Marketing Campaign Ideas for Home Stagers
We believe most business owners realise the importance of having a good marketing strategy, yet they do not always apply it to their business. The evident dichotomy between ‘knowing’ vs ‘doing’ is a topic we could discuss for hours.
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Especially in our industry, it’s not uncommon that marketing comes last. Perhaps it’s because not many Property Stylists have the time, energy or resources to invest in creating actual and meaningful marketing campaigns, or there’s the possibility that they do not really appreciate the value of marketing.
Either way, Cody and I (the media team at Foxy) decided to help and inspire you with some ideas for creating your own Marketing Campaigns, specific to Home-Staging industry. Some have been tried & tested, in which case we add some of hindsight & feedback.
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But first, let’s make an important distinction.
Short-Term vs Long-Term Marketing Strategy
We like to think of them as Sprint vs Marathon. As the name may suggest, the difference is in the distance to the finish line (or expected result). Both strategies are about moving forward, but each one requires a different approach.
The goal of short-term marketing is to get a ‘quick win’.
This strategy helps you achieve your short-term goals, e.g. boost in property installs, more online enquiries, etc. The downside with this approach is that the success only lasts a limited time and then you have to think of a new way to drive traffic to your business.
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Long-term marketing strategy for us is all about creating a strong brand.
Branding itself is an intangible concept. It’s hard to measure, but when done correctly it can lead to great results and even make the short-term wins more sustainable. For example, at Foxy, we have worked very hard to create a brand that gets recognised and connected with friendliness, portraying us just as we are – normal, down-to-earth people who are genuinely willing to help.
This (the brand) seeped across all our social media posts, videos, phone calls, in-person-conversations, you name it.
“I believe we are only now starting to see the results of 2-3 years of consistent branding. Phoebe will often mention a client has come to us after watching our videos, because they feel like they can trust us. They know the team, what our furniture looks like, even our warehouse! When you are making a relatively large purchase like staging a home, you want to feel like you can trust the people you are buying from. That’s the power of branding.” – Cody Shorter | Marketing Manager
Short-Term Marketing Campaign Ideas
1. Giveaways
People LOVE getting things for free! Giveaways are a great way to boost your social media following, remind people about your business and rekindle the relationships that have gone stale. This is how it went down for us.
What we did at Foxy
We ran a ‘Foxy Christmas Giveaway’ across our social media accounts at the end of October 2020, offering 5 x free home staging packages up to the value of $3,500 each for installs during December & January. This promotion was only for Brisbane Real Estate Agents. They could sign up for a chance to win via a Mailchimp Landing Page we created, by adding their name & email to our monthly newsletter.
Why we did it
December and January tend to be our quiet(er) month with lots of houses selling, but not many new listings going up (considering most agents take leave over Christmas). All these pack-ups and not many installs mean that our warehouse fills up quickly and furniture just ‘sits’ there. This promotion was a great way to keep our warehouse at manageable capacity, as well as offer something of real value to the real estate agents.
What was the outcome
It was great! We engaged with a lot of agents via Instagram DMs, drawing their attention to our current giveaway, which was received with much gratitude. New relationships were built, old(er) relationships were rekindled. We drew 5 lucky winners who now have a $3,500 gift to pass onto their home-selling clients.
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This is a snippet from the draw we posted on our Facebook & Instagram stories.
2. Tradeshows
Having a market stall at a tradeshow could be a great way to enter a new market or put your name out there when you are just starting up.
This one is more of a suggestion; it’s not based on our personal experience. We have attended tradeshows in the past, but only to source new products for our styling range.
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3. Limited Time Promotions
FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) makes people act quickly. Offering price reductions is an effective Call To Action for those, who have been looking at your services for a while, pondering whether they should or should-not buy. A limited time sale gives them an incentive to purchase.
What we did at Foxy
We have used this strategy for our online store, offering a discounted promo code to people on our e-mail list.
Why we did it
Considering our online shop is still relatively new, this was our way of drawing people’s attention to it, without coming across as too ‘salesy’.
What was the outcome
This one did not go too well for us, mostly because most of our email list consists of real estate agents. They signed up to get monthly news relating to market movement, not rug discounts. We are looking at running other promos during the year, targeting a different market segment.
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Important to mention!
Be wary of running too many promotions. Offering sales too frequently attracts the ‘bargain-hunters’ who would not otherwise purchase from you and will not engage with your other, non-sales related posts. This will lower the quality of your followers vs engagement ratio and may even tarnish your brand image, making people associate your brand with cheap rates and therefore cheap results.
Long-Term Marketing Campaign Ideas
1. Events
Whether it’s attending real-estate events in your city or hosting your own, this strategy is a great opportunity to expand your network and build relationships.
We hosted a few events at the Foxy warehouse, all relevant to Home Stagers. We brought in speakers from different industries who gave talks on topics like insurance, marketing and even feng-shui styling.
A part of our branding strategy is to be the Industry Leader. Being the first styling business to bring an event like this to our region has contributed to that goal.
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2. Content Creation
This is the most important aspect of our entire marketing strategy. This is what Cody and I spend most of our time working on, every day.
- VIDEOS – Our weekly FoxyTV Episodes have brought in more business to us than any other marketing campaign. Cody does an amazing job capturing it all – the good, the bad, the funny, the sad… and everything in-between that comes with running a busy Home Staging Business. If you haven’t watched our FoxyTV videos yet, you are missing out. Here’s a few of our favourite episodes.
Styling Side by Side Houses
How to Start a Home Staging Business
Home Staging Quoting Tool
“I picked these three because they all have a different aspect we like to focus on. Entertainment, valuable information and sharing our resources for free.” – Cody
- BLOGS – Blogging is the new SEO (directing organic traffic to your website). Writing regular, high-quality blogs that your audience genuinely connects with, helps your business in several different ways. It helps direct traffic to your website, keeps people there for longer and helps you be more ‘googleable’. These are our three most popular blog posts for the last year.
- PODCASTS – Podcasts are a great way to provide more value to your current audience, reach new listeners AND learn about other businesses in our industry. If we were to call another successful home stager with questions relating to his/her success, the chances of getting the answers are relatively low. If it’s positioned as an interview for a podcast, people tend to take a different approach and are more likely to answer honestly. These our our three most listened to podcast episodes of all time.
Geoff Lewis – Bowerbird Interiors
Jennie Norris – Sensational Home Staging
Adam Luttrell – Shift Property Styling (#2)
3. Social Media
This goes almost without saying these days. If your business is not on any social media platform, it basically doesn’t exist. Without going into too much detail about the difference between each platform, we use the content we created (above) and turn it into micro-content (short, easy-to-digest snippet of the full video/blog/podcast). Here’s a few examples:
- Audiograms
- Short videos
- Pictures, GIFs or Illustrations
- Quotes
- Infographics
- Short listicles
4. E-mail Newsletter
This is something we have started doing relatively recently (towards the end of 2020), so we can’t really provide any specific data on the success rate. Our main focus with these emails is to provide as much value to Brisbane Real Estate Agents as possible. News relating to the market, our predictions, insight on what other agents are saying, etc.
The aim of providing information that is relevant and genuinely useful is to make the agents associate our brand with being the Industry Experts. Plus, it is a good way to put our name in front of them on a monthly basis.
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Important to mention!
Sales are NOT the objective of Long-Term Marketing strategy. They come as a biproduct of consistent, high-quality and valuable content.
Thank you for reading!
We hope you’ve learned something new and got inspired along the way.
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