157. Marketing for Introverts: Aligning Strategies with Your Strengths
Do you struggle with marketing? Marketing your interior design business requires visibility and connection with potential clients. For introverts who prefer smaller groups and more intimate interactions, traditional marketing advice can feel overwhelming and misaligned with their natural working style. The challenge becomes finding ways to share your work authentically while honoring your temperament and energy levels.
In this episode, I'm exploring how to create marketing strategies that align with your individual strengths and preferences as a business owner. Whether you identify as an introvert, extrovert, or somewhere in between, the key is understanding that effective marketing doesn't require you to be someone you're not. I share personal examples of how I structure my marketing activities to support my introverted nature while still achieving business growth.
You'll discover practical approaches for managing your energy during networking events, creating depth over breadth in your connections, and leveraging your natural gifts in your marketing efforts. I'll also address the mindset shifts needed to view marketing as an act of service rather than self-promotion, and how to structure your marketing activities in ways that feel sustainable and authentic to who you are.
If you've been thinking about working with me one-on-one, be sure to get on the private coaching waitlist! Click here to learn more about Design to Thrive and secure your spot to be the first to know when availability opens up.
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
How to identify marketing strategies that align with your personality type and natural strengths.
Why managing your energy creates sustainable marketing habits.
The power of focusing on one-to-one connections rather than working the entire room at networking events.
Practical ways to decenter yourself in marketing conversations and make them about serving others.
How writing to one person instead of an audience creates more intimate and effective marketing messages.
The importance of setting boundaries around social media consumption to preserve your social battery.
Why depth over breadth in relationships leads to better marketing results for introverts.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
If you love what you’re learning on the show, and want to learn how I can support you, click here to learn more about coaching.
Click here for the latest workshops and free resources.
Follow me on Instagram!
Sign up to my Monday Mindset email list to get bite-sized insights on topics that you can use to set your week up for success!
Get my free Life & Business Vision Journal!
Access the free Get It Done Daily Planner!
Quiet by Susan Cain
Stay tuned for details about Create Your 2026 Road Map by getting on the mailing list!
Episodes Related to Marketing for Introverts:
77. PR for Interior Designers: The What, Why, and How with Molly Schoneveld
145. Stop Being So Hard on Yourself: The Power of Self-Compassion
147. PR Strategies for Designers: Strategic Growth & Visibility with Allison Hay
151. Client Trust, Social Media, and Authentic Marketing with Melissa Oholendt
155. Inside My Business: Decision-Making, Priorities, and Podcast Changes
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 157. In this one, we're going to be talking about how to market your interior design business when you identify as an introvert. The truth is, people need to know about your business in order for you to do the work that you really love. And as your goals grow and the business evolves and market conditions change, you need to have a marketing strategy that fits your objectives in the business. And this absolutely needs to be aligned with who you are and how you like to work as a business owner, or you're going to be fighting yourself the whole way.
While you'll be hearing what this looks like for me in practice as a person who prefers smaller groups and more intimate interactions, this episode still definitely applies to all of you who are extroverts or you feel like you fall somewhere in between. And that's because this conversation is really about aligning your marketing strategies to your individual strengths, preferences, and what you want to create as an interior design business CEO.
We're going to be talking about the not-so-obvious things that are in the way of you putting out your work and your business in the spotlight, how to navigate these challenges, and also expand your view of what marketing looks and feels like when you honor yourself and what you do best.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designer. Welcome back to the podcast. I have to tell you, it has been so long since I've been at the microphone. It's really interesting going to this every other week because when I record in advance, even more time passes. I mean, I just feel like there's so much that has happened for me.
I've been to a couple of lacrosse tournaments. We went to Palm Springs on fall break. We had Halloween, and I've been doing a bunch of those strategy sessions you heard me previously promoting. Those have been so fun. It's incredible what we can get done in this session. And that's because of that customized prep work that I provide to the designer who is having one of these with me.
So, I'm loving those and I think I'll probably bring them back sometime in the new year, but we'll we'll see. Stay tuned. Definitely, you want to be on my email list if you want to get dibs on some of those strategy sessions and just know what's going on and how we can connect and work together. You can head over to desicreswell.com/resources and you'll find the sign-up for Monday Mindset, or you can go straight to desicreswell.com/monday-mindset.
The other thing that I have to say is thank you all for your positive feedback and encouragement on this change to moving the podcast to every other week for the time being. That has meant so much to me. One of my brain's biggest fears was everyone would stop listening because it's every other week, and you're proving it wrong, which is amazing. And I mean, it feels like a little silly fear that I had, but it was there. So, just acknowledging it, and I'm really glad to be on this cadence.
And I'm really glad to have made that shift. Like I said in episode 155, and that's where I was sharing the behind-the-scenes of that decision-making process, part of my reasoning for switching the podcast to every other week was to create some space to get back to visibility and pitching so that more designers just like you can benefit from the work that we're doing here in this community. And I've definitely been doing that. I've had some exciting things develop. I have an article coming out in Designers Today for the issue that'll come out right in the new year. If you're a subscriber or check that out online. I also was interviewed for Business of Home for their winter issue. So, very much getting back into marketing.
And as I've been doing that, I've been thinking a lot about how I do the marketing, why it works, both why it's effective in terms of the results that I can create, but why it also just works for me and my style, and how that actually helps me do more of it and enjoy it so much more. And I thought that would be interesting to bring that topic to the podcast. I know marketing's been on the minds of many of my clients, and I'm sure that it's on your radar as well as you're thinking about your 2026 goals.
