Asheville Nc Realtors

Learn To Market Your Home Staging Business

Learn To Market Your Home Staging Business

In my last article I talked about how your business plan’s vision and mission statements should be built and what they say about your company.   Next, we will tackle one idea in marketing your business. The home staging training provider you choose should include a marketing emphasis. Here, we will explore more specifically, how to work with your competitors to reduce your marketing costs and reach a targeted market for your industry.

In the home staging classes offered by The Real Estate Home Staging School ™, based in Asheville NC, marketing is a topic that receives prominence.  If you are the best home stager in the world, if you cannot market your business effectively your home staging plans will not be implemented and your business will not likely succeed.

Home Stagers do have a finite number of markets, home sellers, home builders, home investors, and agents, people that sell Homes for them.

When you develop a marketing plan, making direct targeted marketing efforts in each category is essential.   

Many industries have affiliations or governing associations, particularly those that are not regulated.  Home staging is one such industry. Many new home staging business owners will join a group such as the Real Estate Staging Association to begin to build their credentials in the industry.  These affiliations also offer new home stagers the opportunity to work in smaller local groups to create direct marketing for the region served.

Following is an example of how a new home staging business owner can take advantage of those groups in targeted marketing effort.

The Western North Carolina Chapter of Real Estate Staging Association held such a joint event.   Recently the membership of competing home stagers, all members of the bigger affiliate group,  marketed directly to home selling agents.  This is a good example of how to reach your market and teaches you that competition is a good thing.  Such an alliance helps you reach the market in a big way.

The Chapter set up a booth in The Realtor EXPO event.  The booth had four venues  to facilitate flow through the booth. Each venue had a specific purpose.

Venue One -  a presentation board highlighting the Value of Home Staging using the Real Estate Staging Association statistics for “Days On Market” for 2010.  In the home selling industry, Days On Market is the critical factor to success.  Home Stagers attempt to reduce the Days On Market result through their home staging activities.That highlight board was flanked with before and after photos. The objective here is to reach the conference attendee with a visual stimulus, the commonly referred to “Before and After” Photos and the data results over the previous year that indicate success in reducing the Days On Market objective.

Venue Two – a computer set up to sit with Realtors, look at their Mls listing, and give a free analysis of one room in that listing. This technique is meant to reach out to the selling agents emotionally.  You show me the home you are having a hard time selling and I will look at the pictures and tell you what needs to change, free of charge.  It reaches out to the “What’s In It For Me” psychological side of a potential client.

Venue Three – multiple presentation boards highlighting through photos, the ways home staging actually merchandizes a home rather than just decorating a home.  The individual aspects of staging like, flow, focal point are highlighted.  Also, how home stagers create emotion in the potential buyer is depicted in before and after photos.  Again, a visual stimulus that sends a specific message to the potential client.  The property you are trying to sell can be much more appealing with a few low cost tweaks and let me show you how that looks.

Venue Four is a presentation board and information area.  Again, reaching out directly to the emotional trigger, what’s in it for me, how does help me?  People tend to think of a call to action from the perspective of why should I?  Here is where the targeted market learns why they should react to your call to action.  Just as a copywriter always includes a call to action, the targeted market campaign in this conference did the same.  For the home staging business owners this means communicating how it specifically assists them in marketing the property.  And as with copywriters, the brochures reinforced the call to action advantages.

So, what is the advantage to the home staging group in the client targeted effort?

They include business costs and new clients.

Participation in conferences of this nature are costly.  Sharing that cost with a larger group of your competitors may seem counterintuitive but it isn’t.  The potential market of homes to be staged is significant.  Each participating member has the opportunity to reach this group of potential clients in a captive setting.  And with a growing inventory of homes as the economy slowly recovers, the skills individual home staging business owners bring to the table in meeting, talking and working with these potential clients is key.  Your group may be competing, but, in the one to one situation you have at the conference you can win the client with the right interpersonal and communication skills.

Make a direct and targeted marketing effort work for you.  Do not isolate yourself within your industry.  Work with affiliates and associations that share your objectives.  You can reduce your overall marketing costs, have a targeted marketing campaign, and a captive audience in a conference setting.

If you have any questions about the Home Staging Industry and Home Staging Training Providers click through here.

About the Author

Eileen Wheeler, Owner, The Asheville Home Staging Company and co-owner/founder of The Real Estate Home Staging School TM.  I am a retired business executive in the area of quality systems, taking a product from design to the consumer.  In home staging, the home is the product that should be redesigned for the purpose of selling rather than the purpose of living.

Lynn’s Picks for Exceptional North Carolina Real Estate May 7, 2011.mov