The most exciting day of getting a new home is the first time you insert your keys into the locks on the door, turn the knob and push the door. Ahead of you lays your new home, a place to sip a hot cup of coffee, looking east as the sun’s rays gently caress your face. Or down a mug of chocolate as the day ends, seated in your lounge chair, as you unwind from the day’s work. At least, that may be how you picture it.
But what faces you is this:
Most of us would have faced this. The need to renovate our new homes would lead us straight into the arms of Interior Design companies or even renovation contractors. How should we evaluate them? Based on their pricing and quotations alone? Or their design portfolio? Many of us would be lost.
In fact, with so many competitors in the market, we might just choose the first ID firm we see along the road and go along with them.
On the other site of the equation, as an Interior Design firm, how do you stand out to your potential customers and convince the customers that you’re better than your competitors out there?
One thing that I’ve seen a lot of renovation contractors do is they slash their prices, and tout that they’re the contractor, so there’s no “middleman fees” or markups. However, they also do not add value to their end customer, and their profit margin is slashed, along with their competitors, in a death spiral to the bottom.
How do you avoid this?
That was the headache that our client who was in the interior design industry faced. They had been in the lower end of the market, doing great carpentry and design work for their own customers, but unable to break into the higher end of the market, where customers cared more about service than costs.
You see, Mr Lim, the owner of the ID firm started out as a carpenter, and worked his way up and started his own carpentry firm. After many successful projects later, he transformed his carpentry firm into an ID firm with Anthea, his partner.The problem that he faced was that while he had a steady source of projects as a carpentry firm, his projects came from partnerships with other ID firms.
However, as he became a full-fledged ID firm, handling every portion of the renovation process for clients, he became a competitor to his previous business partners, and had to source for his own customers.
Anthea, his partner handling majority of the design work, is a millennial, and more versed with the trends on social media. She started the Instagram account, a Facebook page, as well as developed a website to showcase their portfolio and designs. However, her efforts didn’t draw in much results in terms of new customers. They were dejected.
That was when Mr Lim was introduced to my teammate, Van at a business networking event. Over coffee with Mr Lim and Anthea, we found out that they just copied what other ID firms were doing. Essentially, their thinking can be summed up as, “If everyone is doing it, that must mean it’s working and we should do the same.
However, that fails to take into account whether the strategy is working for their competitors, or whether everyone in the market is blindly copying each other, hoping for better results.
During our conversation with Mr Lim and Anthea, we slowly dug out their value proposition. Not only are they good designers and project managers, but they also handled the carpentry in house, which made costs lower for their clients. Plus, they can do a lot more custom carpentry work than their competitors. But, none of this was apparent in their digital marketing efforts.
So to the general audience, they seemed like a run-of-the-mill Interior Design firm. They wanted to change that image, and generate leads, and thus we took on their project.
There were a few things we had to do to achieve that aim.
- Testimonials – this was something that Mr Lim had, but the testimonials were all over the place. A few “Thank You” SMSes on his personal phone, or some short messages on his business WhatsApp account, and a few emails from grateful customers. But none were structured, and it was hard for him to share them with his new customers.We drafted a series of questions to send to his old customers.A testimonial should state more than “Thank you” or “Your work was appreciated”. A good testimonial will touch on what you’ve done for your clients, what made you stand out over your competitors, and whether your client will recommend you to their friends. The more your clients’ testimonials state about you, the less you’ll have to brag about yourself. Let your clients say the words you can’t.
- Portfolio – we got professional photos of some of their recent projects taken. The difference between a professional photographer and a layman using a phone camera is a huge world of difference. Along with the professional photography for their projects, we also filmed a video of a client testimonial at their newly renovated home.
This serves not just as a portfolio video, but also as a testimonial that shows an actual customer’s project.
- Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – We dug out the USPs from Mr Lim. What made them different from the hundreds of other Interior Design Companies operating in Singapore?
A few things that we learned were that homeowners were concerned about a few things, namely, budget (“Will this company exceed my given budget and charge me more?”), project timeline (“Will this company take so long with my project that I will be in an old folk’s home by the time my renovation is completed?”) and warranty (“What if something goes wrong in 6 month’s time?”).
With those in mind, we crafted ads and landing pages to match the sentiments of the customers, to reassure them, not just with words, but with proof from other customers that their fears were allayed.
With those simple steps (and a lot of hard work), we managed to generate more than 10 warm leads for our client every month. These leads were exclusive to our clients, and not shared with other IDs, unlike what some platform lead generators do, thus leading to high value sales for our clients.
Right now, with the volume of sales they are doing, they’re looking to expand. If you’re an ID looking for a job, send us your details and we’ll pass it on to them. If you’re a business looking to expand in a similar manner, drop us your details and we can explore how we can bring your company to new heights.