Whenever we're setting goals or thinking about where we want to grow into, marketing is definitely going to be a piece of this. And if you do want to tackle some marketing initiatives, I want you to know, Create Your 2026 Road Map, my annual goal-setting workshop, is going to be coming back, and we can work together to create that plan. It'll be January 9th and 16th, if you want to pencil that in. More details definitely are coming. But yeah, marketing is going to be on your radar for sure, or it should be, right? Unless you don't need any more new business, right, which probably not.
Now, making time for marketing, that's a whole separate issue. And of course, I have lots to say about the planning and execution and follow through of those tasks. But what I think is important to address first is how to make a plan that you actually want to follow. A plan that works for you and your personality type, your season of life, your strengths as an individual, your temperament, right? We're going to talk a little bit about that introversion. Just your preferences, how do you want to approach marketing? Because that really matters.
When you're thinking marketing has to look a certain way or you have to do it a certain amount of times or be somebody that you're not, of course, you're going to shy away from it. You're going to find it to be draining, and we don't want that because that's going to get in the way of you creating the results that you want in your business.
Now, I've mentioned the term introvert a few times. I think probably most people know what that means, but just in case, let's be clear. When I say introvert, I think we often think of just someone maybe who is a little bit more reserved or reflective, and they're someone who gains energy from being by themselves versus being in social relationship or interaction.
Whereas an extrovert, they tend to gain energy from being around people. And of course, there's all sorts of variations of that along a spectrum.
I definitely fall more towards introversion, and knowing that about myself, I definitely plan the activities and my marketing initiatives in my business in a way that supports who I am.
I can't remember when I initially came across Susan Cain's work. She wrote that book, Quiet, which was just absolutely transformational for me. It must have been maybe in the early 2010s. I can't remember exactly, but I had no idea that introversion was a thing. And I think a lot of the time that I had been running my interior design business, or back when I was practicing design for some of these large firms, I had thought that my way of being was wrong, that who I was somehow wrong because I didn't have this very extroverted big energy. And I think there was always this sense of like I'm trying to be more of that instead of being who I am.
And having the awareness of, oh, this is just my temperament and there's nothing wrong with that. There's actually like a lot of really amazing things that I do because of that, really opened up the possibilities for me and thinking about how I can be a business owner and honor myself.
We're going to go into how you can create marketing opportunities for yourself that honor you as the person behind the business and lean into your strengths as the individual. But before we talk about those strategies, I do want to give you a perspective shift on how I think about marketing so that you can understand how you're thinking about marketing and if that thought process or your beliefs around it are useful.
Now, the way that I think of marketing is that it's just a tool you can use to bring more awareness to your business, your services, and it's something that is rooted in relationships and connection with people that you want to call in.
It is an opportunity to serve whoever it is that you want to serve, so your design clients. This is helping them when you sell to them. Marketing and selling is not icky. It only feels icky if you think that you're extracting something from someone else that they don't want to give you freely, right? And your design clients, your dream clients, by definition, if they're your dream client, they need to want your services. And so as you market, you are giving potential clients the opportunity to take advantage of the gifts that you have as a creative. So I want that to be very clear, that this is of service to others when you share what you have to offer.
The other thing that we want to look for are the shoulds. What are you thinking marketing should look like that doesn't align with what you want, or doesn't support the business you want to build? Because if there's that conflict there, you're definitely not going to want to do it.
Now, marketing can definitely be elaborate. You can have a full content calendar, you can be on multiple social media platforms, maybe you're hiring a PR firm. And just a quick plug here, I had two great interviews with PR experts, Molly Schoneveld, episode 77, and Allison Hay, episode 147. So if you're interested in hiring a PR firm or wondering if that's for you, definitely check those out. But I mean, that's a more involved strategy and requires more from the business in terms of your resources.
But marketing can also be very simple. It can be meeting people, telling them what you do and who you serve, and fostering those mutually beneficial relationships. The type of marketing that you choose to engage with should always be filtered through the lens of the results and the outcomes you want to create for the vision that you have for your unique business.
A business that is serving clients across the country and maybe has a staff of 12 is going to have different marketing needs and objectives than someone who's a solopreneur or someone who has maybe a team of two. If you listen to episode 151, it was part of summer school with Melissa Oholendt, she's someone who wants to be known in this industry, and she has said to me, I am building an empire. I can't remember if she said that on the podcast or not, but she's very clear on that. And if you look at the type of marketing that Oho Interiors does, that's very different, right?
Now, maybe that's the vision you have for your business and you can use what we're sharing and talking about here on the episode to get there in a way that feels supportive of you. But maybe you also have something that is going to be a very small boutique business where you're serving clients locally and a small number of clients per year. And there you're aiming for something different and a few quality connections with trusted referral partners and getting referrals from the clients that you have loved to work with is going to be enough.
All that to say is we want to be looking for what we're thinking we should do and checking that with, is that something that's actually I need to do? Is it something that I want to do? Does it align with where I'm headed?
All of what I've been sharing is really the foundational piece of creating a strategy around marketing that you are going to find appealing and inclined to do. If you are basing all of your marketing decisions off shoulds and doing strategies that don't align with where you're headed for your business, you're going to have to essentially strong-arm yourself into action, and it's like shoving a boulder uphill. It is exhausting, and eventually, just like if you were pushing a huge boulder up a hill, you run out of strength.
That's where knowing yourself and making decisions judgment-free about how you want to do it is so important, because let me tell you, it is so much easier to be consistent if you're doing something that is at least intriguing or appealing to you and leverages what you're good at or naturally inclined to do.
This isn't the same as you never stretch yourself or you don't build new skills, but it does mean that your strengths, your desires, the things that maybe piques your interest, or you think that would be nice, I'd like to do that. I wish I could do that. That's going to be your starting point.
I'd love for you to do some self-reflection. If marketing is simply a way to meet people, share what you do, and build those mutually beneficial relationships, how would you want to do it? And see what comes up. Just look for what is my first response? What's my second response? What comes up for me here, around what I want to do?
