Getting more LEADS in your interior design business

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Transcript

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Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host, Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleandra Finch Design Studio. I've lived the transformation from study to studio and then stripped it bare and wrote down the framework so you don't have to overthink it. In this podcast, you could expect real talk with industry friends, community, connection, and actionable tips to help you conquer whatever's holding you back. Now let's get designing your own success. I have been waiting all day to record this because I got up this morning and there was somebody like NBN digging up my front lawn so their jackhammer has now gone away and I can get On with it. So I went out to our private group inside of the framework yesterday and asked the girls, what's going on for you now? What can I support you with? What's happening out there? What sort of topics would you like to hear on a podcast? And I got some great ideas for probably the next four or five solo episodes, but one that popped out to me that I thought, actually, that could be very helpful for a broader audience with around lead generation and a creative marketing ideas to bring in new eyes onto your business. Because I am hearing it's tough out there at the moment. 2024 has started for people. Consumers are changing. Consumers are Way more savvy with their dollars because they need to be because of cost of living, which we keep hearing all of the time, but I am experiencing that in my business. Actually, I'm experiencing a bit of a shift in my business. It's not so much that the volume isn't there. that the types of things like the girls in the framework are generally paying it off monthly. So we do a 1. 99 per month payment plan. So they used to be paying it in full and then just putting it on their tax returns and whatnot. And now I find that they're joining the membership and paying monthly, which is great. The option is there to do and I have actually found a really big increase in private coaching this year, probably in the last four or five months specifically. It's tilted a little bit and I think people have gone in my business into a way of being like look, if we're going to work together and we're going to pay a couple of thousand dollars, I'd rather work with you on a one on one Monday to Friday chatting and you looking at my specific needs and us creating a specific strategy for my business, rather than me joining in on the call. So something for everybody. That's just obviously It's a great team. Neither here nor there with lead generation, but there's a lot of changes. We've talked about AI last week. I interviewed Stacey from intelligent. designer. ai on Instagram, and we talked all things AI. But yeah, consumer behavior is changing and the way we deliver things is changing. So if you've been using ManyChat or bots or anything like that in your DMs, even the way people want to receive things, it's way more instantaneous and it's not click the link in bio and go and check it out for yourself. It's more DM me the word framework and you will instantly get access to the information or if I've created a lead magnet for you, a template, a tool, something for your business, you need only send me the word creative, for example, and you immediately get the creative services pricing guide, how to price your services properly. And that is a real guide that is there. If you have a creative business and you're like worried about whether you priced it correctly or how to set your pricing, DM me the word creative and I'll send you the guide. So yeah, things are changing. Things are looking a little bit different this year. So today specifically, I just want to talk about a bunch of different ways we can get in front of your ideal clients. The first thing you want to do is know that ideal client and I hate that being like, okay, you have to do your ideal client over time, but you have to at least be able to put yourself into their shoes. Have you been in their shoes before you were an interior designer, for example, did you ever work with an interior designer? If you did work with an interior designer, where would you go looking for them? Is this, something that you would just do on Google, in Facebook groups, at the local shopping center, like where are you actually going to go? Those are the places where you need to be. So I spoke with a framework of the other day and I was like, okay, cool. You have a really coastal aesthetic and you live in this location. And so I would be thinking about where does my ideal client spend their morning. And you can think about this from the perspective of your own business. If I know my ideal client, where do they spend Saturday mornings? If they're out brunching, then you want to be on a pinboard or, have a flyer, something like that. In that restaurant. Precinct or wherever it is that they go out to brunch. Maybe you could put some cards on the counter. Maybe you can't, but it's thinking about that stuff. So for her and her coastal aesthetic, I was like, Hey, maybe they're in a Pilates studio every Saturday morning. And then maybe you could contact the Pilates studio owner and say, I would really love to run a competition for members of your studio only, and I will give away a. 1 hour consultation to the value of 595 in a gift voucher and we'll collect emails and you will be able to add them to your that you make sure that there's a consent tick box for both parties and then they've grown their email list at the Pilates to you and you've grown your email list. So you have a