How to Use Instagram To Grow Your Staging Business

Using Instagram to Successfully Grow your Home Staging Business

Do you need Instagram to grow your staging business?

The short answer is no.

You need 3 things: Meet people, tell them you’re a stager, keep in touch.

I had always felt like Instagram was one more tab open in my brain. And as a staging business owner, we seriously already have waaaayyy too many tabs open, don't we?

I'd get rolling into a staging project, hit the road and realize I hadn't taken one. single. picture! Not one! And we'd created such an amazing transformation! Can you relate?

I realize in hindsight it was because I didn't see Instagram as a huge priority.

I had built my business before Instagram was even a thing and most of my ideal clients didn't really know how “the Facebook” worked, never mind Instagram.

But just because you don't need Instagram to grow your staging business doesn't mean it's not a powerful stay in touch tool.

And as we said that’s the third step to getting new clients.

The reason it’s so powerful is that it cultivates connection.

Connection is where it’s at in our businesses and in our marketing.

Click here to sign up for the waitlist for the next enrollment period for Staging Business School Accelerate Track, the year-long mentorship program to help staging business owners see the road ahead, plan for it and grow, flow and thrive.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

Why I feel that Instagram is an important part of your marketing plan
The Instagram Intention you must have to keep a positive mindset about the time you spend on Instagram content
How to create content faster and with more ease
The best way to grow engagement over time

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

FEATURED ON THE SHOW:

Get the Fab Free Lead Magnet Guide to grow your staging business by staying in front of your best clients in a non-salesy way
Lori’s Instagram

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

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How To Grow Using Instagram

Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast today. We are talking about one of my happy places or what has become one of my happy places on line in my marketing of my business.  It wasn't always the case. So I'll tell you all about that today. But Instagram has become one of those places that I really enjoy being an marketing my business.

And I guess before we dive into this whole topic, though, I, in order to have full transparency with you, because that's what I want to share with you.

I want to be fully transparent about all of the things that I bring to you. I guess I really need to answer one big question first then is, do you actually really need Instagram in order to grow a staging business?

And the truth is the short answer is no, you actually don't. You need three things to grow a staging business.

You need to meet people. So meet the humans where they are. You need to tell them you're a stager and you need to keep in touch with them.

That is the core path to fully booking out your calendar. So you don't actually need Instagram. And the way that I know this is that I built my business before Instagram really had traction, especially among my ideal clients.

My ideal clients were realtors and our realtors. And in the very beginning of my business, when I was looking to grow it, most of my realtors didn't really even understand, or weren't even on “the Facebook”, never mind being on Instagram. They just weren't there. 
And so it wasn't a tool that I actually needed to use, but when it came apparent that Instagram was growing and I started to see my ideal clients popping on and creating accounts over there, I wanted to start to use it, but I honestly felt like it was just another tab I had opened in my brain.

And as you know, as a staging business owner, we seriously, already have way too many tabs open as it is, right.  We're wearing too many hats already. And I felt like being Instagram manager, probably wasn't one of my highest priorities, but it was honestly very frustrating for me because we created these incredible transformations in the projects that we worked on, but we would find we do a vacant installation and we'd get to the end of the day and we’d leave the site and I'd realized we'd never taken a single photo, not a before photo, not an after, not an in-process no selfies.
So we actually had nothing to use.

And part of that was because in hindsight, I didn't really see Instagram as a huge priority for our business.  And so as a result, we just didn't prioritize it. But now as I'm growing my education business, my staging education business, I realize that Instagram is a really fabulous place to keep in touch with people.

So as part of that, you know, those three steps telling people, meeting people, telling them that you're a stager and then staying in touch.  Instagram is a beautifully designed place to do that before you bring them over onto your email list. And the reason it's so powerful is that you can be in front of people several times a week in a way that you can't be in their inbox.

So it really begins to cultivate connection. And it's really a safe place for people to engage with you and deepen their relationship with you without having to feel like you're necessarily selling them all the time.
So it's a really powerful marketing tool that way. And you know, the results of those efforts will be that not only do you deepen your relationship and your connection with people, but you'll also help your perspective, clients get so comfortable that before they even get on a phone call with you to learn more about your services, they're really going to be a yes, there'll be a yes before they even get on the phone.

And that is in powerful shizz right there.

