Ep 92: Stop Perfecting Your Marketing, Start Trusting Your Pipeline

Welcome back to the Design Boss Dialogue podcast, the interior design business podcast for women who are ready to build businesses that feel as good on the inside as they look on the outside.

I want to start with a confession: last month I sat on a newsletter for four days because it "wasn't ready." Sound familiar? If your enquiries have felt inconsistent lately, or you've caught yourself putting marketing on the back burner while you focus on client work, this episode is for you.

Here's the truth,  your interior design business runs on a ripple, not a switch. What you post, send and say today doesn't show up in your pipeline today, it shows up weeks from now. Overthinking your marketing doesn't protect your business, it just delays the moment your pipeline actually responds.

In this episode, we cover: 

Why your interior design business runs on a lag, and what that means for your marketing. The real reason feast-or-famine cycles happen (it's rarely the market). Why visibility matters more than perfection when marketing your design business. How perfectionism quietly becomes a hiding place from being seen. My approach to content that never leaves you wondering what to post. 

Consistency, not originality, is what builds a predictable pipeline. You don't need a perfect caption today. you need a visible one.

📍 Continue the conversation and connect with Lisa-Marie: HERE

🎙️ Studio: Moska Interior Design - HERE  

⭐️ If this episode resonated, the most powerful thing you can do is leave a rating and review - it helps another designer find this show exactly when she needs it.

Download your exclusive guide for 7 ways to Springboard your Interior Design business and redefine your success - HERE