return. You've got a measurable outcome and you run the giveaway for a good 30 days or a month, so you can capture at least four rounds of weekends and people throughout the week in the studio. I'm just making this up as we go along, but for her, I was like, that might be a really creative way and a good way to go out and find where your clients are and, Quote, unquote, meet them where they're at, but really thinking about your ideal client means that you can actually get in front of them. If your ideal client is a I don't know, a busy working professional mom with young children, maybe you work with a lot of families in your design or whatnot, then go down to the local community centers, the kindergarten, the daycare, because they're working and the kids are in daycare, and then say to the daycare, Next time you have a raffle, I'd really love to be involved. I'd love to give away three 75 vouchers or whatever. I make up all the numbers. You know how to do this stuff for yourself. But perhaps you wanted to do two of these sorts of incentives per 12 month period. And yeah, and they're marketing and lead generation tools. So then you should have built. a bit more of your subscription list up or your email list just by running that competition. Try not to run it for a week, as I say, a minimum of a month in something like a studio or a wellness center. Completely depends on your ideal client, but if they'll be there often then you should be too. And it's not just local area marketing or in person marketing that works in terms of lead generation as well. Value adding and being what I call inside of my group a support pest. Now a support pest is lots of things. She is a little cheerleader. I love to be a support pest. If I see you do good work in your stories, you'll always see me tapping the heart. Liking your posts, sharing your posts, saving your posts, if I see you working on a collaboration with a brand, I will like, share, tap, send to a friend, all those things just to support you having more collaboration opportunities because I know how marketing works, and I know how the post brand campaign works, and I know what the brand is hoping to get out of it, so I always make sure to. Overlook support, be prepared to support support. So when I'm talking about that from a digital perspective, I guess Facebook, I would call it dead because I very rarely use it, but it can be a good business tool and there's still a lot of your perfect potential clients on there. So hands up if you've heard of all the, I won't use any actual names because I don't even know what they're called, but the renovation moms who renovate and donate and. Demolition DIY. I don't know. There's lots of different Facebook groups like that. Get into those groups and be really helpful. The aim of the game inside of those Facebook groups is not to sell. Ew, ick, so much ick. Nobody wants your unsolicited DMs or your salesy kind of messages that are helpful but helpful with a catch. Give me your email address and I'll tell you the answer, that kind of stuff. Yuck yuck. But what you do want to do is, you can spend 15 minutes a day popping in and just looking if there's anything that you do know something about and you're in a renovation pay or something like that and just popping in and say, Hey, professional interior designer here. I run my own business. This comes up for clients all the time. This is how I'd approach it or this is the advice that I give them. I hope it was helpful. DM me if you have any further questions or you need anything more. We want to be starting conversations. Leads are. We need to be having a lot of conversations with people until they know and trust you enough to buy off you. So the first time that you're chatting to someone, the intention is not to sell them something or have them go, Oh my gosh, I can't believe wherever you've been all my life, quick, sign me up. But, if you have given them value, and you have genuinely wanted to help them without needing them to pay you and you have this skill and talent, then they are definitely going to think of you next time that they do need some paid help. This doesn't mean that you spend all day every day in there working as a free interior designer. But so many people are so afraid of sharing what they know in case people go and do it themselves or things like that. And we say all the time, that just isn't what happens. So my advice is get helpful, be a support pest, get on your social media like you already are, but start conversations. Engagement goes two ways. The amount of times I hear from people, oh, I've got my engagement, I've got this and that Who are you talking to? How many conversations have you started in DM? Are you reaching out when people put something up in their stories and say, Oh, this is, this drives me crazy too. Thanks for sharing. Or, I loved that. Can I have the Can I have the details of where you got that from? Just starting conversations with people is engagement. It's important. And and so I hate the old school way of talk to 10 people who are your ideal clients and identify 10 people who are your competitors and show up on their page. All of that is so ick and really such a dated, horrible way to behave on Instagram. But there is definite opportunity in saying, I'm going to spend 15 minutes a day and I'm going to force myself to start 10 conversations in my DMs. Those conversations eventually will lead to purchases or collaborations, friendships and other things and it makes you feel like you're on Instagram for a reason, not just posting Canva assets and a big chat GBT caption and then checking back to see if anybody booked you. Newsflash, they won't. They need to know you and you