To-The-Trade S3E13 The Content Goldmine Every Interior Designer Is Sitting On with Eric Dillman

Eric Dillman started in interior design school, moved into sales and digital marketing, and now works directly with designers to help them show up consistently on social media and stop waiting for the perfect moment to post. In this conversation with Laurie Laizure and Nile Johnson, he gets into what designers should prioritize, how to stay consistent when life gets hard, and how to finally get on camera.On platforms, Instagram remains the primary play for most designers. It's visual, it's where clients are, and Meta rewards native posting. LinkedIn is useful for brand and manufacturer relationships, not client leads. YouTube Shorts is quietly building, and Laurie notes that YouTube feeds AI search in ways worth paying attention to. The simplest strategy is to find one platform where you can perform well and automate distribution to the rest.On content: designers are sitting in a content goldmine and don't know it. The mistake is thinking in terms of final outcomes— the reveal, the finished room. Clients want the process. They want to know who's in their house, why you made the choices you made, and what goes into a recommendation they might have taken for granted. Tag your brands. Document your decisions. That context is something no influencer can fake, because they weren't on the job.On consistency: batch your content. Eric records podcast episodes months ahead and coaches designers to keep a running camera roll of unposted content so that when a hard week hits, the feed keeps going. Laurie adds that reposting something from six months ago is completely fair—most people won't remember, and the ones who do will just say it was a good one.On-camera fear: Nile admits he has the ring light and the mic and still doesn't use them. Eric didn't show his face on his own profile for two years. His starting point: a tight one-minute script, built with AI, run through a panel of AI critics to strengthen it before you record. Use Instagram's free Edits app for teleprompter, green screen, and clip-by-clip recording. Flub a sentence, delete that clip, move on. Post it, then put your phone down. Your biggest supporters will be strangers who connect with your work -- not your inner circle.The episode closes with an idea Laurie and Eric are both clearly excited about: a challenge to get 10,000 interior designers making videos, using shared scripts and a common hashtag.