ABOUT DESIGN BOSS DIALOGUE

Design Boss Dialogue is the interior design business podcast for women ready to build a profitable, sustainable interior design business - without losing themselves in the process.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Welcome back to the Design Boss Dialogue Podcast, the Interior Design Business Podcast for women who are ready to build businesses that feel as good on the inside as they look on the outside. I am your host, Lisa Marie Elkadrawi, and today I want to start with a little confession. Last month I sat on a newsletter for four days because it wasn't ready. Now, if you know me, you know that's not because I didn't have anything to say. I've got plenty to say. What I didn't have was the feeling of certainty, that little green light that says, Yep, this is absolutely perfect. It's good enough. Send it. So I kept opening the draft. It stayed there. I tweaked a sentence, closing it again, and for four days, a newsletter that, if I'm perfectly honest with you, ended up going out almost exactly as I'd written it the first time. Does this sound remotely familiar to you listening to this today? And maybe it's not a newsletter. Maybe it's a caption that's still sitting in your notes app from last week and you should have had it just uploaded to Instagram. Maybe it's the reel that you filmed and you never posted it because, oh, God forbid, like the hair wasn't right, the lighting wasn't right, you know, you're so critical of it, or you just weren't feeling it that day. Maybe it's the fact that your inquiries have felt a bit quiet lately and you've quietly stopped marketing altogether because you're really busy with client work, that something had to give, and marketing was the easiest way to let things slide. But you've just been a little bit critical of the things of when you do do that quick little video and you know you should post it, your mind is elsewhere. So it sits, you look at it, it sits, you look at it. Oh, I'll just get back to it later. I've got more client work. Now, if any of this is landing for you, this episode is perfect, perfect for you because today I want to talk about something that I don't think gets said enough in our industry. Overthinking your marketing isn't protecting your business, it's actually hugely, hugely costing you. And I want to show you why, and I want to give you a different way to think about this one. One that's gonna take the complete pressure off and not add to it, okay? Now, here's the first thing I need you to hear, and I want you to really let this land because once you see it, you can't unsee it. Your interior design business does not run on a switch, it runs on a ripple effect. Now, you'll all have heard me talking about the 90-day ripple effect in our businesses till I blew in the face till the cows come home. But what do I mean by a ripple effect? I mean that what you post today, what you send today, what you say out loud today, it does not show up in your pipeline today. Okay? It shows up six, eight weeks, sometimes honestly three months, 90 days from now, because someone sees your post in July and might not reach out until September, or they might not reach out till August. Because that's when they're finally ready, or finally had the budget, or finally stopped scrolling and started acting, or gone back into their saved items and thought, oh, I really need to contact her about this work. This is exactly the same principle behind my 90-day ripple effect, which, if you'd listened, obviously, to a few episodes back now, you'll know I talk about it in terms of sales conversations, the idea that what you do today ripples out into your diaries weeks from now. Well, marketing works exactly on the same ripple effect. It's not a separate system, it's the same ripple just earlier on in the chain. And here's why this matters so much. When you don't understand that your business runs on a ripple, you start making decisions based on immediate feedback. So, say you post something and nothing happens within 48 hours, your brain goes into distortion. Oh, well, that didn't work. My content must be absolutely pants. No one actually likes me, no one wants to work with me. So you stop. You absolutely stop. You go into protection, you go into fight or flight. Well, I've got to retrieve back. Now I've got to question absolutely everything. Or I'll give you another example. You wrote something in your notes, you're going back time and time again. You haven't even posted that particular piece of content because some part of you has already predicted that it's not going to work, so why bother? And this comes down to procrastination and imposter syndrome as well. But that's not how this works, okay? That's not how any of this works. Visibility compounds, it builds on itself quietly in the background of your business. So whilst you're busy doing the actual design work, you're working on the business, you're working in the business, then one day, often, when you least expect it, someone messages you and says, Oh, I've been following you for months. I finally feel ready to reach out. I absolutely love your content. And in fact, I had this, I was sitting with a client last week in her monthly mentoring call, and we were talking about lead generation and her leads, and she was saying, Oh, I've had another discovery call in from a client that's actually found me on a trial reel and has contacted me because they've been watching my content and loves it. I've had another client contact me. Uh, she's finally ready to reach out. She found me on a post that I posted two months ago. Now, that is what I mean by compound visibility and ripple effect. That message didn't come from today's Instagram post that she posted. That message didn't come from something that she posted yesterday. And when you post something a couple of weeks, a couple of months ago, it came from a version of you who has showed up, even if it felt uncertain, because you understand the importance of visibility and compound. And for those of you that don't, then obviously I want you to listen further. So, the first thing I want you to take from today's episode is this stop judging your marketing by what happens in the next 24 hours. Start judging it by whether you're constantly showing up in a way that's honestly, recognizably you. The results are going to show up. They're just going to show up later than your nervous system wants them to. So, this is also why it's so important, and we won't go into it today, that we support our soulful mindset work, our internal energetics. This is why the two go hand in hand. And you will have heard me talking about this in loads of episodes, obviously, across the last 18 months, and you'll hear me talking about it on Instagram. But it's a blend of both work that we do, strategy and soul. So let's talk about feast or famine because I think this is where the ripple really becomes visible. So here's the pattern I see over and over again. Business gets really busy, like really busy. You've got three projects on the go, site visits, clients to manage, deadlines stacking up, and something has to give, like has to give. So, what gives? Your marketing. Now, if you're sitting listening to this