Having an antique store and consistently growing it amidst competition takes good marketing skills. In absence of good marketing, your antique business will soon be overshadowed by others that are better at promoting their antique store. This is why you will find this write-up on antique store marketing ideas extremely useful for giving top gear to your sales. Let us start dealing with the crux of this article:
1) Get More Advantages from Your Antique Website
The online marketing journey of your antique business starts with having a website in the first place. This is due to the fact that more consumers do a preliminary search for products and services online and this trend is bound to grow with time. It is considerably easier to expand into new markets by having a website because a website becomes accessible from everywhere without any geographic restrictions. If you’re looking to get the most out of your antique store website, consider the following things:
a) Content placed on your website must be well-organized and easy to find apart from your antique website being well-designed.
b) For ensuring quick leads, contact information should be clearly visible to visitors on the front page of your website.
c) Display testimonials and a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section on your website.
d) Get your site mobile optimized in order to get the site resolution to auto-adjust according to the device used.
e) The total time it takes for your website to load completely shouldn’t be more than 1 second (or a maximum limit of 2 seconds).
f) Emphasize the significant achievements your antique business has accomplished, such as winning awards, recognition from trusted bodies, or being featured in the press/media.
2) Get Your Antique Store Discovered Easily on Google
Spending time and money on your antique store website is not of much use if people searching for antique products can’t find your website online. To impart this visibility to your website, the processes that are required to be managed are called “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization”. Much has been written about SEO and you can very easily find a vast amount of content on SEO online. However, if you wish to have expert assistance for growing your site’s visibility online, the best way out is to assign the task of SEO to any professional agency.
3) List and Show Up on Google Local Pack
Google My Business or GMB is considered one of the most potent ways to boost the online visibility of your business for local search queries. The initial step towards this method starts with creating a GMB page for your antique business along with all the relevant details filled out like name of business, phone number, address, opening hours, etc. As your business profile on GMB starts gaining more reviews and online mentions, Google will start displaying your business listing more often. There are many strategies to enable your GMB listing to be displayed more often and you can learn about such strategies through many digital marketing-oriented websites online. To ease out the GMB optimization process, you can have it managed by an expert online marketing company.
4) Taste the Multiple Benefits of Press Releases
The majority of businesses still don’t understand the benefits of publishing a press release. The widespread belief that press releases may only be used to provide news or announcements is a common misunderstanding. When a business employs a premium press release syndication service, its content is more likely to appear on major news websites like Yahoo News, the Associated Press, Fox News affiliates, along with many other small and big sites. Press releases are also a great instrument for influencing the ranking of your website in search engines because the backlinks created during the press release distribution process work as a powerful SEO (search engine optimization) factor. So start publishing press releases for your antique business.
5) Let Content Provide You with More Sales
For businesses that have their presence online, they know that many of their leads and potential customers are searching for content related to their business online. This opens a great marketing opportunity as having content published on various topics related to your industry can help you to gain more visitors and thus more sales. This is the simplicity of content marketing. Posting content persistently over a period of time will help in creating a long-term passive flow of visitors to your website. Adopting a content marketing approach will increase conversions, boost revenues, improve awareness, and establish your antique business as a prominent brand online.
6) Advertise Through Top Notch Ad Networks
If you run your paid ads on platforms like Google, and Facebook, you will find out that the lead flow of customers is enhanced. If you want to get the best quality leads, Google Ads stands in first place followed by Facebook and Bing Ads. However, you might end up losing money on PPC advertisements if you do not have the required capability for the creation, bidding, and targeting of ads. This is why to effectively advertise your business, you must either study all the fundamentals of ads or get the services of a marketing firm.
7) Cover More Customers with Email Marketing
When it comes to convincing those website visitors who arrived on your website but didn’t buy your products, email marketing is one of the most successful strategies. Just by making efforts to grab the email addresses of your site visitors can provide you with multiple opportunities to promote your antique products. Email marketing of your antique store is also effective when you need to broadcast your new range of products, offers, discounts, etc to your email subscribers. If you incentivize people with good offers in exchange for email addresses, you can build a targeted email list faster.