People it's really powerful and you can have so much fun with Instagram, and it's so much easier today to leverage what you're doing on Instagram, because now that Instagram is owned by Facebook, you can share all of that content between those two.

You can even schedule out your Instagram and your Facebook posts right in Facebook. So it's really flipping awesome. But with anything that we do, we really need to be intentional about it and have create intentional thoughts.

And then an intentional belief plan as it were in terms of how you are thinking about using it. So the first thing I'm going to say is this Instagram is a long game.

This is not instant, you know, reward from what you do. If you are in business for the long haul, you're going to have to take a long view of Instagram.

You're not immediately converting people into buyers on Instagram. It's Instagram is really that foundation of getting to know you getting to like you getting to trust you.

It's another aspect of that before they become a buyer and kind of how we had talked about with organic marketing and the social media podcasts, that this is part of that letting clients get so comfortable with you, that they make working with you, their idea, it's not your idea.

So it really is a great place to let people get to know you, your business, the behind the scenes, all of that, to eventually turn those followers into fans who then become part of your email list.

So I just want you to remember that it's a term connection kind of tool that you'll be using.

So let's just get into now that we've got some of those that, that intention and getting that grounded beliefs around Instagrams, that let's talk some mechanics.

Okay. The first thing is, what kind of account should you have?

So years ago when Facebook launched their business pages, a bunch of us, including myself, really tried to max out how we used business pages on Facebook To, you know, bring people over into our community there to nurture that community only to find out that, of Course, Facebook doesn't want you to market your business for free on their platform.

They want you to pay For it. So They, They put Pages and the content on pages behind everything else in terms of the algorithm.
And it really became not worth it to Have a Facebook business page. And because now Instagram is owned by Facebook.

As I had said before, I Have a feeling this is going to be the same thing with Instagram. So my recommendation is that you Set up your business page as a, either personal page or a creator Page.
And both of those actually will allow you to use actually better tools in some regards than the business pages. So I would start there so create That account as personal or creator.

And then when you are setting up your profile to even go that granular, you want to make sure that you have an image of yourself in your profile versus your logo.

I see a lot of Stagers using your logo and People Want to interface and interact and connect with people and humans and the human face, not logos, not brands.

So If you have Your logo on there, no shame in it, just go in and make sure that you find either an image of you, your Co-founders, your team, something where you have people.

Also make sure that you have Your location because we are Zip code Based businesses.  It's really important that You share maybe the service area That you're in so that people know exactly, Exactly where you offer your services.

What are the services that you offer.  Iif I am looking for vacant staging services, if I am an investor or a developer, I'm going to want to be able to look at your profile quickly and know exactly what you offer.

Link to your Website or your Freebie either one.  And if you want to have both, you can use a tool like link tree, which is Linktr.ee

And you can put in multiple. So if you wanted to share links to your Photo gallery or your portfolio or your service page, or your blog or your freebies, You can use that To take, We have one link that opens up to multiple links.
So it's a great, great tool.

So Once you've set up your personal or creator account and you've leveraged Your profile, What kind of content do you want to create?

So I Love Jenna Kutcher's JK five, Jenna Kutcher talks about having five content pillars that You rotate through Your content.
And three are not business Related. They are personally related

And my content pillars are home staging, how to marketing your staging business.  I have a third though. I do. I kind of do the opposite. I do three business ones. I have systems for your staging business, Lori's travels and things Lori loves, thinks about these can be design-related. These can be product related, but those are the five my JK five as it were for my Instagram content.

So what are your JK fives? What are your business pillars? You know, maybe it's before and afters or something like that.
And what are your personal pillars? What do you want to share? That's a little bit deeper dive into who you are as a business owner.

Okay. So develop your JK five, and then you want to create a system for getting some stuff done, right? Because if we don't have a system to get it done, it won't get done consistently.

So the first thing is you want to make sure that you're scheduling time to create for Instagram. That's the first one.
And you can batch create. We talked about batch creation and another than the podcast about social media you want to sit and maybe think about those content pillars.
What are the upcoming themes and services you want to be sharing over the next month and just batch create a bunch of content so that you don't need to keep sitting down to it every day.
But schedule that time in your calendar.

Then what you're going to do is you're going to go in and create you're going in that, that time that you are there, you're going to do a few things.