Following that thread, then what aligns with your strengths? Maybe, especially as an introvert like myself, you really enjoy writing, but also it could be that you enjoy speaking. Just because you have a more reserved tendency doesn't mean that you still don't like speaking. So maybe it's that. Or maybe you're someone who loves to be a connector.
If you love writing a blog or a newsletter or making those initial invitations to meet with somebody else in writing could be really supportive. If you want to go the speaking route, get curious. Do you prefer to have one-on-one interactions or small groups? Maybe you feel more at ease in one of those scenarios. Maybe it's that you want to have a balance of those types of interactions throughout your month.
And if you love being a connector, maybe introducing yourself and building out that web of people that can be bringing business in and you can be sending business out is really appealing. And you want to lean on referrals or being active in your community.
I can tell you I brought in a lot of my work when I was starting my residential practice through my personal network and just getting to know people better that I already knew. As I'm going through some of these examples, you might know exactly what those strengths are, and you're like, yes, that is the method that I want to use. Maybe there's somewhere you'd really like to do them, but you feel like you could use a little boost in confidence or skills. Of course, you can give yourself in space to practice in a way that feels more emotionally safe. Maybe by taking a class. I know I did Toastmasters early in my career. I also did BNI, which is a networking group, and they were a great place to verbally practice sharing my message when my natural default was to be better at sharing my message in written format.
The one caveat here is that don't put yourself in the trap of I'll move in that direction of whatever it is that I want where I feel shaky. Don't put yourself in the, I'll do it when I feel confident trap. It could go on forever. You might end up hiding in these practice platforms. So make sure you're clear on what it is that you're going to get out of these practice sessions, even just rehearsing some of these verbal pieces or getting the reps in with the writing or making introductions, whatever it is. Get some reps in, but then go test it in the wild because that is really where the confidence is going to be built.
Okay. Now, I feel like I've laid a lot of groundwork here and I want to talk now more specifically about some strategies for marketing as an introvert. Once you know what are the strategies you want to pursue, and can start to think about exactly how you're going to execute on this. I think the number one thing is that you want to manage your energy. If you think about introversion versus extroversion, the introversion means that being in these more public front-facing circumstances, right, that's going to require more of you versus give a ton to you.
And everyone has varying levels of sustainable output in the marketing department. As you experiment with this, you're going to start to see where you fall. You probably have a good idea already of what that is. So then, once you know yourself a little bit better about where is my energy? What do I have available? What types of things give me more energy? What do I find more draining? Then you can start to structure your marketing activities around that.
Some ideas could be setting baselines for the number of networking meetings or outreach opportunities that you have each month. Maybe it's a minimum baseline, but essentially it's like, yeah, I go to one or two of these per month and that is perfect, and I celebrate doing that, and I don't expect more of myself from that. And with that, you're looking at choosing the best groups or the ones you're going to enjoy the most to be the ones that you go to, versus being someone who's going to take any and every invite.
Another way that you could think about managing your energy is day-to-day. So, I love to do this. This is something that is essential to me in my planning process, and that is blocking out my days with live days, I call them, and then more internal days. So the live days are where I have some sort of forward-facing interactions. So it could be that I am going to an event, it could be I'm having an online coffee chat, it could be serving clients. But I have to balance out those live days with space to recharge and then concentrate on my work without interruptions. It's effective from a time management standpoint, but it is so effective, too, from an energy management standpoint as well.
A lot of you have found me through some of the speaking engagements that I've don,e where I've been on another person's podcast or a webinar or something like that. I definitely do presentations and those live events, and I always balance it because it's interesting, even though I do identify as an introvert, I do actually get some energy from those speaking engagements. It's just I know I have to balance it because it's fun for me while I do it, but I also know that I'm going to block my calendar around something like a webinar, knowing that is going to take a little bit of recovery time for me.
So maybe that's, for you, that's thinking about when I have something that does take a little bit more energy for me, how where does that fall on my calendar? Maybe there's certain days of the week that work better for you, times of day. What are you doing before and after? I'm doing a workshop for the Design Leadership Network soon, and when I got that calendar, they asked me to present at a certain time. So I'm planning my week around that so that way I'm not going to get off that call and then have to do something else. I'm going to plan my day around that and balance out the energy outputs so that way I end the day feeling really sound in myself versus overextended.
The other piece here with managing your energy is focusing on depth over breadth. We talked about this a little bit at the beginning, but we always are kind of in a culture of more is better. And if we approach all of our marketing that way, we will end up being very, very depleted because you can always do more if you just push harder. And another way that I see this showing up is when we are saying maybe going to a networking event, there's a pressure that we create inside ourselves of we have to maximize it, right? Because if you're an introvert, you're probably not going to three different events per week. Maybe you're going to one or two per month, and they're very choice events.
And so we can have this thought process of, well, I'm not doing enough, so now when I do go, I have to really put a lot of pressure on myself to like get every last drop out of this. I know I used to do that when I started going to networking events, and I would try and collect like as many business cards as I possibly could and meet as many people as were there that I could connect with. And I think for some people that is very energizing. Even if it is energizing for you, I don't think it's necessarily the best approach because we don't actually get to know and connect deeply with the people that are there and start to develop those relationships.
So if you are going to go do something, whether it's an online thing or you're going to be out in the community, focus on the depth and enter into that networking event or the conference with a clear intention of one to two, maybe three people or types of people that you want to connect with. And you don't have to work the crowd. All right? It is enough to go and find the people you want to connect with.
And then the other thing I do too is I give myself full permission to leave whenever I've had enough. I just do because what I've realized is that a lot of the internal resistance or pressure that I can feel sometimes around these more public live scenarios is really rooted in the forcing or pushing myself beyond what I have capacity for. So it's not so much that I don't want to go to the event or be a part of this group. It's more of I don't want to have that internal signal that I'm complete, that I've had enough, and I'd like to move on, and push past that.