as you're driving along or you're pouring a cup of tea, you're making dinner, and you're nodding and you're and laughing to yourself, this is resonating, isn't it? And it's the thing that feels the most optional in the moment because nobody's chasing you for a caption the way a client is chasing you for a floor plan. So you go quiet. Weeks passed, or you know, days or months, your head goes down, you're doing brilliantly at work, you're feeling really productive, you're in the business, feeling like you're finally too busy to market. Which, let's be on it, it feels like a badge of honor in this industry at times, and I'm here to kind of quietly disrupt all of that. And then right on schedule, about six to twelve weeks later, inquiries dry up. Now, this funny enough came up again in one of our Thrive community calls because one of the girls says, I have done no marketing because I have just been on word of mouth, and then all of a sudden things have dried up and I've had to really pick up the momentum wheel again because I have not done my marketing, because the business was just busy. Okay. And when it dries up, it feels sudden. Like you can really, really feel it. And it feels like it's come out of nowhere as well. Like, oh my god, where did everyone go? Why have all my leads gone quiet? Why is this just why is just why is this just not working anymore? And it's completely predictable once you see what's happening. You went quiet weeks ago. The pipeline is just now catching up to that decision. Okay, this is the feast or famine cycle, and I want to be really, really clear here. It is very rarely about the market. It is very rarely about your prices, your location, the time of year. Nine times out of ten, when I dig into this, when I start working with a client, we can trace the quiet patch back to a period of low visibility a few weeks earlier. The business is just doing exactly what it was told to do. So if you go quiet, eventually the pipeline goes quiet too. And it's not a punishment, it's just because you are playing out on a delay. And once you see that, something really powerful happens. The fear leaves the quiet season. Because instead of panicking and thinking something is wrong with my business, you can look back and think, ah, I know exactly why this happened and I know exactly what to do about this. And that's why when I work with so many designers in the industry, we are working on 90-day cycles, momentum building, we're looking at lead generation. We are always trying to work 90 days ahead of ourselves so this doesn't happen. Okay. Now, I want to go a little bit deeper here because I don't think the marketing overthinking conversation is complete if we only talk about strategy. I think we also have to talk about what's actually underneath it, okay? Because here's the thing: most designers I talk to are not short on ideas. They're not short on things to say. They've got beautiful presentations, beautiful projects. You know your industry, you know your clients. You could talk for 20 minutes about scope creep or sourcing or client psychology without blinking. So if it's not a content problem, then what is it? What is it that you have? And I think for a lot of us, perfectionism in marketing is actually a hiding place for something a little bit more vulnerable, which is the fear of being seen and judged. Now think about it. When you post client work, that's easy. The room is doing the talking, not you. But when you have to write a caption, send a newsletter, show up on camera, and just talk, that is you, your opinions, your voice, your face. And some part of your nervous system reads that as risk. Okay. Inside, we start to get a little bit jittery. Not because anything is actually wrong, but because visibility at a biological level has always felt a little bit dangerous. Or all of us, I will admit it. When I first started in the industry, there was no hope in hell you'd get me talking on camera. Like, obviously, I have had years and years of training and coaching, and I can happily get up and speak now. But I work with so many designers that they are so scared to approach the camera and talk about their work, and we work on it for months and months and months, and then they start showing up and think, what was I actually scared about? So I want you today to think about being seen. We need to dissolve the fear of being judged. Being judged means being rejected in our minds, and rejection to a nervous system feels like a threat. We want to dissolve that. We don't want to attach that with our marketing, okay? And naturally, what do we do in that situation? We disguise the fear as a standard. We tell ourselves, oh, it's not ready. Oh, I need to think about this too much more, or I'll post it, I'll I'll I'll post it later. But often, if we're really honest with ourselves, it's not about the content being unready, it's about us not feeling ready to be seen, okay, and the fear of being judged. So I want to eng, I want to gently invite you to notice this week. The next time you delay a piece of marketing, pause and ask yourself, is this actually not good enough? Or am I just too scared to hit the send button and show up? Because those are two very different problems and they need two very different responses. If the content genuinely needs work, fine, improve it. Absolutely not a problem. Look at your presentation, look at your mood boards, that's okay. But if you're just scared, hitting send anyway, imperfect and all, is the work that we want to look at. That's the muscle that we're building. We are not building perfect content, we are building authenticity. People buy from people, okay? And it's slow and steady, remember. We're not going out there all guns blazing. We are going slow and steady. And this is where I think this conversation is a bit different to a lot of the marketing advice out there because it's not just post more, be consistent, stop overthinking it. Although, yes, all of that is, you know, true. It's also be gentle with yourself about why you're overthinking it in the first place. You're not lazy, you're not bad at marketing, you're a human nervous system doing what nervous systems do best when visibility feels vulnerable. And once you can see that clearly, the compassion makes the consistency so much easier to build. And I want that, I want you to let that land, okay? So let's get practical because I don't want to leave you with just the why. I want to give you something that you can actually start using today. Okay. I want to talk to you about how I would approach marketing and how I would approach content. Okay, so I'm gonna walk you through three little things that I would love you to try and approach and let me know. Obviously, you know, hit reply on the show notes. Um, send me an email if you're in our email marketing list. Like I would love to hear from you about this. So, point one, okay, this is your evidence before and afters. This is this is the proof that we're building, okay, with the practical frameworks that we want to look at. Client results, testimonials, the finished room. This is the content that does the least emotional heavy lifting for you because the work speaks for itself, but it's also the