Ep 247: The Walkthrough: Is Your Marketing Front Door Open?
Your interior design business might be doing beautiful work, but are the right clients finding their way to you?
In this episode of Designed for the Creative Mind, Michelle Lynne kicks off The Walkthrough, a series that takes you through every room of your interior design business, from marketing and sales to operations, procurement, installation, and project closeout.
First up is the front door: marketing.
Michelle shares why referrals alone aren't a marketing strategy, how the busy-season blackout can leave your pipeline empty, and why consistent marketing doesn't have to mean posting every single day. She also explores how to make your marketing sound like you, why handing marketing off isn't always as simple as hiring someone, and how marketing connects to every other part of your business.
If you've ever let marketing slide because client projects took over, only to find yourself scrambling for new leads a few months later, this episode is for you.
In This Episode, You'll Learn:
Why referrals aren't the whole story. Clients often discover you through a referral but research your website, portfolio, and social media before deciding to reach out.
How to break the busy-season blackout cycle. Marketing takes time to produce results, so stopping when you're busy can create a pipeline problem months later.
What consistent marketing really looks like. A current website, a monthly blog, regular email communication, and a manageable social media presence can go a long way.
Why your marketing needs to sound like you. Clients are hiring your perspective, expertise, and approach to design—not just your portfolio photos.
How to delegate marketing without losing your voice. A good content partner needs to learn how you think and communicate, not just follow a list of instructions.
Who should own marketing in your firm. If marketing is everyone's secondary responsibility, it can quickly become nobody's responsibility.
How marketing connects to the rest of your business. Your marketing efforts influence sales, capacity planning, client experience, reviews, and referrals.
Your Action Steps
Before you overhaul your marketing, take a closer look at what's already working.
Review your last 10 signed clients and trace how each one actually found you.
Ask past clients what led them to your business and which channels they explored before reaching out.
Look at your website and social media through the eyes of a potential client. Does your content feel current, relevant, and reflective of your firm?
Identify who owns marketing in your business—and who is accountable for keeping it consistent.
Choose a manageable marketing rhythm you can maintain even when your project calendar is full.
Remember: Marketing isn't something you do when you have time. It's an essential part of running your business.
Ready to Walk Through Your Own Business?
Wondering where your business is working well and where things might be held together by you?
Schedule a free Business Walkthrough with Michelle and the Sidemark team. Together, you'll look at how clients find you, what happens when they inquire, and where your systems may need attention. Depending on your needs, the walkthrough can extend into sales, operations, design development, sourcing, procurement, installation, and project closeout.
You'll leave with a clearer picture of your business and actionable next steps.
Schedule your Business Walkthrough:
https://api.mysidemark.com/widget/bookings/sidemark-business-walkthrough
Coming Up Next
In the next episode of The Walkthrough, Michelle heads into the sales room. A potential client has found your firm and filled out your contact form—but what happens next? Follow the inquiry from the first message to the signed agreement and discover where good marketing can quietly go to waste.
Thanks for listening to Designed for the Creative Mind with Michelle Lynne!
Transcript:
MICHELLE LYNNE (01:02)
welcome to the walkthrough. This is a series here on Design for the Creative Mind. I'm Michelle Lynn. You already know how to walk through a client's home. You notice the light, the flow, the room that isn't working, and why. So in this series, we're gonna do the same thing with your business. We'll follow one project from the first inquiry to the final punch list and walk through every room along the way. We're talking about marketing, sales, operations.
Design development, sourcing procurement, installation, close out. Some rooms are gonna feel great, a might a little bit or a few might need some work. So let's take a look. We're gonna start at the front door. This is going to be the front door of a home, but it's also the front door of your business. So when I walk into a client's home for the first time, the entry tells me a lot. And this is before anybody even says hello.
I can usually tell whether the house has been loved and kept up or whether this is just a place where everybody walks through on the way to somewhere else. The mail's piling up on the console. The lamp hasn't worked in a year. Okay, nobody means for the entry to get that way. It just happens because it's the room that you pass through instead of the room that you live in. In a design business, the front door is marketing. It's how a future client first hears your name.
Finds your website, sees your work, and decides if you are somebody that they want to talk to. And for most designers that I work with, it's the room that gets the least attention. Even though every other room in the business depends on somebody walking through it first, you can have a beautiful process, a wickedly talented team, and a procurement system that runs like clockwork.