need to get to know them. So the aim of this lead generation is about opening conversations and really getting to use digital media in a better way. So use Facebook. If you're unsure of topics, this comes up a lot with me as well. People are like, I don't know what to say in my stories. I don't know what's helpful. I don't know what's interesting. There's nothing interesting about me or I don't want to show up on my stories because I'm so boring. Yeah, we're all boring. Everyone's looking at themselves anyway, which I've said before, if you're not sure what to talk about, go to those Facebook groups and look in the search bar and look at the most searched thing and then go and talk to those topics. So if the most searched thing in the renovation pages. best white paint for a coastal look or something, then get on your stories and say, this question comes up a lot, which white paint to use for the best coastal outcome? Here's my top two. Or when we look on Facebook, if somebody's saying, the question's coming up time and time again, even if the question thinks I'm looking for a reliable, highly recommended painter, or I need this painting job done, then I would get on my stories if I saw that coming up time and time again on a Facebook group, and I would be like, hold up. Before you hire a reliable, highly recommended painter from your community groups, please, I give you all the permissions to do but please don't let them choose the paint colors. Something fun, something silly, just a bit of a joke about hey yeah, for sure, get your recommendations. That's a great way to find a good painter, but don't let them choose the colors. That's an interior designer's job. So that right there, I literally. I couldn't think of an example. I stopped. I went onto Facebook. I went onto the first it's actually just a community page that came up and someone was asking that exact question with the location for what they needed for a painter and then I looked at that and went this is how I'd use it as content. So it's a goldmine for topics I'm hearing all the time. I just don't feel like I've got anything to say on my stories. Give the people what they want. Find out what your potential clients are asking by doing some research on Facebook and then go and answer all those questions because you'll very quickly people will look to you to be like, Oh, I want to hear your hot take on white paint or finding a painter or making a decision around paint colors. I spoke about community groups before and sometimes I think people don't do things like workshops or styling sessions and that sort of stuff because they're like, oh it's such a big effort to pull together and I need free goodie bags and I need to have printed collateral and I need a venue and I need all of this sort of stuff. It just becomes too hard. But there's a lot to be said for slipping into things that are already going on. So your library might do little sessions, your community, if you have a neighborhood house or community center, and it might be worth just going in and saying, Hey is there any opportunity for me to do a half an hour or one hour session? And I'd be targeting again, Thinking about if your ideal client was a professional mums or whatever, you might say, Hey, can I run a zoom session where they could sign up and I will run it after work because I know a lot of my ideal clients will be busy. And then get people to register and you can take that as far as you want. You can have that on your Instagram. You can advertise it in Facebook pages where the rules allow. You can mention to people who say to you that they're struggling with a particular thing. Hey, I'm running a workshop in May. It's just going to be an hour of your time. You'll get the replay. You can come along live, that sort of thing. They are all leads. People will be interested in doing that. Just trying to get something that's actually an interesting topic. If you wouldn't dial into it and pay attention and it's not a no brainer you have to be there, you don't want FOMO, you want to see it, neither will they. If it's dry again, how to find a reputable painter, I'm not dialing into that webinar. But I would totally come to the webinar where you showed me how to style like a stylist with things that I already have in my home. I'd be curious about that. I'd be like, okay, cool. What's you going to do? And that's easy to do. You just teach people how to declutter, how to use space, how to yeah, I'm not going to write the webinar over this podcast, but I guess you get the picture. And the main thing is that we want lots of sign ups, so you want to make the marketing message really I'm going to do this for free and I really hope you'll come along and join me. It's going to be a lot of fun, no pressure, no homework, nothing like that. It's just sign up, you'll get a link to the Zoom call. Keep things simple. This is the other thing that drives me crazy. If you are in your first. 