content that builds trust fastest when someone who's on the fence about reaching out. So we want to put evidence-based content out there that the studio is live, the studio is active, client results, you know, even sentences that clients have sent to us, um, screenshotting some social proofing, the before and afters. This is really, really easy content for a designer. This should not be overlooked or feel heavy. Okay. Then we want to look at the um tools in which we use in order to produce that content. And what I mean by this is our processes, our systems, our procedures. This is the behind the scenes, this is the juicy bit, how you actually think as a designer or a businesswoman, how you solve problems on your projects in your work, why you made a particular sourcing decision, what a client consultation actually looks like. This is the content that positions you as the expert, not just the aesthetic. Okay. And it's often the content designers skip because it feels it, you know, it might feel perfectly boring to you, and you think, oh God, why am I videoing myself walking around site and meetings? But however, it's really fascinating to someone who has never run a design project in their life. You've got to imagine this from the client's perspective. Okay. A client is about to embark on a project which is completely alien to them. If they are in a completely different industry, they have not got a Scooby, they've got not got a clue about how a house renovation works. So they're looking for every single piece of evidence for someone that can walk them through that. So if you are in the middle of a renovation with a client or you're doing a room refresh, or you're on clarity sessions, or you're out there doing a new build, or you know, you're doing e-design, show the processes of how you get from A to Z. People absolutely love it. And this is the easiest stuff that you can do. Set up your tripod, film doing your mood boards, your fabric samples, opening samples, working on CADs. This stuff makes great B-roll content. And then the last one is you. Okay, you, your values, your mindset, your soul threads that run through everything you do, your why, your zone of genius, your superpowers. This is the content that turns a follower into someone who feels like they know you. And it's it's the content that can make your marketing unmistakably yours. Because nobody else can post you. Okay. Nobody has your story, your studio, your years of experience, your perspective. And that's what will make your marketing content so unique. And here's why this works so well as a rhythm when we look at, you know, the the evidence behind what you do, the systems, and then the authenticity piece is if you ever feel stuck, you're never actually stuck for ideas. You're just temporarily unclear on which of those you haven't touched for a while. Okay. If you've gone quiet on your social proofing, share a project result. If you're feeling like your content's a little bit flat, add your systems and processes, add a site visit, a meeting, a client get together. If you're feeling disconnected from your audience, get a little bit more personable with them. Tell them what you're doing, why you do what you do, what your studio represents, or your business. You don't need huge big content calendars to solve this. You just need small processes and the willingness to rotate through them on repeat. Now, I teach in one of my foundational modules authority, awareness, trust, and conversion. And we build all of those into the three areas that we've just spoken about today. And they are so strong for a designer to use to build their authority, educational value to their followers. People sitting on the fence needs trust and conversion content. You just need to know how to rotate it and place it within your sales and visibility roadmap. That's what it comes down to. So let's bring all of this together that I've just spoken about. Your business runs on a ripple, okay, not a switch, which means the marketing you do today is building a pipeline that shows up weeks from tomorrow, not tomorrow. Okay, it shows up weeks from where you're building it from, months even. Feast or famine is very rarely random. It's usually the natural predictable result of quiet marketing patches from a few weeks earlier, which means you have far more control over it than it feels like in the moment. And perfectionism, more often than not, isn't actually about the content being unready, it's about you feeling unready to be seen and recognizing that distinction changes everything for about how you respond to it. And when you do sit down to create, you do not need to overthink it. Just remember look at the social proofing around you, look at your systems, processes, methodologies for how you actually work and what you do, and think about you as the authentic person. Remember awareness, authority, trust, and conversion. Rotate through them, show up imperfectly and trust what the pipeline is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing, even when you can't see the results yet. So if you've been working and working and working on content and you feel like you're not getting there, remember it's daily discipline, showing up visibility, imperfectly or not, is going to support you in those clients trickling in. Now, here's what I want to leave you with. The designers who build predictable thriving businesses, they're not the ones with the most perfect polished content or the most original ideas or the perfect caption every single time. They are the ones who kept showing up, especially in the weeks when it felt uncertain, especially when the immediate feedback wasn't there yet. Consistency, not perfection, is what your pipeline is actually responding to. I want you to let that land. Consistency, not perfection, is what your pipeline is actually responding to. And if this episode has struck a chord or you resonate, if you've got a caption sitting on your drafts right now that's been not ready for a little too long, I want you to do something for me. Okay, we are starting the week with momentum. I want you to post it today. Imperfect and all. That's the work that we're building. We're building the compound effect. And if you want some support building your marketing rhythm that actually feels sustainable rather than something you're constantly forcing yourself to do, then email me on teamdesignbossdiary at gmail.com and we can have a discussion on where you can build your systems and processes, your marketing, your sales and visibility plans. We can look at your forecasts, we can look at building that whole encompassing picture for you. You can find me over on Instagram as well, and we can continue this conversation. I would genuinely love to hear which of the processes you're going to lean into that you have been neglecting lately from your content. And if this episode gave you something today, the most powerful thing you can do for this show is leave a rating and a review. It's how other designers sitting exactly where you were four days ago with an unsent newsletter finds this episode right when she needs it. Thank you so much for being here. I will see you next week for another gorgeous, powerful packed podcast.