And the first is you're going to use the saved feature. So I want you to find accounts that are your ideal clients and go onto one of their, their posts.  And on the right hand side is a little thing that looks like a flag, and that is a save feature.

And the cool thing is with Instagram is you can actually create folders for your saved items. So create an ideal clients folder and start saving accounts into that folder.

And you can spend even just five minutes in that time block that you have to go find accounts. And what I like to do is go to accounts that I know are my ideal client, and then see who their followers are.
So who are they following? Who are their followers? And within that, you're going to find typically aligned accounts.

So if I want to focus on realtors from Keller Williams in my local zip codes, most likely if I find one of those accounts, following them, or they are following other Keller Williams agents from their office or the area that I can then save so that I have, I'm developing a library of ideal client accounts that I want to begin to engage with.

And that's your next step. Then you want to start engaging with those accounts. You want to be liking their posts.
You want to be leaving comments on their posts, because that is what's going to make you more visible to, and most likely they're going to follow you back, which is exactly what you want, because you want them to begin to see your content.
But the cool thing about engaging with them is it's the whole concept of givers gain. If you engage with them, they will be more likely to engage with you.  So it's a really win-win to get in there. So you'll start interacting with them.

Then you want to make sure that you are experimenting with the kinds of content that you're creating.
So when you sit down on a weekly basis, the other folder that I have that I save too, is ideas.

So I see somebody has posted something and I save it to my ideas folder. So you can go into that and you can start copying, right?
Basically just copying what you see other people do. What resonated with you, what you thought was a good post, you know, using someone's example is always a great way to reverse engineer and create your own content.

You'll have your own spin on it. But that is the next thing that you'll want to do is start saving some ideas so that when you go to sit and create, you've already got some ready ideas available to you.

And then of course, you want to make sure that in every post that you are doing, you're, you're adding a call to action.  And we'll talk about that in a minute. And then the last thing is you want to make sure that as part of your Instagram system, that you're not posting and ghosting.

We'll talk about that in a minute as well. So let's dive into the details and the anatomy of each post.

Now that you've got your J K five, you've got your system where you're setting aside your time to, to create, save those accounts and start interacting with them.

You're going to create your posts. So the first thing I'm going to encourage you to do is genuinely show up.

And this is where that don't post and ghost shows up. If you want to get engagement, you want to make sure that if somebody engages with your post, you're engaging back with them, acknowledge the fact that they took time to engage with you.

Now, the one caveat that I'm going to tell you is that if you start getting people who are like, love it, send your picture to that spam.
And that actually, if keeping those in your Instagram account or your comment section actually lowers you in the algorithm. So you want to delete those just plain delete them.  But anything else that is an organic natural comment. You really want to respond to, even if it's just a hard emoji or a quick, thank you for leaving the comment, always engage.

And again, you want to make sure if you want more engagement, you're engaging on other people's posts. So that's again, little aside.
So first of all, genuinely show up remember that people want to interact with people, not brands. So your images can certainly be before and afters and the beautiful rooms that you create and all of that.

But you also want to include pictures of yourself or your team at some point, right? So make sure that Your, Your pictures, aren't always just interiors.  People want to see you and they will engage and respond to you. And in fact, I know that to be true because we experiment with my page and all of the, the images that have me in them perform so much better than the ones of the beautiful rooms.
So It, It definitely is a thing.

Make sure that What You're writing is worth reading. So when you get to the point of the caption, a couple of Just rules Of thumb Is That you want to imagine that you're talking to one person.

So identify who that one person is that you can be talking to and make sure that when you've written it, if you could send it to a dear friend or family member who knows you really Well, that it actually captures you.

Like, If you send it to them, you're going to feel like, oh Yeah, They they're going to feel Like, oh yeah, this Is, you know, in my case, this is Laurie.

So Whether You're writing the caption or you're doing a video, you want to make sure that it's As true to your voice as possible, true to who you are.

Sometimes, especially with video, if you're doing a real or an Instagram story where it's Video,  People can perform in front of the camera or get super nervous in front of the camera.
And I've been guilty of Both of those, But the more you can just be you and talking directly to maybe that one close family member or friend or ideal client that you want to work with, you'll capture more of your natural voice.

And that is going to do better in terms of your engagement. Okay? So you got your picture, we've got your post or your caption, and then your call to action within your caption.