3 to 5 years of business. You don't need to understand or like difficult funnels and automations and nurture sequences and other things. As I say, everything's moving towards just DM me the word, I'll flick you the link. Try to do as much of that as possible. Keep it the way, like that's how you start conversations. That's how you keep chatting to people and keep their interest and build relationships. It's just I've got this thing. I know that you really want it. Shoot me a message and I'll send you my version that's available to you. People really appreciate when things are simple as well, because it means that they haven't felt trapped into anything. They're not suddenly getting a 15 email long welcome sequence over the next month. It's just as simple as, look, I've got it. I've made it. It's useful if you want it, reach out in my DMs and I will happily send it to you. And I think that's just the best approach. That's a great way to do it when you're on those Facebook groups as well. DM me if you want a copy of this, great. When you say stuff like that in a public forum as well, I find if I'm like, Oh, I've got a free checklist for that, or you can get a monthly review that I have, or take anything from my resource hub for designers on the website. DM me, I'll send you the link. I don't always want to put the link up on the public Facebook pages just because of the way I don't want it to ever feel salesy, and I don't want to break any rules, but I'm like, hey, if you want to send me a message, and you find that one person who initially needed it will send the message, but 30 other people will also be like, can I get a copy of that? You're like, yeah, it's live on the web. It's on the internet. www. oleanderandfinch. com. Go nuts. Click on the banner for interior designers and take anything you want. But yeah, I do think that keeping like ignoring funnels, not getting all worked up in your head. What about a lead magnet? What should it be? It doesn't matter what it is. All it matters is someone wants it and they're willing to exchange their email address for it. So just think simply. What is the biggest questions coming up for my ideal client right now? And answer them. Answer them in your own way, on your own kind of templated PDF, and in your brand colours, and then it's completely an original thing, and just make sure it's helpful, that it has value don't send people don't ask for people's email addresses and then send them absolute nonsense, because they'll never buy from you, they won't trust you if I was to ask people for their email address for these amazing resources, or blogs, ideas, templates, and so on And then send them a blank Word document with a few dot points and nothing valuable in those dot points. It's not a strategy, it's not anything interesting. Then I would 100% expect them to never sign up to the framework.'cause what would they think? It's inside the resource library. Just a bunch of blank documents with dot points. You give them a bit of a taste of you as a brand, you as a person, your deliverables, what you stand for, and who you are. Please promise me that you are not putting paid advertising behind your posts, boosting them, spending money before you're seeing organic engagement and reach and growth. So if something performs really well organically, by all means, Throw 30 bucks at it or something you're willing to lose to see what happens. If you are doing something like a post about a lead magnet and it suddenly gets, you've said put the word creative below and I'll send it to you a copy and you say it blows up and you've got like a hundred people who've said creative and it's been an hour since you posted it. Heck yes, put a little bit of money behind it. People want this and you're going to build your email subscription. But mostly what I see people doing is doing something they think it's really good or that is quite healthy how we can work together and then boosting that daily and hoping to get growth and engagement and a result that's worth the advertising behind it. I personally believe that you shouldn't be paying in or you shouldn't be playing in the paid advertising space until you are making almost six figures organically. I think once you've mastered marketing without putting money behind it, then you are able to make really great decisions about where to put the money behind it and get the most out of it. Up until then, you're throwing money spaghetti at the wall, and it might be before you're bringing in enough money to play with, if that makes sense. Anyway, I will jot this down as something to talk about later around paid advertising versus organic and how to really stretch and make do, or how to do better organic marketing. I did just want to call that out because it's very easy to get excited when we make a lead magnet or we're going to run a workshop or we've just opened our Pinterest board and whatnot and all of a sudden you're throwing all this money, follow me on Pinterest, follow me on Pinterest. Why are we paying for that? We want to, yeah, if you get good organic messages and good organic marketing over on Pinterest, then you don't need to pay on Instagram to send people to Pinterest, you just start getting follows. Now, let's get into some other ideas to try to bring onto your office. Things like Pinterest, things like SEO and Google business profile and all those sorts of things that are really important and the idea that we want just do them if we get enough time extra after spending all of our time on Instagram, which is not giving you the leaks that you want, right? You wouldn't be listening to this hoping for some golden nuggets if you were getting constant DMs full of like hot links that are ready to buy from you. That isn't happening at the moment. And if you have your eggs in other baskets like Pinterest, every morning I wake up, there's lots of people who pinned my boards who are going to my website from Pinterest. So it's It absolutely drives traffic and then your homepage could do the heavy lifting or whatever deep link you have into your sales pages or whatnot. But getting that initial marketing piece I just think there's so much benefit to spending for me. Like time on Pinterest, time on podcasting, time on lots of other avenues, explore TikTok if you can, trying to diversify or omni channel your marketing is so important and I feel like so many designers are just trying to hack the algorithm, break the algorithm, work