Of course, sometimes you can't leave, but when you can, if you feel good, give yourself permission to leave. You don't have to stay longer than you want. And you can even take a break during an event. Did you know that? Personally, for me, if I'm in a really noisy event where there's lots of noise and especially if the acoustics are bad and there's a lot of noise bouncing around, and I'm having to shout to talk to people and strain to listen, that's very draining. So sometimes I will just go take a little break and give myself what I need.
So this is what I'm talking about of learn yourself and learn what works best for you, because it's not mutually exclusive of like, oh, well, I find these bigger events draining, so I'll never go. Because maybe you do want to be there because you want to meet the people that are there, or there's something valuable to be gained. So if you want to go, figure out a way that works for you.
The other thing that I think is really important to remember in any of these marketing activities is to decenter yourself. You want to practice making it about the other person. So this could be active listening, this can be curiosity, this can be what value do I have to share here?
When we make it all about ourselves, about how we look, how we're perceived, what we want to get out of it, that's a lot of pressure, and then we rob ourselves of the connection that fuels us as introverts. And it actually prevents us from having the connection and the relationships that we want to have in those moments.
Absolutely during these conversations or maybe it's in pitching yourself to a podcast or you want to be a panelist who shares their perspective at high point, whatever it is, you're going to want to share what you do and how you could help the other person and showcase your work. But also remember that there is this balance of value given and value received, and it's a give and it's a take, and you can release the pressure on yourself because that can feel horrible. It can really deter you from putting yourself out there.
I think this is applicable to any type of marketing that you engage in. Even if you are someone who wants to use social media as your platform to reach new eyes on your business. If you think about something like Instagram or Tik Tok or whatever it is that you use, in a way, it's set up as this stage where you could think about it like, look at me, look at me, everyone, eyes on me. And it doesn't have to be, right? Because if that's how we're perceiving all of these different marketing efforts of like everyone's staring at me and they're just waiting for me to say something brilliant or share something they've never ever thought of, again, that is a lot of pressure to put on yourself, and it's going to prevent you from engaging.
Same thing goes when you're in a one-on-one conversation or a small group. It is about you, but it's definitely not about you. It's like both can be true. And one of the things that I love to remind myself of is that I'm going to focus on being interested, not interesting. So it takes away some of that performative nature and it allows you to be more present with the people in front of you, whether that's a live person or the live community at large of a social media platform.
The next approach that I want you to consider is focusing on one person, not an audience. If you want to do some of these written marketing strategies, so that could be social media, it could be blogging, it could be sending out a newsletter, lots of different ways that you can utilize writing. Even though you are sending it out to the masses, in theory, it's best to think about talking to one person.
I believe this is why for those of you who subscribe to Monday Mindset or tune into this podcast regularly, it's why the message resonates. I don't think about casting a huge net and speaking to thousands and thousands of people, which is interesting, right? Because when I send an email, I am sending it to thousands of people, but when I write that newsletter, I'm thinking of one person. I am thinking of speaking to you as if you are the designer right in front of me, as if we're having a one-on-one conversation. That brings a lot of intimacy to the connection. I'm someone who would much rather, like I said, be in a one-on-one conversation or a small group.
So when I'm approaching my marketing, that's what I envision, right? I don't think of I'm speaking to thousands of you because that feels very overwhelming for me, and I wouldn't be writing nearly as much. But when I think of, oh, I'm just having a conversation with a designer who needs to hear this today, the experience that I have of creating that content is radically different both from the perspective of what it is like for me to create it and also for you on the receiving end.
So I want you to really think about that if you want to engage in some of these written marketing strategies, is how do you focus on one other person and drop this idea of an audience? Even if you have an audience, even if you have lots and lots and lots of social media followers, you can still talk to one person.
One last thing about social media. If you're an introvert and you're on it all the time, get off. That's the advice there. Get off it. Don't be signed into it all the time or delete it off your phone, whatever you have to do because scrolling uses up social battery. If you think about how you feel after you have been scrolling on it and then you get off, you're going to deplete yourself. And I think the other tricky part here too is that when you're on there and you're hitting like and maybe you're responding to somebody's story, which can be fun. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying you can't ever be on social media.
But you're giving yourself the idea that you are marketing all the time, right? Like if you're, you know, tapping the heart for a builder that you want to work with. Yes, that can be useful to engage with their account to start to build that relationship, get them familiar with their name. So that way when you email them and say, "Hey, do you want to meet up?" Great. Then you've got a little bit of familiarity.
But we don't want to use up all that social energy with a false sense of forward momentum, right? Because we can think, oh, all the heart tapping is active results-based marketing, but really it's just taking up time and you're doing these little actions that aren't super purposeful and are actually taking you away from the more impactful activities that you could be doing. And that is to automate, outsource, or delegate the parts that drain you as much as you can.
This is kind of obvious, but I feel like it needs to be said. If there is something that you feel like it is just too much, too hard, and you have a way to outsource it, go for it. Give yourself that permission.
As we wrap up here, what I really want you to take home from this episode is that you do not need to be someone you're not, and you don't have to be everywhere all at once in order to successfully market your design business. You really can do it your way. Of course, you have to have results that you're trying to create and be focused on.
But those outcomes can be created in so many different ways, and leaning into your natural gifts and strengths and your temperament as an individual and really honoring that is going to be the path of least resistance and going to get you the best outcomes.
You absolutely are going to have to do things to market your business and be visible. And if there's some fear or there's a confidence challenge with putting yourself out there, being seen, being more visible, there's a mindset and emotional strengths component to that for sure. The fact of the matter is, you are going to have to market your business and you can do it in a way that honors your gifts as a creative, as an introvert, and as an interior designer.