But none of it's ever gonna help you if the right people never find their way in.
I'll be the first to say this was a room that I had to rebuild in my own firm and more than once. For a long stretch of my business, marketing was something that I did in bursts. It's usually when I got nervous about the calendar and then I'd forget about it the minute the work picked back up. And that pattern is a big pipe, a big part of why the four of us started Sidemark. Because so many designers that I was talking to, that we were talking to, because
My my other the
Because so many designers that we talked to were living the same cycle and assuming it was just how this business works. So in this episode, we're gonna look at how clients actually find you, which is often different than what
you would guess.
We'll talk about what happens to marketing when you get busy, why consistency is smaller and more manageable than most designers think, how to sound like yourself, especially in this world of AI. Okay, and also how to sound like yourself instead of every other firm in your market. What happens when marketing doesn't really belong to anybody?
Then we're gonna pull back and look at marketing as part of the whole business because it connects to every room that we're gonna walk through in this series.
So let's start by how clients actually find you. When I ask designers where their best clients come from, the answer oftentimes come back as referrals. Usually. Sometimes Instagram, sometimes the Google. And you know, with let's talk about referrals, because a lot of people that I'm talking to right now are saying that that's the big driver of their
business.
And I don't think that they're wrong exactly when they say referrals, but when we sit down and we look at the last handful of projects that they've signed, it's it gets a little bit more interesting than that one-word answer. What I see over and over, and this happens in my firm as well with with referrals, is that client rarely finds you just through a single path. Like, hey, I saw Susie last week, she said to give you a call.
But instead, somebody hears your name from a neighbor at a dinner party. Okay. Or maybe Susie says, hey, do call Michelle at ML Interior's group. But what happens is that a few weeks later, they look you up on Google, okay, or they land on your website, they scroll through your portfolio. Maybe they check Instagram to see that you're still alive. And then they sit on it for another month before they ever fill out your website contact form.
But after you go through the sales process and you have this contract signed, you write referral in your notes. And technically it's true. But the referral only opened the door, y'all. Your website and the work that you've been putting out there are what convinced them to walk through it. And the that distinction, so referrals is one thing, but you
Let's just stay on stay on point, Michelle. That distinction is bigger than it sounds because it changes where you put your energy. So if you believe that every good client comes from referrals, it's easy to decide that marketing isn't really necessary for your firm. And I've seen this. Okay, you're relying on your work that will speak for itself. And it does speak well for you, absolutely, but only if people can find it. And only if what they find
Feels current. A website that still features a project from four years ago or an Instagram account that went quiet last spring, it sends a message to the referred client that even if it's not the one you meant to send. Okay, that message to that referred client might not be what you intended, but that's what they get.
So I know we had a client a couple years ago specifically. I can I can think of this. her husband actually worked with my father-in-law. And when they were looking for a referral, my father-in-law mentioned it to them.
Then you know where she called me from? She called me from the beach on the honeymoon. Actually, so it wasn't her husband at the time, on her honeymoon overseas because she found me, because she found me on Instagram after that referral. And she literally called me from the beach. I want to say she was in I can picture overseas. I don't remember exactly where she was, but I was like, my gosh, you're calling me from your honeymoon?
And so it's because she saw that we were active, she saw that I had just done a story. And it's it's it's more than one touch point. So the first thing that I would encourage you to do before you change anything, and I just had a a call yesterday with a potential client and had this conversation.
I was like, go back through your last handful of signed clients. If you have 10 good clients, go back through 10 of them and trace how each one actually found you. Okay, not the box that you checked in your CRM, if you have one, but the whole path, as best as you can piece together. And if you can, ask them. They might not remember, but it's a good exercise.
Because most clients are happy to tell you and you'll learn things about your own business that surprise you. So make that a practice going forward. First of all, how did you find me? Great. Did you look at any of my other channels?
Some designers have discovered that their website's doing far more work than they'd give it credit for, or their Instagram account. Others find that a single referral source, maybe a builder or an architect relationship or a real estate agent, has been sending them half of their projects and they've never once thanked that person properly.
What you're looking for is the difference between the marketing that feels productive and the marketing that actually produces. And they're not always the same thing. Posting every day can feel productive, right? But it's bringing in very little interest.