So your call To action. You want one included every single time that you are doing an Instagram post. So you want to make sure it's something fun, like double Tap, if Which will make them like the Post Drop an emoji Or drop A specific emotion, they put a heart in the comments.

If you know, you love This, You can do Lincoln profile or Lincoln bio. Some people think that That lowers Your engagement or lowers your ranking in the algorithm.

I haven't really found that to be true. But if you're worried About It at all, you can use an image in your Posts.

So You can put in a second image that people Scroll To, and you can say, grab the link, you know, go to the link in bio.  That's another way that you can do it, but there's all kinds of ways.

And as you see these done, you can add those To your ideal folders So that when you're stuck on what your call to action could be, you know, if you want to use something Creative, you go to that, your saved folder, where you have Ideas and can quickly grab some ideas, and then there's your Hashtags.

So Hashtags really make your posts more discoverable. They're Kind of Like a search tool. A lot of people will Search on hashtags to find certain things.

So maybe Your hashtag is in my case, Because we're zip code Based home staging, Philadelphia suburbs, or our homes, aging, we've got, you know, Montgomery county or bucks county would be my hashtags, because if someone's looking for a stager For our area, I want to be able to own those Hashtags When people are looking for them.

So,  And the, the thing is that Hashtags Increase your engagement posts with at least one hashtag get 12.6% more engagement, which is really Cool.
And according to sprout, Social 11 hashtags is really the optimal number to gain the most engagement. So you, you can do 30 in a post, But It sounds like according to sprout, social 11 is perfectly adequate and fine.

So start searching for hashtags that you want to own. And I would recommend that you look at hashtags that have under a thousand posts or more so that you can really be the account that shows up the most when people are searching on those specific hashtags and

You can post Your Hashtags either in your caption or in your comments, the advantage to posting your hashtags in your caption is that The algorithm gets to work immediately when you post it.
So even if there's only like a ten second lag between you posting your CA your, Your Posts, and then adding the comment with additional Hashtags, The Instagram algorithm and little robots behind the scene have already been working to analyze and push out your content based on what's in your caption.

So I would Say, use it in your captions. Why not? Right.

And the last thing is your Hashtags Should be relevant to what you're doing.  You don't want to post something. I've seen people do things where they're, it's some random hashtag because they want to get in front of more followers.  That's not really Super helpful because the Algorithm and the little bots have gotten really smart at Instagram and will not give you any advantage in terms of visibility for using an irrelevant hashtag.

So That's all your Static posts. I want to touch a little bit on stories and reels today, Just because We're talking about Instagram in general, but they could be their entirely own podcast.
So we'll probably do that and bring on my Instagram manager to help us go through that.

So Stories and reels are a great way for people To get to know you better because they're more interactive.
And the cool thing is that you can ask your audience questions, and then they can also ask you questions. There are different ways to do that.

So You get to know your audience more, get to know what their questions are, their thoughts on things. You can add a link in your stories to send them to lead magnet.

That's why a lot of people had Business, wanted business accounts to get the ability to link away from Instagram. Well, now you can do that in your stories, which Is really cool.

So you can send them to a link to your website, to your freebie, to your portfolio, all of that stuff.  You can do that right in Instagram stories, which is so cool. But of course, if you want them to, if people to leave Instagram, you're going to need to make sure you're very clear on why they should do it, right?

So that's a lot about Instagram, but the, the five kind of key ingredients is to make sure you've got a good, solid, grounded mindset that this is long-term.

You want to make sure that you put yourself or your team in front of the camera. In addition to the beautiful rooms that you create, you want to make sure that you're interacting and engaging with the ideal clients and the people who interact with you.

You want to leverage your links and schedule it out, make sure you're using the scheduling. And again, you can use the publishing tools over on Facebook to do that.
And I have a feeling that Facebook prioritizes those things as well, because you're using their platform. I have no proof of that, but that is my thought that Facebook really wants to encourage people to use their publisher.

So they'll likely, you know, put those better into the algorithm. I don't, I'm not sure why he keeps stumbling over that, but you place higher in the algorithm.

You get more visibility, maybe that's what it is. So anyway, I hope that you've gotten some gems out of this podcast.  I hope that you find Instagram to be a really useful marketing tool and one that you can actually have fun with.

All right. My friends, I will see you in the next episode!

Do you need Instagram to grow your staging business?

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

FEATURED ON THE SHOW:

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

How To Grow Using Instagram

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