If you've been like me who previously felt like, "Oh, I should do things a certain way. I should be able to do it like these other people," instead of going, "What works for me?" Episode 145, which is all about self-compassion and how to stop being so hard on yourself would be a great episode.
If this was helpful and if marketing is on your mind for the coming year, definitely stay tuned for details about Create Your 2026 Roadmap. That's going to be on January 9th and January 16th, and details are going to be coming soon about that. This is going to be the fifth time that I've run this workshop, and that's just virtually. So I've done it a few times live. Hundreds of designers have gone through this process and you're going to want to be on the Monday Mindset list because the early bird pricing that I'm going to provide for this workshop is kind of insane. I wanted to make it a complete no-brainer to sign up.
So if you're not on my mailing list, go to desicreswell.com/resources. You'll find the Monday Mindset sign up there, or you can go to desicreswell.com/monday-mindset and you can get on the list.
I'll be back November 26th with a brand new episode. In the meantime, go back, listen to some of those episodes that I mentioned in this one, and send me a message too. I would really love to know what you thought of this, if it was helpful, and how you're going to use some of these strategies to move forward. When I'm back with that new episode, we're going to be talking about breaking through your own ceilings and start to talk more about wrapping up the year and preparing for your goals next year in 2026.
Until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful couple of weeks and I'll talk to you soon.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
While you'll be hearing what this looks like for me in practice as a person who prefers smaller groups and more intimate interactions, this episode still definitely applies to all of you who are extroverts or you feel like you fall somewhere in between. And that's because this conversation is really about aligning your marketing strategies to your individual strengths, preferences, and what you want to create as an interior design business CEO.
We're going to be talking about the not-so-obvious things that are in the way of you putting out your work and your business in the spotlight, how to navigate these challenges, and also expand your view of what marketing looks and feels like when you honor yourself and what you do best.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designer. Welcome back to the podcast. I have to tell you, it has been so long since I've been at the microphone. It's really interesting going to this every other week because when I record in advance, even more time passes. I mean, I just feel like there's so much that has happened for me.
I've been to a couple of lacrosse tournaments. We went to Palm Springs on fall break. We had Halloween, and I've been doing a bunch of those strategy sessions you heard me previously promoting. Those have been so fun. It's incredible what we can get done in this session. And that's because of that customized prep work that I provide to the designer who is having one of these with me.
So, I'm loving those and I think I'll probably bring them back sometime in the new year, but we'll we'll see. Stay tuned. Definitely, you want to be on my email list if you want to get dibs on some of those strategy sessions and just know what's going on and how we can connect and work together. You can head over to desicreswell.com/resources and you'll find the sign-up for Monday Mindset, or you can go straight to desicreswell.com/monday-mindset.
The other thing that I have to say is thank you all for your positive feedback and encouragement on this change to moving the podcast to every other week for the time being. That has meant so much to me. One of my brain's biggest fears was everyone would stop listening because it's every other week, and you're proving it wrong, which is amazing. And I mean, it feels like a little silly fear that I had, but it was there. So, just acknowledging it, and I'm really glad to be on this cadence.
And I'm really glad to have made that shift. Like I said in episode 155, and that's where I was sharing the behind-the-scenes of that decision-making process, part of my reasoning for switching the podcast to every other week was to create some space to get back to visibility and pitching so that more designers just like you can benefit from the work that we're doing here in this community. And I've definitely been doing that. I've had some exciting things develop. I have an article coming out in Designers Today for the issue that'll come out right in the new year. If you're a subscriber or check that out online. I also was interviewed for Business of Home for their winter issue. So, very much getting back into marketing.
And as I've been doing that, I've been thinking a lot about how I do the marketing, why it works, both why it's effective in terms of the results that I can create, but why it also just works for me and my style, and how that actually helps me do more of it and enjoy it so much more. And I thought that would be interesting to bring that topic to the podcast. I know marketing's been on the minds of many of my clients, and I'm sure that it's on your radar as well as you're thinking about your 2026 goals.
Whenever we're setting goals or thinking about where we want to grow into, marketing is definitely going to be a piece of this. And if you do want to tackle some marketing initiatives, I want you to know, Create Your 2026 Road Map, my annual goal-setting workshop, is going to be coming back, and we can work together to create that plan. It'll be January 9th and 16th, if you want to pencil that in. More details definitely are coming. But yeah, marketing is going to be on your radar for sure, or it should be, right? Unless you don't need any more new business, right, which probably not.
Now, making time for marketing, that's a whole separate issue. And of course, I have lots to say about the planning and execution and follow through of those tasks. But what I think is important to address first is how to make a plan that you actually want to follow. A plan that works for you and your personality type, your season of life, your strengths as an individual, your temperament, right? We're going to talk a little bit about that introversion. Just your preferences, how do you want to approach marketing? Because that really matters.
When you're thinking marketing has to look a certain way or you have to do it a certain amount of times or be somebody that you're not, of course, you're going to shy away from it. You're going to find it to be draining, and we don't want that because that's going to get in the way of you creating the results that you want in your business.
Now, I've mentioned the term introvert a few times. I think probably most people know what that means, but just in case, let's be clear. When I say introvert, I think we often think of just someone maybe who is a little bit more reserved or reflective, and they're someone who gains energy from being by themselves versus being in social relationship or interaction.
Whereas an extrovert, they tend to gain energy from being around people. And of course, there's all sorts of variations of that along a spectrum.
I definitely fall more towards introversion, and knowing that about myself, I definitely plan the activities and my marketing initiatives in my business in a way that supports who I am.
