Developing an effective furniture marketing strategy requires time and effort, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. This guide will show you step-by-step how to build a marketing strategy that will help you increase your furniture sales. Your business is worth it.
How you market to your customers depends on who your customers are. Even though you might happily sell to anyone, the fact is that some people will love your products more than others. You’ll sell more furniture if you can identify who those people are.
If you’re not sure how to describe your primary customers, ask them! Conduct in-store and online surveys to help create a picture of your ideal shopper, including their age, gender, occupation, average income, hobbies, and preferences. This information will help you determine which television and radio stations they tune into, which newspapers and magazines they read, which social platforms they use—which all inform where you spend your emotional and financial marketing energy.
Although online research is popular, traditional paid advertising methods like television, radio, and print advertising are still effective ways to advertise furniture. Take advantage of these outlets to put your brand in the minds of potential buyers as well as to reach shoppers who haven’t yet gone fully digital.
Think back to your ideal customers. Use these characteristics to identify regional or national outlets or tools for paid advertising opportunities. Create advertisements that speak to your audience and develop a connection between what they want and what you offer. Be selective—you’ll want to preserve most of your budget for digital opportunities, but it’s worthwhile to at least make a small investment in this space.
Using your research, determine which social platforms your target customers use. You want to reach your customers where they already spend time, not where you prefer to spend yours. If your target market includes millennials, Instagram is where you’ll find them. If your audience is older, you’re more likely to find them on Facebook. People who are passionate about decorating spend their time on Pinterest.
Post likeable images and shareable videos that are relevant to your brand. Social media marketing is all about building a relationship between your company and people who share your values. Your goal is to engage, not sell. Aim to cultivate a social media following of people who love furniture the way you do. When customers identify with your brand, your furniture is more likely to be top of mind when they’re ready to redecorate the living room—turning those followers into customers.
Nothing beats an old-fashioned letter, except a modern one. Building on your social media presence and your customer retention strategy, create an email list to share information with people who are interested in your brand. Invite people to sign up for a monthly newsletter and share regular product news with them. Use the power of the pen—or keyboard—to remind people what you have to offer.
Up to 87 percent of customers do online research before they ever walk into a store, which means your website needs to be a core pillar of your furniture marketing strategy. As a furniture seller, you’re in the business of making beautiful things. Use your website to show off your design savvy. Here are some points to consider:
Make your products look their best. Give your furniture the rockstar treatment with a high-quality images that will inspire your visitors. Showcase pieces, rooms, or decor themes. Make your website a place that customers come for ideas, even if they are not (yet) looking to buy.
Once you have a customer’s interest, you want to keep it. Make sure your website is easy for customers to navigate, whether they want to browse for design inspiration, admire specific products, place an online order, or get directions to a local retail outlet. This includes making sure that your load times are quick—nothing turns a potential customer away faster than slow service!
In our always-connected world, customers surf the web everywhere, including on the go. Make sure that your web design is comfortable to use in all formats, including traditional web browsers, tablets, and smartphones.
When people decorate their homes, they are looking for fresh ideas—you don’t want your website to feel stale or dated. Even if your brand is more traditional, a refresh will show customers that your business is modern and relevant. Your content shouldn’t be static, either. Just as interior design moods change, so too should your website. Show off new products or feature current products in different ways.
Build a strong brand identity that makes your furniture—and the spaces they create—easy to remember. To really make a stand-out impression, use 3D, augmented reality, and virtual reality tools to help prospective customers get up close and personal with your products. Nothing makes a connection better than seeing how a sleek new table would look in your own dining room.
You know who your customers are and you have selected the best ways to showcase your products. How do you translate that into increased furniture sales? Here are some additional sales tips to help your close more deals.
Use social platforms to promote your sales and discounts as well as tell your customers about any special payment options you offer. Don’t have any? Look for ways to make it easy for potential customers to buy from you instead of from someone else. Incentives like convenient lay-away plans, generous return policies, or special discounts (wouldn’t that sofa look better with those end tables?) could be a deal broker instead of a deal breaker.
Make sure that your sales and showroom staff are comfortable talking about your incentives and empower them to share the information with customers.
Research shows that retaining the customers you have costs less, and generates more profits, than acquiring new ones. Once a customer has purchased from you, give them a reason to continue engaging with you.
