Last month I did an office presentation for a local Long and Foster Office in Wayne Pennsylvania. I was not there to talk about home staging- I was asked to do a one hour seminar on blogging! Why blogging? The office manager had seen my blogs on home staging and the local real estate market in the Active Rain newsletter and realized that I must have been doing something right to get my posts noticed. His Realtors could use some advice on how to blog to grow their business and called me in to "talk blogging".
If someone had told me 2 years ago that I would spend almost nothing on marketing and rely on 4 blogs to promote my business I would have thought they were crazy.
You see as a small business owner I have tried a lot of strategies to advertise my business. As a home staging expert and small business coach I get calls daily from stagers asking for advice on how to advertise their business. My response:
- Newspaper ads- They are expensive and do not get results. I once spent $300 per week on ads and ran them for 6 weeks- I did not get one single call! Not even from friends that saw them.
- Glossy Brochures- They are gorgeous but expensive to create and even more exhausting and time consuming to distribute to offices. If you can get past the gate keepers at the front desk you can put them in the agents mail boxes. If you cannot you risk the chance of them getting tossed. I have seen receptionists throw mine away and have gone back into the office to remove them from the trash- if you have $50.00 to toss in the trash can let me know!
- Trade-shows- They are fun and exciting but expensive! I once spent $5,000 (you read that right) on a booth, materials, staging props, and hotel fees. The result? 21 phone calls from people wanting to become a home stager. Maybe I am in the wrong business.
- Grocery Carts- Sure the glamour shots are fun to look at when you shop but no one actually writes the name and number down! They are expensive too- $2000 for 6 months for one store!
So what can you do to market yourself in your local area for FREE?
Become a local home staging expert by blogging about your accomplishments as a home staging professional. If you are just starting out stage a room in your own home or better yet a friend's home, even better a friend that is a Realtor's home and write about that. Make sure to get a testimonial from that Realtor friend!
If you are an established business owner make sure to blog about the homes you stage and include photos and the name of the town and state that the home was in. Add the town to the title of the blog, the text of the blog and the blog tags. This way google will notice this info when it crawls the site. I love using Active Rain and Stage it Forward to catch up on the latest in the home staging industry but I also rely on it as a tool to market my business. When clients call me, 9 times out of 10 they have found my blog before my website using the keywords that I use in my blogs.
If you already have a blog on Active Rain consider becoming a blogging expert on a local website. I have blogged nationally about home staging for sites such as HomeGoods Stores and locally I now blog about design for Main Line Today Magazine.I do not talk specifically about staging but I use that blog as a way to promote myself as a local staging expert.
As small business owners we wear many hats- office managers, warehouse managers, human resource managers, and sales and marketing departments. Blogging is a fun and FREE way that you can promote your home staging business. I look forward to reading yours! kh