I can't remember when I initially came across Susan Cain's work. She wrote that book, Quiet, which was just absolutely transformational for me. It must have been maybe in the early 2010s. I can't remember exactly, but I had no idea that introversion was a thing. And I think a lot of the time that I had been running my interior design business, or back when I was practicing design for some of these large firms, I had thought that my way of being was wrong, that who I was somehow wrong because I didn't have this very extroverted big energy. And I think there was always this sense of like I'm trying to be more of that instead of being who I am.
And having the awareness of, oh, this is just my temperament and there's nothing wrong with that. There's actually like a lot of really amazing things that I do because of that, really opened up the possibilities for me and thinking about how I can be a business owner and honor myself.
We're going to go into how you can create marketing opportunities for yourself that honor you as the person behind the business and lean into your strengths as the individual. But before we talk about those strategies, I do want to give you a perspective shift on how I think about marketing so that you can understand how you're thinking about marketing and if that thought process or your beliefs around it are useful.
Now, the way that I think of marketing is that it's just a tool you can use to bring more awareness to your business, your services, and it's something that is rooted in relationships and connection with people that you want to call in.
It is an opportunity to serve whoever it is that you want to serve, so your design clients. This is helping them when you sell to them. Marketing and selling is not icky. It only feels icky if you think that you're extracting something from someone else that they don't want to give you freely, right? And your design clients, your dream clients, by definition, if they're your dream client, they need to want your services. And so as you market, you are giving potential clients the opportunity to take advantage of the gifts that you have as a creative. So I want that to be very clear, that this is of service to others when you share what you have to offer.
The other thing that we want to look for are the shoulds. What are you thinking marketing should look like that doesn't align with what you want, or doesn't support the business you want to build? Because if there's that conflict there, you're definitely not going to want to do it.
Now, marketing can definitely be elaborate. You can have a full content calendar, you can be on multiple social media platforms, maybe you're hiring a PR firm. And just a quick plug here, I had two great interviews with PR experts, Molly Schoneveld, episode 77, and Allison Hay, episode 147. So if you're interested in hiring a PR firm or wondering if that's for you, definitely check those out. But I mean, that's a more involved strategy and requires more from the business in terms of your resources.
But marketing can also be very simple. It can be meeting people, telling them what you do and who you serve, and fostering those mutually beneficial relationships. The type of marketing that you choose to engage with should always be filtered through the lens of the results and the outcomes you want to create for the vision that you have for your unique business.
A business that is serving clients across the country and maybe has a staff of 12 is going to have different marketing needs and objectives than someone who's a solopreneur or someone who has maybe a team of two. If you listen to episode 151, it was part of summer school with Melissa Oholendt, she's someone who wants to be known in this industry, and she has said to me, I am building an empire. I can't remember if she said that on the podcast or not, but she's very clear on that. And if you look at the type of marketing that Oho Interiors does, that's very different, right?
Now, maybe that's the vision you have for your business and you can use what we're sharing and talking about here on the episode to get there in a way that feels supportive of you. But maybe you also have something that is going to be a very small boutique business where you're serving clients locally and a small number of clients per year. And there you're aiming for something different and a few quality connections with trusted referral partners and getting referrals from the clients that you have loved to work with is going to be enough.
All that to say is we want to be looking for what we're thinking we should do and checking that with, is that something that's actually I need to do? Is it something that I want to do? Does it align with where I'm headed?
All of what I've been sharing is really the foundational piece of creating a strategy around marketing that you are going to find appealing and inclined to do. If you are basing all of your marketing decisions off shoulds and doing strategies that don't align with where you're headed for your business, you're going to have to essentially strong-arm yourself into action, and it's like shoving a boulder uphill. It is exhausting, and eventually, just like if you were pushing a huge boulder up a hill, you run out of strength.
That's where knowing yourself and making decisions judgment-free about how you want to do it is so important, because let me tell you, it is so much easier to be consistent if you're doing something that is at least intriguing or appealing to you and leverages what you're good at or naturally inclined to do.
This isn't the same as you never stretch yourself or you don't build new skills, but it does mean that your strengths, your desires, the things that maybe piques your interest, or you think that would be nice, I'd like to do that. I wish I could do that. That's going to be your starting point.
I'd love for you to do some self-reflection. If marketing is simply a way to meet people, share what you do, and build those mutually beneficial relationships, how would you want to do it? And see what comes up. Just look for what is my first response? What's my second response? What comes up for me here, around what I want to do?
Following that thread, then what aligns with your strengths? Maybe, especially as an introvert like myself, you really enjoy writing, but also it could be that you enjoy speaking. Just because you have a more reserved tendency doesn't mean that you still don't like speaking. So maybe it's that. Or maybe you're someone who loves to be a connector.
If you love writing a blog or a newsletter or making those initial invitations to meet with somebody else in writing could be really supportive. If you want to go the speaking route, get curious. Do you prefer to have one-on-one interactions or small groups? Maybe you feel more at ease in one of those scenarios. Maybe it's that you want to have a balance of those types of interactions throughout your month.
And if you love being a connector, maybe introducing yourself and building out that web of people that can be bringing business in and you can be sending business out is really appealing. And you want to lean on referrals or being active in your community.
I can tell you I brought in a lot of my work when I was starting my residential practice through my personal network and just getting to know people better that I already knew. As I'm going through some of these examples, you might know exactly what those strengths are, and you're like, yes, that is the method that I want to use. Maybe there's somewhere you'd really like to do them, but you feel like you could use a little boost in confidence or skills. Of course, you can give yourself in space to practice in a way that feels more emotionally safe. Maybe by taking a class. I know I did Toastmasters early in my career. I also did BNI, which is a networking group, and they were a great place to verbally practice sharing my message when my natural default was to be better at sharing my message in written format.