But a s a single well kept relationship can bring in a year of work while feeling like nothing at all.
It's really difficult. It's basically impossible to make good decisions about this room, this marketing room, until you know what's actually happening
in it.
There's another, there's another scenario. I call it the busy season blackout. And it's a pattern that I've watched play out in more firms than I can count, including my own. Like I can picture a couple of seasons where I had a blackout. And it goes something here, it goes something like this. Business is slow, right? So you get serious about your marketing. You update the website, you're you're writing blogs consistently, you're posting on social media.
You're sending an email to your past clients for the first time in a year. You have coffee with a couple of builders. A few weeks later, you might have some inquiries coming in.
A month or so later, you're really seeing the fruits of this because marketing doesn't happen one week and produce the next week. But what happens is that soon these inquiries are coming in and you sign two or three projects and suddenly you're slammed. Okay. You're doing presentations, you're sourcing, a contractor's calling about an outlet that's in the wrong place. Okay. Marketing just drops off the list. I get it.
You didn't really actually decide to stop, it just isn't urgent anymore. Sound familiar? But then what happens is that these projects move into procurement and installation, and then you see pretty soon that calendar is going to be open again. And you look around and you realize, hell, nothing new is coming in. So you get serious about marketing again, and the whole cycle starts over. Guilty.
Okay. The part that makes this so hard to catch is the lag. Marketing that you do today usually doesn't show up as signed work for weeks, usually months. And especially in today's market, I'm still calling it a bit of a trust recession because everybody publicly is lying. So what happens is that the clients
Even if they hear of you today, they're not going to call you today or tomorrow. Okay. The quiet season that you're feeling right now is or or after this busy blackout season. Okay. The quiet season that you're feeling after that is really the result of marketing that you stopped doing back when you were too busy to think about it. By the time you feel it, you're already behind.
And I know the pressure of an empty calendar tends to make the next round of marketing just feel more desperate. And I'm gonna just say this, you're putting out this energy that clients can sense more than we would imagine.
I remember the version of this that lived in my head more than the version that lived on my calendar. When the work was steady, there was always a small voice reminding me that I should be posting. I should be sending that newsletter. I should be doing my email marketing. I should be following up with that architect that I met at the networking event that I went to. And I didn't do any of it. Okay. I can't, but I carried all of it. It was all in my head.
And then when things slowed down, that voice got louder and turned into something closer to worry. Like it's stress, it's anxiety. There's a lot of mental energy to spend on this marketing room that you're not even taking care of. And y'all, I knew better. I knew better. What eventually I had to accept is that this wasn't a discipline problem. I'm a disciplined person, and so are most of the designers that I know.
Okay, y'all do not run installations, manage client expectations, keep a team moving without discipline. The problem is that the marketing depended entirely on me having spare time and spare energy and some creativity left over. And in a design business, those are the exact things that disappear the moment the business is good. Your creativity is filtered all into your projects. You don't have that extra time.
Okay, and you don't have the spare energy. So any system that only works when you're not busy is a system that's going to fail the exact moment that you need it the most. You see the conundrum? So consistency is actually smaller effort than you
think.
When designers hear the word consistent, okay, I think a lot of us picture something exhausting. A content calendar with a post every single day, okay, or a content calendar that is even every other day.
With reels, with carousels, with stories, with static posts. I should tell a story. It should be perfect. My grid needs to look good.
Or I need to do a a weekly blog, a monthly newsletter. I need to speak at every event in town so people know that I'm a designer. Maybe I need to start a podcast. Okay, and what happens is is that picture so overwhelming, it becomes easy to do nothing at all. Like you're frozen. Analysis, paralysis. Or you go balls out for three weeks and then you burn out.
What I have found in my own firm, okay, and with the designers that I coach is consistency is actually a lot smaller than that. It's less about the volume and it's more about getting into the rhythm.
A client who's thinking about hiring you isn't counting your posts. They're noticing whether you seem present, whether the work that they're seeing is recent, and whether you feel like a firm that's busy and well run. Y'all, you can communicate all of that with far less than you're assuming. For a lot of firms,
A steady foundation might look like a website that's kept current with recent projects, a blog at least once a month, and a thoughtful email that goes out to past and hopefully future clients, trade partners, on a regular schedule. Take that blog and put it in that newsletter. Okay, better yet, get an email marketing system that you write once.
