As a home stager, you are familiar with trade shows and seminars. You invest in fliers and brochures to hand out at open house events. What if you could decrease your marketing budget and get an even higher ROI for the money you spend? Digital marketing gives you easy and open access to potential customers through inbound and outbound marketing.
Inbound marketing is all about creating and distributing valuable content that customers want, whereas outbound marketing includes traditional approaches such as cold calling, television ads, direct mail, telemarketing, etc. The goal behind this is to reach an enormous audience in a cost-effective and measurable way. https://linkdoctor.io/
(Source)
Here are 13 ways you can use digital marketing to boost sales as a home stager.
- Set up a website
The first step to digital marketing is to create a website. This is a platform through which people can interact with you online. It’s like your virtual office. With it, people can learn more about you and what you do.
On a website, your customer can spend hours upon hours with you if they choose. It is a natural attraction for visitors through search engines. You could provide a few short tutorials for DIYs as takeaways for your visitors. Your website can even include packages and payment features. But you’ll hear more about that later.
- Create better content
It is important to keep your existing and potential customers up to date with what you are doing. Your content should provide value and relevance to your target audience. This gives your customer a richer, more complete view of you.
Blog posts make great portfolios for your work. You can make a journal for every project you undertake. Add photos to show the projects you have undertaken. This gives your customer an insight into the work you do. When you have great content, more people will be looking for you. Search engines love this, and it will make for some great traffic to your website.
- Use link building
You have a website and great content that people want access to. Great! Now you need to get your site to rank high on search engines. For search engines, a high rank means that you are an authority and your website is listed on the first page of searches. So here are some ways to improve your domain authority through link building:
Guest posting
According to a 2020 link building survey, content creation was rated as the number one method for link building. If you’re running a blog, it won’t hurt to share ideas with other blogs. This is what they call guest posting.
In order to start guest posting, you have to find websites that are relevant to your niche. It is easier when the website you’re writing for has readers interested in your information. Otherwise, it would just be a waste of your time.
Make sure to add a link to your website when you do so. You can also invite bloggers who follow you to write articles and encourage them to link to your content.
Don’t get them to link to anything. They have to link to content that is relevant and valuable to the content they are writing about. Having quality backlinks will let search engines know that you are an authority as far as home staging goes.
Fix broken links
Broken or dead links are web pages that cannot be found or accessed by the user. The most common cause of broken links is moving or renaming a webpage and forgetting to change the internal link.
Look for broken links or dead links from websites within your industry. Create fresh content and provide that as content for the broken link and request that the site owner replace the broken link with your content.
Every time a user clicks the link, search engines will direct them to your website. This is great for improving your domain authority. Link building works even better with other digital marketing techniques. It will get you the kind of visibility that you need to boost your sales.
- Tell your brand story
Nothing endears your customer to you more than hearing more about you. Expressing your brand values and why they are important to you makes for great content in your blogs. The more your customers understand you and what you have to offer, the more they will want to do business with you. You will be closing sales without a word! Make your brand even more visible using infographics and short videos. These are shareable on different social media platforms..
- Use social media
In America alone, 223.03 million people have used social networks in 2020. They post pictures, like, and comment on content. By 2023, that number will have grown to about 257 million users.
Imagine the number of new customers you could have with this visibility! But even now, social media provides a great way of keeping in touch with your current customers.
You can use Facebook to gain even more customers for your business. According to Statista, Facebook hosts over 2.7 billion active users per month. And there are other social networks you can utilize such as Instagram, Twitter, Quora, etc.
- Address customer concerns
It’s important to address your customer concerns. It’s important to hear complaints directly from your customers because it will help you investigate the problem and hopefully prevent any further complaints by making the necessary modifications.
Include chat options on your website and utilize social media platforms to receive timely queries. Provide quick answers about pricing, discounts, and offers. Quick customer feedback is one of the greatest ways to keep customers coming and make conversions.
- Get social proof for your customers
Get testimonials from people that have enjoyed your service on your website. Be sure to include their images so that your customers know that these are real people. These testimonials will give social proof that you offer value for their money. What better way to boost sales than that?
- Build sales funnels with click funnels
Click funnels is software that allows you to build a landing page to sell your product and capture customer information. Instead of relying on tech-savvy people to build your sales funnel for you, click funnels makes it possible to build sales funnels yourself.
- Track trends
Tracking other industries that interconnect with you works in your favor. Different fields such as hardware, interior design, landscaping, etc., may play a part in what you do. Keep up to speed with the latest trends in these fields and your own field too, and give your business a cutting edge. You can use tools such as Google Alerts and Google trends. Google Alerts help you to discover the latest blogs, news, groups, videos and so much more. Google Trends help you track your search terms. With these, you can get an in-depth analysis of people searching for a specified keyword or phrase.
- Use Ads
Search engines allow you to create online ads. With these, you can reach customers interested in the service you offer. A great example is Google Ads. They appear at the top of the search engine every time someone makes a search using the keyword that you bid for. Nothing says inbound marketing like these Ads. Facebook and Instagram make provisions for ads on their platforms. With these, you get to choose your target audience. That way your ad reaches only those people interested in home staging or buying homes. The opportunities this offers your business are huge.
- Provide full contact information
Make sure to always update information about yourself on all your digital platforms. Customers need to reach you fast once they have made a decision. If you have inadequate information available it will put a dent in your sales. Make sure that your email address and links to your social media appear on your website.
- Engage via email
Emails are a great way to let new customers know you exist. They are also effective in keeping your current customers up to speed with you. Send a link to your blog or advert. Add the smart answer option to your email. This helps your customers answer back without taking too much time. That way you will keep track of how many customers have viewed your email.
13. Offer Services Virtually
Because of our current climate of uncertainty, offering virtual consultations and previews is a way to help reduce the amount of in-person contact needed to provide pricing and services to clients.
Conclusion
As a home stager, finding clients is hard work. One of the biggest challenges faced by this industry is in finding ways to best stage a home for sale in the most cost-effective manner. However, by merging these techniques and more, digital marketing will be a win for you.