The one caveat here is that don't put yourself in the trap of I'll move in that direction of whatever it is that I want where I feel shaky. Don't put yourself in the, I'll do it when I feel confident trap. It could go on forever. You might end up hiding in these practice platforms. So make sure you're clear on what it is that you're going to get out of these practice sessions, even just rehearsing some of these verbal pieces or getting the reps in with the writing or making introductions, whatever it is. Get some reps in, but then go test it in the wild because that is really where the confidence is going to be built.
Okay. Now, I feel like I've laid a lot of groundwork here and I want to talk now more specifically about some strategies for marketing as an introvert. Once you know what are the strategies you want to pursue, and can start to think about exactly how you're going to execute on this. I think the number one thing is that you want to manage your energy. If you think about introversion versus extroversion, the introversion means that being in these more public front-facing circumstances, right, that's going to require more of you versus give a ton to you.
And everyone has varying levels of sustainable output in the marketing department. As you experiment with this, you're going to start to see where you fall. You probably have a good idea already of what that is. So then, once you know yourself a little bit better about where is my energy? What do I have available? What types of things give me more energy? What do I find more draining? Then you can start to structure your marketing activities around that.
Some ideas could be setting baselines for the number of networking meetings or outreach opportunities that you have each month. Maybe it's a minimum baseline, but essentially it's like, yeah, I go to one or two of these per month and that is perfect, and I celebrate doing that, and I don't expect more of myself from that. And with that, you're looking at choosing the best groups or the ones you're going to enjoy the most to be the ones that you go to, versus being someone who's going to take any and every invite.
Another way that you could think about managing your energy is day-to-day. So, I love to do this. This is something that is essential to me in my planning process, and that is blocking out my days with live days, I call them, and then more internal days. So the live days are where I have some sort of forward-facing interactions. So it could be that I am going to an event, it could be I'm having an online coffee chat, it could be serving clients. But I have to balance out those live days with space to recharge and then concentrate on my work without interruptions. It's effective from a time management standpoint, but it is so effective, too, from an energy management standpoint as well.
A lot of you have found me through some of the speaking engagements that I've don,e where I've been on another person's podcast or a webinar or something like that. I definitely do presentations and those live events, and I always balance it because it's interesting, even though I do identify as an introvert, I do actually get some energy from those speaking engagements. It's just I know I have to balance it because it's fun for me while I do it, but I also know that I'm going to block my calendar around something like a webinar, knowing that is going to take a little bit of recovery time for me.
So maybe that's, for you, that's thinking about when I have something that does take a little bit more energy for me, how where does that fall on my calendar? Maybe there's certain days of the week that work better for you, times of day. What are you doing before and after? I'm doing a workshop for the Design Leadership Network soon, and when I got that calendar, they asked me to present at a certain time. So I'm planning my week around that so that way I'm not going to get off that call and then have to do something else. I'm going to plan my day around that and balance out the energy outputs so that way I end the day feeling really sound in myself versus overextended.
The other piece here with managing your energy is focusing on depth over breadth. We talked about this a little bit at the beginning, but we always are kind of in a culture of more is better. And if we approach all of our marketing that way, we will end up being very, very depleted because you can always do more if you just push harder. And another way that I see this showing up is when we are saying maybe going to a networking event, there's a pressure that we create inside ourselves of we have to maximize it, right? Because if you're an introvert, you're probably not going to three different events per week. Maybe you're going to one or two per month, and they're very choice events.
And so we can have this thought process of, well, I'm not doing enough, so now when I do go, I have to really put a lot of pressure on myself to like get every last drop out of this. I know I used to do that when I started going to networking events, and I would try and collect like as many business cards as I possibly could and meet as many people as were there that I could connect with. And I think for some people that is very energizing. Even if it is energizing for you, I don't think it's necessarily the best approach because we don't actually get to know and connect deeply with the people that are there and start to develop those relationships.
So if you are going to go do something, whether it's an online thing or you're going to be out in the community, focus on the depth and enter into that networking event or the conference with a clear intention of one to two, maybe three people or types of people that you want to connect with. And you don't have to work the crowd. All right? It is enough to go and find the people you want to connect with.
And then the other thing I do too is I give myself full permission to leave whenever I've had enough. I just do because what I've realized is that a lot of the internal resistance or pressure that I can feel sometimes around these more public live scenarios is really rooted in the forcing or pushing myself beyond what I have capacity for. So it's not so much that I don't want to go to the event or be a part of this group. It's more of I don't want to have that internal signal that I'm complete, that I've had enough, and I'd like to move on, and push past that.
Of course, sometimes you can't leave, but when you can, if you feel good, give yourself permission to leave. You don't have to stay longer than you want. And you can even take a break during an event. Did you know that? Personally, for me, if I'm in a really noisy event where there's lots of noise and especially if the acoustics are bad and there's a lot of noise bouncing around, and I'm having to shout to talk to people and strain to listen, that's very draining. So sometimes I will just go take a little break and give myself what I need.
So this is what I'm talking about of learn yourself and learn what works best for you, because it's not mutually exclusive of like, oh, well, I find these bigger events draining, so I'll never go. Because maybe you do want to be there because you want to meet the people that are there, or there's something valuable to be gained. So if you want to go, figure out a way that works for you.
The other thing that I think is really important to remember in any of these marketing activities is to decenter yourself. You want to practice making it about the other person. So this could be active listening, this can be curiosity, this can be what value do I have to share here?
When we make it all about ourselves, about how we look, how we're perceived, what we want to get out of it, that's a lot of pressure, and then we rob ourselves of the connection that fuels us as introverts. And it actually prevents us from having the connection and the relationships that we want to have in those moments.