Leverage your social media platforms. Invite customers to participate in surveys or to share their favorite photos showcasing your products in their homes. Consider offering personalized discounts or promotional offers as a perk of being connected to your brand.
Furniture Sales EventAnd for a few more tips on growing your online revenue, check out our infographic full of tactics that any business owner or marketer can put into place right away to improve their furniture marketing strategy as well as their sales.
Websites, social media, email lists—all promoting dozens or even hundreds of products and variants across multiple product lines. That’s a lot of information to collect, store, and distribute. The best way to manage all that data while still having time to manage your business is to adopt a product information management (Our) platform.
Our software helps businesses handle the data, content, and other materials that are needed to market and sell products. Ours also ensure that quality data is created for internal use and multichannel distribution. An effective Our will make it easy for you to manage information about your products and put that information to work so that you can focus on the business of selling furniture.
That faux-suede sofa you showcased on Instagram? Your prospective customer, Kathleen, used the augmented reality tool on your website to see how it would look in her living room, and now she wants to know where in her city she can buy one. She clicks on the photo, which is connected behind the scenes to a product SKU and your inventory levels. Kathleen is in luck—your products are stocked by a local retailer, and there are two left at a store in her neighborhood!
If Kathleen had to visit or phone the store to ask about the sofa, she might not have followed up. But now she’s motivated to make sure that one of those sofas becomes hers. The only thing she’s not sure of is whether the sofa will fit in the back of her minivan. By scrolling through the product description, she can verify the dimensions and see how the product is packaged for shipping. She sees that it ships in two boxes that are each small enough to fit in her vehicle.
When you consider what a Our does from the customer point of view, it’s easy to see how powerful it is. You don’t need to look any further than one of the furniture industry’s biggest players to see what it can do for your bottom line: IKEA doubled its sales after implementing a Our system.
Marrying your product information to your marketing strategy creates a relationship that’s destined for success, for you and your customers. If you’re ready to take that next step and finally round out your furniture marketing strategy for 2019, look no further than our Our buyer’s guide.
Marrying your product information to your marketing strategy creates a relationship that’s destined for success, for you and your customers. If you’re ready to take that next step and finally round out your furniture marketing strategy for 2019, look no further than our Our buyer’s guide.
Chocked full of information about the benefits of Our implementation, which features to look out for, and side-by-side comparisons of today’s leading brands—it’s the first and last shopping list you’ll need when it comes to product information management software.
To succeed in the furniture industry, you need more than just creating beautiful furniture items. You need an efficient marketing strategy to drive customers to your store and make them loyal. Since most buyers see furniture as a long-term commitment, you need more effort to market and convince them than a retailer selling common FMCGs. This article will show you the top 15 essential furniture marketing ideas to improve customer experience and get your products to the right target customers at the right time.
The furniture market is constantly changing with new trends and shifts in customers’ buying behaviors. Having excellent products doesn’t enough to compete. A thorough marketing strategy with creative execution ideas is the missing piece for your business’s success. You need to be on top of customers’ minds when they need a furniture item, and provide an outstanding shopping experience for them to complete the purchase.
In addition, marketing plays an important role in building customers’ trust and maintaining long-term relationships with them. You must serve customers in all stages of their journey: attracting potential customers to explore your products, engaging with them in their shopping experience, and delighting them with stellar customer service after purchasing.
To turn strangers into loyal customers, you must have an integrated marketing strategy that combines inbound and outbound methodology while providing an omnichannel experience and a better personalized experience for your customers. Here’re the 15 essential furniture marketing ideas to achieve it.
Most customers will do an online search for your company before they shop online. Thus, your website is a crucial destination for customers to find, explore, and buy products. A high-quality website should have content-rich information, great visuals, professional design, fast loading speed, and optimized for mobile. If you make a good first impression on your website, you can keep customers staying longer on your site to explore your brand and products. This leads to a higher chance to convert sales.
In addition, it should have a strong backend with a stable eCommerce feature that connects with a homeware and furniture POS for customers to order and pay. All steps to complete a transaction must be intuitive to follow, such as adding to cart, placing an order, filling in address and payment method, etc. You should also provide a chat feature for support and consultation.
Another approach to marketing furniture is encouraging customers to share their stories. These real-life stories are perfect content materials to market your brand and show how your products help improve customers’ life.
You can run a contest for customers to tell their personal stories connected to a piece of furniture from your store. This is the social proof that can touch new potential customers and drive more purchases.