out Instagram. I don't know if it's a kickback from like thinking, oh, wow, that, that account's really taken off. 2016. And I've seen you've got 100, 000 followers. And we thought that was great because it was great, but it's not the end of the game anymore. And we're still seeing people stubbornly dig their heels in and say, I'm here to win at Instagram at all costs. And I'm not going to move to other platforms until I have, but I think Instagram, definitely what is the broader strategy? What can you do better? I believe that your time would be better off starting. And driving results on email marketing. So starting to get people to subscribe through leaf magnets or through every time you talk about something in your stories, if you just pop up and say I was just chatting to a client, we were going through and I was helping her set up her room. This is the mood board. DM me if you want information about where all the items are from, for example. And start those conversations and people would DM you and you're like, cool, what's your email address? And sign them up to your email and send them the mood board with a couple of perhaps you've got a linked version. Just include your audience in everything and wherever you can try to get them to sign up for your emails. But then don't just get them to sign up for your emails and then Crickets, like never send them anything. The side, once and for all. Am I going, like At the beginning, that generally looks like a quarterly or a monthly newsletter. It does not look like mine, where it's weekly. It looks like, I will just make sure that when you arrive onto my email page, you get a thank you and a welcome email, and then you receive about once a month from me. Because it's all that you really can do in that start when you're setting everything else up. But I would spend my energies, if I had my time again, on email marketing, building a larger subscription. list. I would spend my time equally across Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok across the three. And yeah, I wouldn't get so hung up on just everything Instagram. I think it's things, times are changing and clients are changing. And I bet you don't even have a strategy that actually addresses things like local area marketing, as well as some of those other platforms. So first stop, definitely, if you're looking to. Attract more leads and to generate way more leads. Look at the way that where you're trying to do that, because if it's just Instagram, it's a lot harder than if you've got some things working for you over on the Facebook platform, you've got a plan for email and asking for subscriptions, you've got a lead magnet, no matter what that is, basically willing to share somewhat something with someone in exchange for their email address. If you have, yeah. a pretty regular presence on TikTok or you're willing to show up like once a week or do a Instagram live. It's about writing this all down and thinking, Oh, okay. Yep. I've covered a lot more bases than just Instagram. So I spend the same amount of time, but I'm doing a lot of varied activities, which is going to result in lead generation coming from other places, not just a place where you could wake up tomorrow and the whole thing's been locked down and you're locked out and you pretty much need to start from scratch. I mentioned earlier, maybe running like an online workshop or something like that, for a lot of you, you may not feel confident enough to run a live, like, where people can ask you questions and you just might feel really nervous until you've done a lot of that sort of work before, which is completely understandable. You might not even be that introverted. It might just be new technology. You've just never run a workshop. You're like, who am I to run this thing or whatnot. I would really suggest that you take a go at pre recording something, so think about the thing that will give your client value and then film the Zoom call. And then we can create a lead magnet that includes a video tutorial or that includes you basically running the workshop, but you're running it in a way where you can pause and edit and tidy it up, spending time on that. You can put that on YouTube as long form content. You can use clips of that on your Instagram, on your TikTok, on Pinterest as an ideas pin. You can do a couple of pins that point to the workshop that's running this Saturday at this time, and then obviously you've pre recorded it so you can run it over and over. Things like that, I believe, are worthwhile putting time into for marketing because they continue to pay off for you over and over again. My only tip with it would be validate what your client wants before you spend time editing, filming, recording, creating a beautiful landing page or email to post the video only to find out that two people watched it. One was me, because you told me you made it, and the other one's your mum. You really want to make sure that it's something that people, yeah, like all lead magnets, it's something that people are like, yes, no brainer, send it to me, send it to me, send it to me. How do I get it? How do I get it? How do I get it? If you don't get that via from your potential client straight away, keep thinking. It's not the right lead magnet. And here's another idea for you, when was the last time you went on a little sourcing or selections trip for the day and just popped into showrooms, chatted to other industry professionals, chatted to your trade suppliers, let them know it's quiet there are times where people can't get in with an interior designer and then there are times where it is quieter. that your suppliers are grateful that it's not as vanilla. Okay, cool. Things