The 80-20 Rule & Interior Design Business
[Preface: This was my weekly newsletter about the business of home design that morphed into a blog post. Join us in Scaled Up Studio Notes so you never miss a thing.]
Last week ended my Website Launch Blueprint template and course launch - I was happy with how it went and happy it's done. A big thanks for sticking with me and supporting me during the launch week email flurry!
There’s a tremendous amount of marketing work that goes into any launch. Mid launch I was feeling a bit annoyed because I was spending a lot of time on Instagram posts. Not even a lot of posting by any standards, but too much time for too little ROI. I had so much other stuff to do that week.
In general, I sometimes feel this way about posting on the gram. Even though posts are fun to create, I find myself avoiding and even slightly resenting the task. Stories are great and truly spontaneous. IG posting often feels closer to a chore, but only because it rarely seems to pay off for the time invested in my opinion.
Yes if a post goes viral it totally pays off. I've had that happen a few times on my Greenhouse Studio account, but that's a different subject matter - houseplants mostly, which is hugely popular. The chances of a Squarespace or website related post going viral are pretty close to a snowball's chance in hell.
Case in point - one carousel post took about 2.5 hours to create. For around 20 likes and no doubt, zero conversions?! Eeek! No one has time for that!
But it was launch week and "everyone says" you need to post during launch week.
Then I was looking at my Traffic Sources in the Squarespace Google Analytics integration. I roughly knew my overall traffic percentage that came from social platforms, but I hadn't dug any deeper in quite a while.
I had been working so hard to complete Website Launch Blueprint, that I had only been giving my traffic a quick once-over lately and hadn't really looked at some specific stats that are available.
And by "digging deeper", all I mean is opening the drop down tab that shows my social platform traffic percentage. 😅
Screenshot of the Squarespace Analytics Traffic Sources.
So that day I actually opened up the social traffic tab for the first time in a while, and what I saw surprised me.
I don't spend a lot of my work hours on social media overall, but the time I do spend is skewed for sure. (Side note - Pinterest isn't really social media - it's essentially a visual search engine, but that's how its categorized.)
Of the almost 28% of my traffic that comes from social platforms, about 2/3 comes from Pinterest vs. 1/3 from Instagram. And that's with a whopping 50-ish Pinterest followers vs a little over 1k Insta subscribers.
The reason it pulled me up short is that when it comes to how I divvy up my social media work time, I spend essentially zero time posting (or doing anything) on Pinterest. I spend 95% of my time on Instagram.
There were reasons for that skew - if you are a blogger for example, you probably know Pinterest kind of went off the rails during late 2020-21. Many accounts’ traffic were doing some really crazy things.
Large, serious revenue-generating accounts (amongst many others) were suddenly getting banned for no good reason, and it was taking months (months!) to get them reinstated. (I had my own very brief experience with that on my Greenhouse Studio account.)
One prominent home décor influencer who's worked directly with both Pinterest and TikTok was so frustrated she wrote an open letter to Pinterest that was the talk of the blogosphere for a while (and she updated in 2023). Much talk, frustration, and hang-wringing in general.
I have to say, I never went back to Pinterest in a real way after that beyond the obligatory pin when I created a new blog post or YouTube video. It wasn't a deliberate decision at all; I had mentally sort of written it off, unjustly or not.
I hadn't given it a whole lot of additional thought beyond a semi-snotty "I don't support platforms that don't support me." And yep I'll admit, I do think that way to a certain extent.
[I explore this topic in this post]
So, my point here is not about Instagram versus Pinterest, or any social platform versus another. Not even a little bit.
It's about stepping back and assessing what's what's working and what's not in your business, and then allocating time, effort, and resources accordingly. This is the jist of the 80-20 Rule.
What Is the 80-20 Rule?
The 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, says 80% of outcomes (or outputs) result from 20% of all causes (or inputs) for any given event.
The Pareto rule isn't taken literally - the numbers won't be “20%” and “80%” exactly of course. The point is that most things in life (effort, reward, output) are not distributed evenly – some contribute more than others.
Each unit of work (or time) doesn’t contribute the same amount.
It's no different with a design business.
Not every client, project, employee, or marketing effort yields the same results per resource inputs.
I bet you're nodding your head in agreement. (Don't hurt your neck!😁)
Everyone's business is different, and this isn't about Instagram versus Pinterest or anything else. Not even a little bit. Lots of designers get the majority of their engagement and conversions from Instagram.
There's value in making time to step back and assess what’s working your business, what isn’t, and making changes accordingly. Just because I've been doing something in a particular way doesn't mean I need to keep doing it. Especially if I'm sort of doing it on autopilot without much thought!
In the same vein, what's working well for one design business is not necessarily what will produce results for another. So be careful when listening to “conventional wisdom.” Often conventional wisdom serves a purpose, but not always.
Writing this post has made me to think I should put together a formal quarterly check in for SUS. Assess what's working and what isn't and adjust accordingly. (Have I discovered the value of journaling at long last?!) This is conventional business-wisdom, but it’s something I’ve usually pushed off when the time came. 😅
This wasn't the only "Ah ha moment" stemming from my launch. I had another that's likely much more significant. Another post for another time.
My big picture take away - it's time to step back and reassess - from a Pareto perspective!
To be continued.
— Tina
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