When you begin your career as Interior Decorator and Home Stager, marketing is a new conversation that must take place.
Using your talent in design, and becoming the first choice for your clients, is a wonderful dream. However, it doesn’t matter how skilled you are if no one has ever heard of you before. This is where marketing will become the connection between you and your future clients.
Marketing for Design and Staging businesses is a two-sided coin. One side is simply marketing in general for any business, and the other side is marketing specifically for Interior Design and Home Staging. Getting a new business off the ground is both knowing what you are doing and knowing how to do it. Marketing is the same. Knowing the necessity of marketing, and then successfully marketing your new business, is a skill you can learn.
When we consider marketing in general, one helpful aspect is to consider how you have been personally marketed.
What is it that caught your attention? What brought you from knowing nothing to now wanting to know more? What was it that made you decide to purchase that product or service? Marketing is nothing more than the act of promoting or selling a product or service. You want to get your service out to the world in a way that will capture their attention and bring them hungry to be fed more information.
There are some foundational principles you will want to make sure you are following:
- The Cold Market:
There are those who have never heard of you, have never heard of the services of a Designer/Stager, and have no clue they need to be interested in you. The goal is to move someone from not even needing or knowing about your service to a place of catching their attention. These people are certainly not ready to hire you yet. Help them realize they are missing something they didn’t even know they were missing. Think of ways that you can market someone to catch their attention, and simply make them curious. Compel them to contemplate and consider something they never even thought of before. In this step, we are simply starting a connection point with them that wasn’t there before.
- The Warm Market:
Once we have captured their attention, just a little, the next step we move into is to learn more about something. “Okay, so I never even knew there were people out there who did this service and/or offered this product. I am intrigued. I wonder if others hire them?” This person has been moved from “they caught my attention” to “I want to learn more about this.” The learning process is where we start doing some research. This is where, as you grow, reviews and testimonials will become a significant help in your marketing strategy. You have made them curious, and now they are learning more about you. Once they learn more about you, read from others who know you. They have a much better understanding of who you are, what you offer, how you can help them, and most importantly…why they need you. Once they have decided all this, they now feel safer with what they have learned, and their trust in your product/service has been greatly strengthened.
- The Hot Market
The hot market is the client that hires you. This person will work with you first-hand, and they are now a part of your marketing plan, also because their happiness with your work will be more reviews and positive testimonials. This hot market client IS a powerful part of your marketing campaigns, as their opinion will give you future referrals. Due to this, it is vital that you maintain a wonderful relationship with these clients.
In the most general way, typical marketing for any business is to move a client from a cold market to a hot market. Let’s flip that two-sided coin over, because we are no longer talking about business and clients, we are talking about YOUR business and YOUR clients.
Once you understand the basics of marketing and how that is translated into your business, the fun begins. How do we specifically market for a Design and Staging business?
Here are some key points to focus on:
- Consistent Branding
Your logo, slogan, profile pictures, business card, and anything you put in the public must be kept consistent. Your goal in branding is to help the customer know at a glance it is you. Too many differences cause confusion.
- Utilize Social Media
This is where the normal person spends hours a day. This is where ads can be featured, and you can dial in the specific demographic you want to target. It isn’t difficult to find out how to do this online and giving some of your time to learning how to use Facebook or Instagram for your business will be time well invested.
- Maintain Connections
Engage with people in real time on your social media outlets. Answer their questions and comments, engage with them and bring them through the cold, warm and hot market journey. By engaging with them, you are building trust, and that trust is what brings them to you as a new client. If they aren’t ready today, they will be tomorrow. Be patient.
- Seek Exposure
Search for opportunities that will get you in the door or in the minds of future clients. For example, you might:
- Go to an open house and meet real estate agents you could potentially work with.
- Look for listings on the market for a long time. Approach the realtor and give a pitch why staging is effective and valuable.
- Write free articles for the newspaper or real estate blogs to start getting your name and voice in the community.
- Create virtual tours or videos of properties you have staged, and share it on your social media.
- Make sure you are listed in all online listings. (Yelp, Free Google Business Listing, Houzz, etc.)
- Ask for testimonials from previous clients.
- Keep it personal with hand-written thank you notes.
Marketing can be both paid (like Google or social media ads) or it can grow organically over time.
It doesn’t hurt to put money into some specialized marketing, but it is sustained to grow your business over time. Sometimes in life, rapid growth today can mean some long-term weakness, because it grew too rapidly before there was time to strengthen what was.
Pay attention to what your clients need, and how they respond to your marketing.
Keep tweaking and testing until you start seeing results. Give yourself time and space for some of these particulars to fall in place. It doesn’t mean you are failing. It means you are strengthening and building a stable foundational base.
Want to learn more about how you can market your decorating and staging business. Jump on over to our Online Marketing for Decorators and Stager’s class to begin!
TRACY FREDRYCHOWSKI
Tracy Fredrychowski is a Digital Marketing Consultant with over 25 years of marketing experience in the staging and decorating field. Tracy has spent most of her career as a small business owner, so she knows the challenges that come along with being an entrepreneur. Specializing in helping small businesses move their company to the next level, she has a keen understanding of how to successfully market a business in the digital realm.