Absolutely during these conversations or maybe it's in pitching yourself to a podcast or you want to be a panelist who shares their perspective at high point, whatever it is, you're going to want to share what you do and how you could help the other person and showcase your work. But also remember that there is this balance of value given and value received, and it's a give and it's a take, and you can release the pressure on yourself because that can feel horrible. It can really deter you from putting yourself out there.
I think this is applicable to any type of marketing that you engage in. Even if you are someone who wants to use social media as your platform to reach new eyes on your business. If you think about something like Instagram or Tik Tok or whatever it is that you use, in a way, it's set up as this stage where you could think about it like, look at me, look at me, everyone, eyes on me. And it doesn't have to be, right? Because if that's how we're perceiving all of these different marketing efforts of like everyone's staring at me and they're just waiting for me to say something brilliant or share something they've never ever thought of, again, that is a lot of pressure to put on yourself, and it's going to prevent you from engaging.
Same thing goes when you're in a one-on-one conversation or a small group. It is about you, but it's definitely not about you. It's like both can be true. And one of the things that I love to remind myself of is that I'm going to focus on being interested, not interesting. So it takes away some of that performative nature and it allows you to be more present with the people in front of you, whether that's a live person or the live community at large of a social media platform.
The next approach that I want you to consider is focusing on one person, not an audience. If you want to do some of these written marketing strategies, so that could be social media, it could be blogging, it could be sending out a newsletter, lots of different ways that you can utilize writing. Even though you are sending it out to the masses, in theory, it's best to think about talking to one person.
I believe this is why for those of you who subscribe to Monday Mindset or tune into this podcast regularly, it's why the message resonates. I don't think about casting a huge net and speaking to thousands and thousands of people, which is interesting, right? Because when I send an email, I am sending it to thousands of people, but when I write that newsletter, I'm thinking of one person. I am thinking of speaking to you as if you are the designer right in front of me, as if we're having a one-on-one conversation. That brings a lot of intimacy to the connection. I'm someone who would much rather, like I said, be in a one-on-one conversation or a small group.
So when I'm approaching my marketing, that's what I envision, right? I don't think of I'm speaking to thousands of you because that feels very overwhelming for me, and I wouldn't be writing nearly as much. But when I think of, oh, I'm just having a conversation with a designer who needs to hear this today, the experience that I have of creating that content is radically different both from the perspective of what it is like for me to create it and also for you on the receiving end.
So I want you to really think about that if you want to engage in some of these written marketing strategies, is how do you focus on one other person and drop this idea of an audience? Even if you have an audience, even if you have lots and lots and lots of social media followers, you can still talk to one person.
One last thing about social media. If you're an introvert and you're on it all the time, get off. That's the advice there. Get off it. Don't be signed into it all the time or delete it off your phone, whatever you have to do because scrolling uses up social battery. If you think about how you feel after you have been scrolling on it and then you get off, you're going to deplete yourself. And I think the other tricky part here too is that when you're on there and you're hitting like and maybe you're responding to somebody's story, which can be fun. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying you can't ever be on social media.
But you're giving yourself the idea that you are marketing all the time, right? Like if you're, you know, tapping the heart for a builder that you want to work with. Yes, that can be useful to engage with their account to start to build that relationship, get them familiar with their name. So that way when you email them and say, "Hey, do you want to meet up?" Great. Then you've got a little bit of familiarity.
But we don't want to use up all that social energy with a false sense of forward momentum, right? Because we can think, oh, all the heart tapping is active results-based marketing, but really it's just taking up time and you're doing these little actions that aren't super purposeful and are actually taking you away from the more impactful activities that you could be doing. And that is to automate, outsource, or delegate the parts that drain you as much as you can.
This is kind of obvious, but I feel like it needs to be said. If there is something that you feel like it is just too much, too hard, and you have a way to outsource it, go for it. Give yourself that permission.
As we wrap up here, what I really want you to take home from this episode is that you do not need to be someone you're not, and you don't have to be everywhere all at once in order to successfully market your design business. You really can do it your way. Of course, you have to have results that you're trying to create and be focused on.
But those outcomes can be created in so many different ways, and leaning into your natural gifts and strengths and your temperament as an individual and really honoring that is going to be the path of least resistance and going to get you the best outcomes.
You absolutely are going to have to do things to market your business and be visible. And if there's some fear or there's a confidence challenge with putting yourself out there, being seen, being more visible, there's a mindset and emotional strengths component to that for sure. The fact of the matter is, you are going to have to market your business and you can do it in a way that honors your gifts as a creative, as an introvert, and as an interior designer.
If you've been like me who previously felt like, "Oh, I should do things a certain way. I should be able to do it like these other people," instead of going, "What works for me?" Episode 145, which is all about self-compassion and how to stop being so hard on yourself would be a great episode.
If this was helpful and if marketing is on your mind for the coming year, definitely stay tuned for details about Create Your 2026 Roadmap. That's going to be on January 9th and January 16th, and details are going to be coming soon about that. This is going to be the fifth time that I've run this workshop, and that's just virtually. So I've done it a few times live. Hundreds of designers have gone through this process and you're going to want to be on the Monday Mindset list because the early bird pricing that I'm going to provide for this workshop is kind of insane. I wanted to make it a complete no-brainer to sign up.
So if you're not on my mailing list, go to desicreswell.com/resources. You'll find the Monday Mindset sign up there, or you can go to desicreswell.com/monday-mindset and you can get on the list.
I'll be back November 26th with a brand new episode. In the meantime, go back, listen to some of those episodes that I mentioned in this one, and send me a message too. I would really love to know what you thought of this, if it was helpful, and how you're going to use some of these strategies to move forward. When I'm back with that new episode, we're going to be talking about breaking through your own ceilings and start to talk more about wrapping up the year and preparing for your goals next year in 2026.
Until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful couple of weeks and I'll talk to you soon.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Music.
Next
Next