And it's evergreen for a year. And no, it doesn't have to be a weekly email. So you don't have to write 52 emails.
So a website that's kept current with recent projects, the thoughtful email that goes out, social present that short presence that shows up a few times a week instead of every day. Okay. Twice a week, three times a week is really good. And it's not glamorous, y'all. It's not gonna go viral, but it keeps the front door open and the lights on. That's what this marketing room needs to do.
And like I mentioned a minute ago, the email piece is the one piece that I push the most. It's the one that most designers skip most often. Your past clients, the builders, the architects, the realtors you've worked with, they already know and trust you. They're the people most likely to send you your next project. And most firms only talk to them when they need something.
A regular, genuinely useful note. Maybe it's just a recent project, something that you learned on a job, or a seasonal reminder about something worth thinking about in their home keeps you in the conversation without asking anything of them. I mean, just that monthly newsletter.
Start with that. And I call it a newsletter. I mean, nobody wants to subscribe to a newsletter, but it's just going to be a monthly update. I call mine from the studio. Notes from the studio. So we're consistently where consistency usually breaks down isn't knowing what to do. Most of you could write the list that I just gave you. It breaks down in who's going to keep doing it during the weeks when you have three presentations and an installation. That's
That's the real question this room raises. And it's the one that we'll get to, quote unquote, in a minute. But first, I want to talk about what you're actually saying when you do show up. Okay? Because consistency doesn't help much if the message sounds like everybody else's, or if it sounds like AI.
So
If you spend 10 minutes reading the website of design firms in any given market, you'll start to notice how similar they sound. And now that I'm saying this out loud, I might need to go revisit my own. Okay. It says timeless spaces, homes that reflect who you are, a seamless, stress free process from start to finish. And none of this is wrong. That is exactly what we do. And it's sincere.
But when every firm says the same thing, a potential client has no way to tell you apart, right? And they end up deciding based on the photos alone, or or God forbid, even worse, they decide on price.
So it's easy to see how it happens. Writing about your own work is uncomfortable. Okay. I'm gonna bet for 95% of designers, it's uncomfortable. We'd much rather show the room. Here's the pretty pictures, here's the before and after. So we'd rather show the room than explain it. And when we do sit down to write, we reach for the language that we've seen everywhere else because it feels safe and professional.
Feels like, well, if it's working for her, it'll work for me. I look up to her. But the result is marketing that's polished and it's completely forgettable. Or you pop it into AI and AI spits out basically the same thing. And it doesn't sound like a human.
So what what and I if I've said this, if I had a nickel for every time I said this, I I'd be on the beach in Fiji. The clients are actually hiring you. Okay. It's not your photos that they're hiring. It's not necessarily your website that they're hiring, but they're hiring your perspective. It's the way you personally walk into a room and see what it could be.
The opinions that you have about scale and light and how a family really uses a kitchen. It's about the way you talk them through a decision that they're nervous about. That's what should come through in your marketing because that's what they're going to experience when they work with you. If your website and your email sound like the first consultation,
The right clients are gonna feel like they already know you before they even pick up the phone. And the wrong ones tend to self select out, which saves you a lot of time. You don't wanna serve everybody.
So for example, on ML Interiors Group website, in our portfolio, we have a story attached to each one of them.
This this actually is some good information. It works for a variety of ways. One, it works for your search engine optimization because you're using keywords. It works because you have this content created. So if you want to submit your project for an award or something, you don't have to go back and think about what happened nine months ago. And it also helps clients see themselves in your work.
So ML Interiors Group, we don't have a look. You can't say, Michelle did that. And that's on and that's intentional. So clients that come to our portfolio are gonna see a variety of different styles. Right? And they're gonna go towards the style that resonates with them the most, even if it's not exactly their style.
And they're gonna read that story and they're gonna hear about the images.
We do the same thing when we when we publish a new one. That can go up in our blog and then that goes out in the newsletter once a month. Okay. And that's not to mention all of the content that they get in their evergreen emails.
