5 Ways to use your portfolio to grow your business
As professional home stagers, we always need to be on the look out for ways to market ourselves. Unfortunately, unless you’ve already done an incredible job of marketing your business and have a steady stream of customers, marketing is something you’ll never outgrow the need for. Even if you do have a steady stream of customers, creating new and fresh content is mandatory to keep your search engine status.
Using your home staging portfolio to market your business
In order to consistently market yourself with as little work as possible, it’s great to use what you are already doing – hopefully that is staging! Professional photos are a key part of making the best impression possible. If you don’t know how to take a great quality photo, then include professional photos as part of your fees to the homeowner and agent and share the photos. This will create a win-win scenario. Homes that have great photos consistently sell faster because more buyers are lured in to view the property.
Now that you’ve got great photos, here are five ways to make the most of them.
Blog about the home you professionally staged
The first way to use your portfolio is to simply blog about the home you just staged. While this should be an easy task, sometimes home stagers get caught up in what to say. Blogging about your latest home staging job should be easy. You can use before and after photos, particularly if the home was occupied, or if there were major changes. Focus on the main rooms of the home – living room, dining room, master bedroom, master bath, and kitchen.
This first blog is about creating hyper local content. Pay close attention on developing and using keywords like, St Augustine home staging, or Home Staging in Hunters Creek.
Write how-to home staging blogs
The second best way to use your home staging portfolio in marketing is to create how-to blogs. Take a look at that last closet makeover and write a blog on staging your closets when selling. Give tips and ideas, along with some of the whys. Let your readers (and potential customers) know just how much you know. Showcasing your understanding of buyer psychology will help you stand out from other home stagers as well as help them understand why they need you.
Showcase your home staging statistics
Professional home staging is not about making a home look great, it is about making it sell at a premium. The best way to showcase your value is through great home staging statistics. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any company do this as successfully, on a regular basis, as Just Perfect Home Staging & More located in Wilmington, NC. They have created a template for their marketing, plugging in the statistics formula that you learned in Online home staging training Module 6, it is easy to show in real numbers the value that you provided in the real estate transaction.
Use your home staging blog to discuss design trends
Part of being a professional home stager is understanding what is happening in the design industry. What are buyers expecting to see? While we are not designers or full scale interior decorators, most of the time customers expect us to know what is trending. If possible, use your last home staging project to showcase this. Did you use coral pillows to showcase the growing coastal design trend?
Select a few great shots from your last home staging project and relate them to popular photos on Better Homes & Gardens, Houzz, or Pinterest. Let potential customers know that you are keeping up to date on the latest and greatest and they’ll be more likely to have confidence in your recommendations.
Market your home staging portfolio with social media sharing
The final key to using your home staging portfolio to market your home staging business is perhaps the most fun of them all. Create a strategy to share your work with your circles, followers, and fans. Create albums on your Google Plus Business page and Facebook fan page. Pin the images from your various blogs, with keywords, to Pinterest and Houzz.
When sharing your images, be sure to tell potential viewers WHY they need to click on the image and view more. For example, when you wrote that great blog If I can’t watch TV in the living room, I’m not buying this home be sure to tease Pinterest followers with something like, “How many seats you have in front of the TV may determine how quickly you sell your home”.
5 Tips for creating great marketing content from your home staging portfolio
You don’t have to do a lot of homes to create great content. A few well chosen professional photos and a little ingenuity can create blogs and images that go viral. When you are working on your next home staging job, think about the challenges that you experienced and remember that these often make great home staging marketing content.
If you are an experienced home stager, take a look at your portfolio and see what trends and tips you can write about. Can you focus on a color, style, or room type?
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