are a bit quiet. What are you doing? What are they doing? How can we collaborate? Can I come in here on a Saturday morning and we, and I'll do a skills session with some of your clients, like your direct retail clients. Can I help you in any way? How can I support you? How can you support me? Have those conversations and get out there. You're obviously networking and growing, but you never know what a conversation could lead to. They have their finger on the pulse. They're right there when the clients come in and are telling them what they need. Ask them what clients have been saying lately that they need help with. Yeah, really build those relationships because they will surprise you with how they do generate leads or how your name comes up in a room when opportunities are present. I briefly mentioned collaborations there, but I do think that they can be extremely good way to cross pollinate audiences, find an account or an audience that you can bring a lot of value to that is not an interior designer that doesn't have that skill and then offer to have a live chat with them around. I have a girl in my framework, for example, that I'm thinking of and her need is to work with, Hair salons and like commercial fitouts and doing interior design from a salon perspective. And she recently was on a podcast that I heard that's a podcast for hairdressers about the place of interior design inside your salon, refits or Fitouts. And I was like, what a great fit. But I can also think of a million different places where she could branch out and just say, Hey. Can we get together? Maybe we do an insta live. I'd love to tell your hairdresser listeners a lot of things that they should consider when they're thinking about changing the look and feel of the salon and whether that's like not moving the plumbing or having a really strong budget to do it all at once instead of chipping away at it or the importance of getting Yeah a third party to project manage that kind of stuff. So when you put your own business into that, run it through that lens or that filter, and you just think about is there a place where I'm not just going to be talking to other interior designers, but in fact, the people that I want to be working with. So what kind of people do I want to work with? Where are they? And is there a, person that I can collaborate with to do like an InstaLive or to be a guest in their memberships or courses? Or perhaps there's a way that you can get in front of your client before they're ready to Be your client. So are they just exploring build the other day? I went down to some local display homes. I pop in there all the time, but often when it's open days and things, the actual I guess management team are often on site and I have left cards. I have my cards locally in those display homes so that people who are thinking about building who want to work with an interior designer, it's just another way that I put myself out there. Just going meeting with them being like, hey, He, do you need more stuff? I go back and check how are the business cards going, take out some bag of lollies, have a chat to them. Like a bag of Ellen snakes gets you a long way. Just saying it doesn't have to be over complicated and it doesn't have to be crazy cheesy. It can just be like. I am a local interior designer, so I've come down to see the display homes because obviously I'm super interested. And I also sneaky tip, I love to go in there if Globe West is really quite far away from where I am currently located. So if I'm specifying something like that, I happen to know a lot of those pieces are in the display homes. So I sometimes just run over so I could be like, that's right and look and feel of the proportion and the boucle and touch and go. Yep. No, happy with that selection. I'll go back and specify it for my client. But yeah, building those relationships. Popping in saying hi and maintaining them. Don't just go once throw a packet of business cards at someone and run for the hills. Call up and say, I used to a good with them, if they were being picked up, like how's it going? How, how's business at the moment is acquire. I chatted all the time to a local real estate agent as well. Like I'm not buying a house and I don't do property study. Staging or styling. I can't help her in any way, but she checks in with me once a quarter and just asked about the general market, my feelings, how many local leads I've had lately. Has it been up? Has it been down? And I just think it's really smart business. And I now have a relationship with her that if someone ever does ask me, which they do in my business, in our business of design, they will sometimes say to me, we're thinking we might just get a relationship. We need a bit of help, blah, blah, blah. I'd say this real estate agent straight away, because she's the one that I'd remember,'cause she speaks to me all the time and vice versa. I've had people call me and say, I just got your name from the agent. I, we don't need property styling, but we are looking to use an interior designer. It definitely works. So my intention for today, I guess is just to remind you that creating content is not the only way to. Generate leads and thinking about like how I generate leads for my business. Is this the biggest return on investment? Is this the best use of my time? Is this even worth my time? That's what I want you to really think about. Step back and look at. Everything that you do. And if I took away 10 percent of the time I scroll on Instagram and call it work and put that 10 percent into building an email list or meeting some people locally or just doing something that energizes you and feel different. Sometimes that's the key. We feel