to feel motivated.

And for what it is worth, looking at those designers I know who did do the marketing back in Q1, yes, it definitely works.

Get properly acquainted with your future self. The reason distant returns lose is that the person who collects them does not feel like you. She is over the horizon and you have never met her. But she exists, and she depends entirely on what you do this quarter, because there is nobody else who can do it for her. There is decent research behind this: people shown age-progressed images of themselves save markedly more for retirement, which suggests the connection can be manufactured rather than merely wished for.

So make her concrete. Picture her at Easter 2027, just back from her holiday. Is she frantically trying to magic up work from a standing start to fill the months before the summer? Or is she comfortably booked, because this September you'll treat marketing as though it is urgent and non-negotiable?

Be accountable for what you do not intend to do. Accountability is usually organised around what we have promised, which means it captures the things we were going to do anyway. The interesting version is the opposite. Say out loud, to somebody who will remember, the thing you intend but privately expect not to get round to. It is a much more uncomfortable sentence to utter, and a far more useful one, because it is the only category of work that needs the help. Everything else is either fun to do, or already being chased by a client with a deadline.

One qualification

Not all quick work is avoidance. The distinction is not between slow and fast, it is between activity that compounds and activity that dissipates. A conversation with somebody already warm to you compounds. Following up the two enquiries from March that never converted compounds. A post chasing reach does not.

And on the rare occasions when the causal line is visible, notice it. I heard this week from a client who ring-fenced time for a major marketing initiative. Out of it came a conversation that looked like pure coincidence, and out of that conversation came a pitch for two design projects. She thought it was luck. It was the ring-fenced time.

The reason to bother

I want a six-pack. All right, not a six-pack: a flat, toned tummy. One trip to the gym will not deliver it. Sixty-year-old me is waiting for me to catch up with her next August, and I am going to the gym for her, not for me. I am going to get her the birthday present she wants, and she is going to think I am the bee's knees.

The marketing plan that will deliver clients to your business in 2027 is the same errand.