This is not a food blog, but stick with me because this story provides an important lesson in marketing for home stagers.
Pomegranates are delicious and loaded with antioxidants. I like to eat healthily and I also love food that looks good.
Despite that, I rarely bought the fruit for years because I didn’t know the right way to get the seeds or “arils” out without making a huge mess.
Then one day, some smart marketing people at POM Wonderful had a brochure displayed next to the fruit.
They explained how to open and use pomegranate with easy-to-follow diagrams.
Ever since, I’ve stocked up on pomegranates whenever they’re in season and become quite the pro at scooping out the arils.
Side note, they’re awesome with a handful of almonds. A healthy and portable snack while you’re driving to your home staging consultations.
What turned me into a buyer of pomegranates?
Information that was easy to understand and access!
The marketing team at POM Wonderful realized that a big barrier to people buying their product was a lack of understanding about how to use it.
As long as a pomegranate remained a mystery— or difficult to use— they would never realize their full sales potential.
Home stagers, you have the same marketing problem!
Just like the POM Wonderful folks, you need to educate your own audience to build demand for your services.
Most of you live and work in real estate markets where people have never heard of what you do. Or if they have, there is very little understanding of how and why home staging works.
This applies not only to home sellers, but unfortunately also to Realtors.
There are many preconceived ideas and myths about what a home stager does.
Dispel these and educate your audience about what to expect when they hire a home stager.
Marketing for home stagers
Once people understand what a home stager does, and they realize the value of hiring you, they will be motivated to take action.
The beauty of educating people as a way of marketing your services, is that you become the home staging expert in their eyes.
Once they’re ready to hire a professional home stager, you’ll be the one they turn to for help decorating a home to sell on the real estate market.
I discuss the various ways you can deal with this issue in Module 4 of my home staging courses, called Staging Diva Sales & Marketing Secrets to Boost your Home Staging Business.
Depending on whether you’re talking to a home seller or a real estate agent, you’ll want to explain your services differently.
Both of these target markets have their unique concerns and different information needs.
This scratches the surface of what’s in my training program but for examples of how I explain home staging differently, check out this FAQ page for home sellers and this FAQ page for Realtors.
Home stagers, next time you think that educating your market isn’t important, think about pomegranates. How a simple fruit (that offers outstanding nutrition, low calories and great taste in a low-cost “package”) was such a tough sell.
Simply because people didn’t understand how to use it and were therefore afraid to buy.
Home stagers, have you found a great need to educate your local market?
Do you embrace that challenge or wish you could just get on with things? Please share in the comments below.
That’s a great approach! I will use the “educational” approach at my next realtor’s networking meeting. There truly is a lot of confusion about just what we do and how it will benefit the home seller or the realtor!
I totally agree with you and your approach. My best staging projects has been when, my clients understood how staging works, valued my work, and trusted me. Sometimes, I hear complaints about the staging costs, due to their lack of understanding the value of staging; therefore, it is hard for them to understand that this fee is an investment and not an expense. However, I’ve to admit, that people are coming around bit by bit and they’re learning and valuing our work. At least, this is true in Seattle, most people want their home staged. I believe that creative stagers can work with any budget to make the necessary impact. Knowledge is gold and all of us need to help each other and keep educating our clients.
I have a question about educating sellers of the benefits of home staging, especially when I watch them drop their prices by tens of thousands, and their pictures online show they desperately need a home stager to help them out! Does anyone just GO to any of these houses that are listed for sale and knock on the door in the hopes of getting them to stage their home? It seems like a far stretch, but I look at some of their pictures, even for expensive homes, and I just want to jump into them and start revamping! Does going to the house work for anyone? It’s like cold calling, and does give me some hives thinking about it….. but when they don’t know about it, and you know how good their home could look if they would hire you, what do you do? Thanks!
Hi Amy, That’s a question I would answer more in depth inside the private Staging Diva Network Online Discussion Group which I know you have membership to as a Staging Diva student. The short answer for here is:
Think about how much more you can leverage your time with “one-to-many” marketing approaches (discussed in Course 4 in detail) versus “one-to-one” marketing (which is what you’d be doing by knocking on the door of any specific house that looks awful online).
In other words, imagine how much more powerful it will be (from a potential income standpoint) if you spent the same hour you’d take trying to approach one home seller (who may not want to spend money on staging) and instead used it on any of the marketing tactics I share in Course 4 that would have multiple potential clients – who already know they want invest in home staging – coming to you for help.
Ok thanks, Debra! That makes sense. I need to slow down my mind and just wait till I get to course 4! I also just set up the online access, so will go there for more info for sure! Thanks for explaining!