flat on Instagram. Maybe you just need to write down a whole bunch of stuff and just start looking into streamlining your Pinterest, learning how to do Pinterest better. If you don't know. DM me, come and talk to me. If you are worried about something, starting something, whether it's going to be a good fit for your business, just come and talk to me in the DMs over at Follyander underscore and underscore Finch. I can always see pretty quickly just by jumping on your own Instagram, whether yes, I think you would be great. For reaching out for brand collaborations or doing some local area stuff. And I pride myself on, I guess it's from my product and marketing background, but I feel like quite a creative thinker when it comes to marketing and how to swivel your messaging and make sure that you're getting the most out of it. You're absolutely milking it. So pop in chat to me anytime, but I hope today you have been able to. I guess squeeze out of the sponge a few new ideas that you hadn't thought of because lead generation is really important at the moment. And I'm just going to leave you with one thought, and that is the power of organic marketing, picking up the phone, walking in and talking to somebody for thinking about, yep, I'll spend this 20 minutes on Facebook and I'll interact with people digitally. I'll offer value and advice and then tell them to message me. Or I'm going to commit to starting 30 conversations, 40 conversations this week in my DMs, and I'll do that by reaching out to people when they're posting their stories and replying with a like, somebody, while I've been doing this podcast, somebody has reached out in my DMs and said, Oh, my God. Love your earrings. I will immediately go back to her and start a conversation. And it just can be that simple. And so many of you are not doing it. It's like you feel really shy in the Instagram space and you're good at making the Canva assets and the content and giving all the value and dropping it like a grenade and running in the opposite direction. And that's just simply not what Instagram is about. Food for thought today. There's a lot there. I do have a marketing workshop, a full day workshop that I run monthly, where I teach you to plan all of your content and understand your content pillars and do everything in an hour and a half a week. It's a full day marketing workshop that I run and it allows you to spend a day away from your business. Focusing just on your messaging. We do a whole bunch of workshops, Q and A's. I'm there helping you. We come up with some strategy. We even just go so deep as to think, are you in the right space? Is this where you need to be? Would you be better off blogging more growing, like learning your SEO? Yeah, we work on so much stuff together. You get a free dashboard that I have created that has like just. Hundreds and hundreds of ideas. It comes with a calendar and a methodology for plotting everything into that calendar that's simple. There's checklists and you just get it done. So if you're finding yourself overwhelmed that you're spending like five, six out of seven days, just planning on marketing, there is a better way and you shouldn't be spending that much time. Small business owners on average spend about 20 hours a week. I'm talking about one and a half hours, and that is all that you need to have really good quality content. I'll put details of the marketing workshop in the show notes today and yes, that does run every month. There's one a month. It runs on a Saturday or a Sunday, alternating month by month. So if you can spare a day in the weekend and you want to get serious about setting yourself up and your marketing, check it out. If anything helped you today, if you had a light bulb. That is really led me to thinking about how I get more leads into my business and it's given me a spark that I needed to go out and quickly sit down and write up a bit of a plan and just work harder at getting more eyeballs on the business and more voices talking and having conversations. Please let me know. Please DM me in over on Instagram at oleander underscore and underscore binge. Please rate, review, subscribe. share this episode with other business owners. You don't have to be an interior designer for some of this stuff to be like, Oh yeah, I could get in and I could look at using the search bar in the Facebook groups to find out more about what my ideal client is actually looking for, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Please join me on Thursday. I have the amazing Kelly from 13 interiors. I have interviewed her. A couple of weeks ago and I'm sharing that interview on Thursday, she is bringing the business gold. I love, love, loved our conversation. She just had so many really great, she has a really strong background in business and coming from lots of different industries too, like mining I loved our chats. So please join me on Thursday where I interview Kelly from 13 Interiors. That wraps up another episode of Designing Success from Study to Studio. Thanks for lending me your ears. Remember, progress over perfection is the key. If you found value in today's episode, go ahead and hit subscribe or share it with a friend. Your feedback means so much to me and it helps me improve, but it also helps this podcast reach more emerging and evolving designers. For your daily dose of design business tips and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at oleander underscore and underscore finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www. oleanderandfinch. com to support you on your journey. Remember, this is your path, your vision, your future, and your business. Now let's get out there and start designing your success.