This, however, is where I got stuck when I tried to hand marketing off. And so I know a lot of designers get stuck when they do the same thing. Okay, we hire somebody, and what comes back is technically fine, but it doesn't sound like them at all. Okay, so then I would rewrite it, which takes longer than writing it myself. And eventually I just decided that it was easier to do it on my own. And then we're right back to the busy season blackout.
Here's the thing. When you find somebody that can write your emails, you work with them and you train them to sound like you.
Because sounding like yourself doesn't mean that you have to write every word. It means that whoever's helping you needs to understand how you think and how you talk. And that it takes that, that, my friend, takes a real working relationship and not just a set of instructions. What I should have done, and what I've learned since then, is that you give this content partner some of the work that you've done before. They study it.
They write what you've asked them to write. They don't have to create everything because you don't want to go back and edit everything right away. They create a a bit of work for you to review. And then you sit down on a Zoom or side by side wherever they they live and you talk to them about it. And then you can this is what I would say here. This is what I would say here.
Okay, so whoever is helping you needs to understand how you think and how you talk.
You can't just give it a s give them a set of instructions and expect them to read your mind.
And when you're when you're a small design firm, marketing, y'all, it just belongs to the owner by default. Nobody ever really decided that. It's just that you started the business and you were the one posting and networking in the early days, and the responsibility the responsibility never moved anywhere else. As the owner, business development is your job. Marketing, social media, blog writing.
Email writing
Well, it's hard. Because when something belongs to the person who also owns sales, client relationships, okay, design direction, and the final say on every e install, y'all, that just means it doesn't belong to anybody. So then you hand it to somebody on the team. Okay, maybe it's a junior designer who's good on Instagram, or you've got a a virtual assistant who has a little bit of extra time, and that can work for a little while, absolutely. But
Marketing ends up as the thing that they do between their real responsibilities, which means it basically gets the same treatment it got from you. It's the first thing that's gonna slide when their job gets complicated. And then nobody's really accountable for whether it's working.
Then maybe you make a little bit more money, and then you go outside and you hire a marketing agency. Okay, for me, that's gone well, it's gone badly. The agencies that struggle with designers usually just don't understand how this business actually works. Y'all, interior design, it's it's a complicated business business. It's not just fluffing pillows and picking paint colors, but I don't have to tell you that. But marketing agencies don't have a clue.
They watch HGTV and think that they're experts. Okay. They don't understand that your sales cycle can be months long, that a single project might be worth more than everything else that they manage combined. Okay. Your client that you're trying to reach isn't going to respond to the same tactics as somebody buying a pair of shoes or some face cream.
As your business evolves, you're talking to different people. You want somebody to grow with you. Okay, luxury clients, when you get to the point of luxury clients, has a completely different sound than if you are talking to clients that want you to decorate from a combination of pottery barn and home goods.
So what happens is that the strategy that this marketing agency brings in, it misses, and you're paying for just activity instead of results.
So I'm gonna say, here's my little pitch, is that that's a big part of what we set out to solve with Sidemark. My co-founders and I wanted to give designers a team that understands this industry from the inside out. And Sidemark will actually own the room of marketing for designers.
We have a build program. We've got blueprint and we've got build. We've got blueprint where it is we do it with you. We have build where the team just handles it for you. Okay. We we set up, we we set up and we write and we program the email marketing that keeps you in front of past clients and trade partners and hopefully incoming potential clients.
It's running in your voice, whether you're in a presentation or standing in a client's living room on install day, or if you're laying on the beach. So for designers who want to stay closer to the work and build the skills themselves, like I mentioned, there's a blueprint program where we work alongside you. So you end up with a system that you understand and that you can run. So either way, the point is the same, y'all. Marketing stops deepening or marketing stops depending.
On whether you happen to have a free afternoon.
What I want to ask you to think about, whatever you decide, is who actually owns this room in your business today. Not who touches it occasionally, but who would notice it first if it went quiet? And whose job is it to fix it? And if the answer is you, and you're also running everything else, you already know how that tends to go.
So I wanna I wanna wrap this up here, but the I wanna talk about how this room connects to the rest of the house.
I think this is where a lot of us have the biggest blind spot. Okay. And now I fully see how it works. And thankfully, my blind my eyes have been opened for quite a while. But before, we tend to treat marketing as its own separate project. Okay. Something a little bit creative, a little bit outside of real business. But when you walk through a design firm from the front to the back,
You start to see that marketing touches almost everything. Now, of course, it connects to sales most directly because marketing is only as good as what happens when somebody actually reaches out. I've seen firms do wonderful work getting the right people to their website. And then they lose a meaningful share of them because an inquiry sat in an inbox for days. Or they didn't return a phone call.
