To-The-Trade Episode Summary
Most interior designers have a camera on their phone, hundreds of project photos in their camera roll, and a running mental file of questions clients ask them every week. What they often don’t have is a social media strategy that actually gets used. Eric Dillman is here to help change that.
Eric is an interior design school graduate who moved into sales, marketing, and digital strategy, and now works directly with designers to show up consistently online, build real audiences, and stop waiting for the perfect shot to post. He also hosts his own design-driven podcast, and his handle is @ericdillmandesigns.
In this conversation with Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson on To-The-Trade, Eric gets into the specifics: which platforms to prioritize, how to build a content library that keeps you showing up even when life gets hard, and how to get over the fear of being on camera, even if you are an introvert who did not show your own face on social media for the first two years.
For most designers, Instagram remains the core platform. It is visual, it is where clients are, and it favors the kind of content designers are already producing. LinkedIn has its place, but Eric is direct: for designers, LinkedIn is about relationships with brands and manufacturers, not client acquisition. YouTube Shorts is quietly gaining ground, and Laurie adds that YouTube also feeds AI search in ways that make it worth showing up there, even with automated reposts. The takeaway is to find one platform you can do well, post natively when you can, and automate distribution to the rest. That approach sits at the heart of any effective marketing and lead-generation strategy for design firms.
The design industry is, as Eric puts it, a content goldmine. Designers are sitting on it and do not know it. The problem is not a shortage of material. It is that designers default to thinking in final outcomes: the finished room, the reveal, the portfolio photo. Clients want the process. They want to know who is in their house, how decisions get made, and why a designer chose what they chose.
Eric’s advice is to go through a job and build a content inventory alongside it. Tag the brands you are using. Think about every decision point. What made you pick this tile over the other three? Why did you specify a quieter dishwasher for this particular client? That context is exactly what builds trust with future clients, and it is the kind of content no influencer can create, because they were not there. You were.
Nile puts it plainly: designers do not realize that the behind-the-scenes work, the space planning, the inset versus full-overlay cabinet debate, the sourcing process, is exactly what people want to see. Clients who watch designers explain their process before hiring them come in with less resistance, more trust, and a clearer picture of why that fee is worth it.
One of the most practical parts of the conversation covers what happens when real life hits: a health crisis, a family emergency, a week where you simply cannot create. Eric’s answer is batch recording. He records podcast episodes months in advance, and he coaches designers to do the same: build a photo album on your phone of content you have not posted yet, and unfavorite each one after it goes live so you always have a running backup supply. Repost something you have already shared, and most people will not even know, or if they do, they will just say it was a good one.
Getting on camera is where the conversation gets honest. Nile admits he has the ring light, the mic, and the tripod, yet still stares at them all. Eric says he did not put his own face on his profile for the first two years. He used his logo as his profile photo. He is, by his own description, a natural introvert.
His advice: start with a script. Use AI to build a tight one-minute script with a hook, a tension point, and a clean ending. Then run that draft through a panel of AI critics, each with a different agenda: the skeptic, the engagement-only viewer, the person who hates talking heads. Fix what each one flags, and regenerate. The result is almost always a stronger script.
From there, use Instagram’s free Edits app: a built-in teleprompter, green screen, and clip-by-clip recording. Flub a sentence, delete just that clip, and rerecord. Done in ten minutes.
For those still nervous about reaction, Eric has one more piece of advice: post and ghost. Put it up, put your phone down, and gradually work your way into engaging with the response. The biggest supporters any designer will find are strangers on the internet who connect with the work. The inner circle will support you about half the time. They are not your audience. They are not paying your bills.
Laurie and Eric close with something they have both clearly been thinking about for a while: a challenge to get 10,000 interior designers to make a video. Pre-written scripts. A shared hashtag. Designers in different cities deliver the same prompt in completely different ways. Eric points out that as a viewer, scrolling that hashtag thread would be fascinating precisely because of how differently each person interprets the same material.
It is a collaborative play, and, as Eric says to close the episode, collaboration is everything.
0:00 – Intro and Laurie’s daughter’s bachelorette party
2:13 – Eric Dillman introduced: background in interior design, sales, and digital marketing
3:29 – Why Eric bridges the designer and brand worlds
7:30 – Batching content to stay consistent when life gets hard
8:53 – Scheduling tools: why Eric skips third-party apps and posts natively in Meta
11:40 – Platform priorities: Instagram, LinkedIn, and the quiet rise of YouTube Shorts
13:20 – Q&A content and AEO/SEO strategy: designers are sitting on gold
18:11 – “What do I post?” the content inventory approach
19:13 – Thinking in content, not just reveals
21:14 – What clients actually want: the process, not just the finished room
22:08 – Using content to vet clients before the job starts
27:07 – Laurie’s AI scripting workflow and the Edits app breakdown
33:49 – Interior design vs. interior architecture: the naming debate
34:49 – Industry regulation and second-career designers
38:34 – Getting over the fear of the camera
43:06 – Eric’s own journey: two years as an introvert hiding behind his logo
44:00 – The 10,000 designer video challenge concept
50:20 – “We don’t live in a magazine, we live in a content world”
50:36 – Fear of judgment from other designers and the inner circle
51:47 – Post and ghost: a starting strategy for beginners
54:29 – Being the comment that makes someone’s day
55:52 – Collaboration is everything: wrapping up