How Houzz can send qualified potential clients to your website

Houzz: If you are in the business of selling design or decorating services or building homes, you’ve heard of it. Right?

You haven’t until now? Well, actually I hadn’t either until a few months ago and I’ve been following interior design trends and media for more than twenty years. But don’t let our shared obliviousness trick you into thinking that it’s not well-known or worth the investment of your money and time. Because if you have services or products to sell to people who live in homes, Houzz is like an automatic sales person trying to put money in your pockets.

Once you set up an account, and you upload to your profile quality photos of your products or work from your portfolio, Houzz will put your furniture or your design work in front of people near you who are browsing the website. If you have a Pro account, you can choose to be featured in multiple categories, you can get featured listings at the bottom of pages being browsed by Houzz users, and you can see how your photos and profile is performing through their analytics. You’ll be able to see how many “impressions” your photo or profile made (how many times it was in front of the eyes of others), and how many clicks they received, and how many times your photos have been placed into the “ideabooks” of users. This last function is like Pinterest, but exclusively for home design and decorating.

The community of Houzz users also regularly post questions, seeking decorating or design advice, creating a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel lead opportunity. These aren’t merely “one day” Pinterest users, planning out fantasy homes. Houzz users are more likely to be in the planning stages of a remodel or house build, and with technology you can offer decorating advice to anyone around the world, and accept payment online. Sometimes you may not want to or be able to give away client information or “trade secrets” but at other times you may want to offer generous comments to build up a reputation of friendliness and generosity in your community.  You can directly interact with customers, asking them more about their projects, give them ideas, leading them to wanting to work with you more. Position yourself as an indispensable creative resource and expert and overwhelm them with ideas so that they want you to make things simple for them.

If you need help setting up an optimized Houzz account, please contact us and we’ll be happy to start you off, or even manage it for you.

Written by Natasha Clark