Marketing for Home Decor and Furniture
It seems like a new Direct to Consumer Home Furniture Seller pops up every 30 seconds. With today’s digital economy, it’s become easier to identify and partner with manufacturers, and import or export goods. Americans will always love a good home renovation project, so there’s always a market for these types of goods but if your business doesn’t stand out from the competition you’ll never be seen. And when you are seen, you’re left with very thin profit margins.
I’ve worked in the Home Decor and Furniture space for over 10+ years. From small start-ups to publicly-traded global corporations, I’ve seen best practices and common pitfalls in this space. Here are a few points on how to market your Ecommerce Home Decor and Furniture business:
General vs Specific Keywords: Organic Search Engine Optimization is the holy grail. It means you’re getting traffic (and sales) simply for having the words associated to your products aligned with the words the shopper is searching for. While product names “Dining Table,” “Queen Mattress” and “Desk Lamp” may match millions of searches, your business will likely be buried under a million other businesses who are using those exact same words.
Instead, I advocate for Branding your products so that you can stand out from the crowd. We’ll still use and get SEO points for those important keywords, but we’ll place them somewhere in the romance copy. Branding your products starts from product creation. What unique technologies and features can you integrate in your product? Let’s name those features something unique. Then, let’s give the product a unique name. For example, instead of “Area Rug,” let’s name it “Comfy Clouds Area Rug.” Assuming no one else has the name “Comfy Clouds Area Rug,” you’ll be the only one bidding on that specific keyword phrase, and you can begin shaping consumer sentiment via social ads to begin searching for your product. Just like that, you’ve built your own sandbox to play in and can ensure yourself a higher ROAS than you would otherwise.
Social Proof: Given the millions of Ecommerce Home Decor and Furniture sellers out there, it’s hard for a shopper to know who to trust. That’s where customer reviews and ratings come in. Positive reviews about your Business and about your Products give shoppers less anxiety to trust you with their money. It’s important to communicate how trusted your business is everywhere throughout your social presence.
Your website is a no-brainer. Your homepage footer should call out your Business rating. Programs like Better Business Bureau and TrustPilot can aggregate reviews for you. Your products should also have ratings and reviews so shoppers know which are popular and which are of quality. Yet, there are a few other online placements you wouldn’t think to focus on reviews.
Social media is the next important spot to build shopper trust and the first number to focus on is your follower count. If shoppers see you have a large and engaged following, they’ll know they can trust you (and DM you if they have an issue). Next, platforms like Facebook allow visitors to rate your page. Ensuring this rating doesn’t go negative will keep your business elevated.
Last but most important is Social Media Ads and social proof here takes place in three areas: 1) likes, 2) comments, and 3) the image content. Throughout my years of experience running Paid Social Ads for my clients, I’ve noticed that Ads that have existed longer and that have had more time to generate viewer engagement (via likes and comments) do better and that’s because the likes and comments act as social proof. They validate that shoppers have seen the ad and reacted positively or negatively. Additionally, through my own A/B tests, I’ve seen that uploading an image that calls out your business’s or product’s ratings/reviews leads to higher engagement. So launch your social campaigns, find the best performing ones, and keep them running!
Consolidate: One of the benefits of the Home Decor and Furniture space in generating Social Proof is its nature for product variations. For example, a single mattress style will need 5 different sizes to cover all customer needs, or a wood computer desk may come in three different wood stain colors. Home Decor and Furniture almost always have color, size, or quantity variations to make full use of manufacturing economies of scale, and this is to your advantage when gathering social proof.
By selling 5 different sizes of a single mattress style, you’re increasing the rate that you’re gather reviews and ratings by 5! You’ll start to earn a critical mass of ratings and reviews in shorter amount of time than it would take a single style with a single size. From my experience, I’ve seen conversion rates increase significantly once ratings and reviews go above 15, so you’ll be able to quickly obtain critical mass with products with variations.
Further, variations are helpful in other respects. They allow you to A/B test which asset resonates most with shoppers on the website, email marketing, and social media marketing. Alternating which color, size, or quantity variant image is shown is an easy win to see which image resonates most with shoppers.
Conclusion. Ecommerce for Home Decor and Furniture can be like the wild west if you don’t know how to set yourself apart from the competition. With these marketing tips, I hope your business is able to stand out and atop the crowd.