Okay, that's going to be the room that we walk into in the next episode. It connects to operations too, because good marketing should be timed to your capacity. If you know that your team will have room in four months, the marketing you do now is how you fill up that space instead of scrambling in three months.
And then that connects all the way to the end of the project because a well-closed project with a happy client and a review and a referral is some of the best marketing that you'll ever have. We'll get there in the final, probably the final episode of the series. So when marketing is disconnected from all of your all of the other rooms in your business, you can't really tell what's working. You don't know which efforts brought in which clients.
Or which clients turned into your most profitable projects. So every decision about where to spend your time and money ends up being kind of a guess. But when it's connected, you start to see the whole path. It's kind of like when you design a whole home and you have a consistent story that you tell throughout each room. Does that make sense?
So you like so in in in your design business rooms, you start to see the path from the first time somebody heard your name to the final punch list item. And here's the thing is that it changes the kind of decisions that you can make about your business.
I started doing this recently for Sidemark. It's a Sidemark business, it's a business walkthrough. You'll hop on the phone with me for 45 minutes. We start where your clients start by looking at how people find you today, what your email marketing looks like, what happens from the moment somebody lands on your website. Some walkthroughs keep going through every room in the business: sales, operations, design development, sourcing, procurement, installation, and the punch list.
So you can see where things are well connected and where they're being held by held together by you. Now, other times, y'all, we can't even get past the entry. It's like one room clearly needs attention first. Okay. Or maybe it is going to be operations, which by the way, we've added to sidemark. So that's super exciting. standard operating procedures for your business in general. But here's the thing.
Once we dial in and we we have this walkthrough.
You get a summary and you have exact action steps. Like here's some solutions for you. This is what you need you need to do. Okay. This is where Sidemark can help you. Okay, you've known Sidemark as a sales and marketing software. Let me tell you, the rest of the business is what Sidemark 2.0 is being built to support. Okay. Yes, you heard me correctly. We're gonna have operations, we're gonna have sourcing, we're gonna have procurement.
Of course, we've got the sales and marketing. Did I mention we have the operations? So, like standard operating procedures from the moment they call you to the moment that the punch list is done. I'm so excited. So, if any of this episode feels familiar, schedule a business walkthrough. Okay, the link is in the notes. You can go to mysidemark.com.
Okay, it's combined. If you wanna if you wanna get some one-on-one coaching, we can do that as well. But but this this walkthrough is free. Bring whatever you have, whether it's a full system or a website or an inbox and a lot of good intentions. Okay, you will leave with a clearer picture of your own business. And that's whether or not we w end up working together or not.
So if you take one thing from this episode, I'd want it to be the idea that marketing isn't something that you do when you have time. It's a very important room in your business and it needs regular upkeep. The same way the entry of your home does. When it's cared for, nobody notices it, and people walk in feeling welcome. When it's neglected, everybody notices, even if they never say a word. And
I hear a couple of you right now saying, Well, I walk in through my, I park in the garage and I walk in through another room. I don't really go through my entry. Then flip it. Then flip it. When it's neglected, everybody notices, even if they never say a word. So this week, go back through a handful of your life of your past clients and trace how they really found you. Look at your website the way a stranger would. Or ask.
one of your friends or your spouse to look at your website.
And get that feedback. Ask yourself who owns this room in your business right now and whether that's working for you.
Whew, okay. Next time we're gonna walk into sales. Somebody has found you, they've looked through your work, and they filled out your contact form. What happens next? This is where a lot of good marketing quietly goes to waste. We're gonna follow that inquiry all the way from the first message to a signed agreement. Okay? So that's it for this episode of the walkthrough. If you'd like to do this for your own business,
Like I mentioned, there's a link in the show notes to schedule a business walkthrough with our team, with me, a sidemark. Okay, we'll go through your firm phase by phase from how clients find you to how the projects close. And then we'll show you where it's connected, where they're held together by you. So I'm Michelle Lynn, and this has been Designed for the Creative Mind. I'll see you in the next room.