8) Grow a Loyal Customer Base with Social Media
If you devote consistent time and effort to building a social media following, your antique business can reap long-term rewards in the form of more sales and leads. All you need to do is to start creating and sharing interesting posts along with interacting with people who interact with your posts. Doing this process for a few months consistently will give you enough followers that will set the momentum for getting more followers automatically. Social media marketing of your antique store will succeed or fail based on the consistency and quality of your content sharing. Also, make sure to join as many relevant local Facebook groups as possible to speed up the word about your social media profile.
9) Keep Growing Referrals
Referral marketing is a great method to increase word-of-mouth promotion. In this form of marketing, you will have to ask your customers to refer your antique store business to their friends and relatives. A more successful referral marketing strategy is one that employs giving some or the other incentives to your present customers in order to get new referrals from them. Coming up with great incentives for people who refer your business is the key to success with this marketing strategy.
10) Start Building Loyalty with Merchandise
To work towards the growth of your antique business, low-cost merchandise with your antique business name printed on them can work out as a great promotional strategy. T-shirts, coffee mugs, pencils, calendars, wristbands, water bottles, balloons, etc are a few of the products which your business can get custom printed followed by distributing them to your customers. Additionally, they can be used as rewards for those who share marketing messages of your business on their profiles made on social media platforms.
11) Do Selective Directory Listings
If you pay attention to the results that are being displayed on the first page of Google for keywords related to your antique business, you will most likely find that not all of these results are websites owned by your competing businesses. Some of them are directories (like Yelp) that list businesses and you can also take this opportunity to create a listing of your business on such directories. This will help you to gain more views and consequently customers for your business. It is also advised that you must not just create and leave your listing but must also periodically check the status of your listing whether it is active or has been removed.
12) Do Video Marketing of Your Antique Store
Potential customers who do Google search for information related to products/services offered by your company will most likely come across video results too. Also, a significant amount of searches for products and services happen on the Youtube platform too. Considering these factors, it is a good strategy to have your promotional videos posted on the Youtube platform. Since videos convey ideas way better than other content forms, they can convey your marketing message way more strongly than text content.
13) Try Tested Offline Marketing Methods
In order to grow the visibility of your antique store, offline marketing is a great supplement to your online marketing efforts. Low targeting abilities and high cost are usually pointed out to be the downsides of offline marketing but for businesses where budget is not an issue, offline marketing is worth exploring. Some of the ways you can try offline marketing for your antique store business are by placing banners and billboards across prominent locations, using ads in big newspapers, distributing flyers, etc.
14) Get Clients from High-End Forums
Luxury forums are a great way to advertise your antique business to an affluent audience. You can type various combinations of keywords in Google like luxury watch forums, luxury travel forums, luxury property forums, etc., to come across various high-end forums where you can easily promote your antique business.
15) Sell More with Auction Sites
On the internet, you can find various types of auction sites for almost all kinds of products like coins, collectibles, furniture, etc. Depending upon the relevant category and site, you can start listing your products for auction on such websites. The rules regarding auction will be different on different kinds of sites and you must, therefore, make yourself familiar with the rules of the respective sites to decide if it suits your interests.
16) List on e-Commerce Stores
Most popular e-Commerce stores like Amazon have a separate category for antique items and you can utilize the huge traffic potential of such websites to quickly turn over your products. Apart from Amazon, you can also list your antiques on other big e-commerce stores where the traffic is in at least a few million.
17) Keep Growing Rich Inventory for More Sales
Usually, people who search for antiques online do not stop at just one site, they browse through various websites and in order to get more sales for your antiques, you must continuously update your inventory and must also hold a rich portfolio of antiques so that more people will likely buy from your store. For this, it is essential that you must periodically scan through big auction sites and other inventory stores.
18) Utilize Fairs and Antique Shows
Book your booth on major upcoming shows so as to display your antiques at a huge gathering. There are also various antique-related shows that take place at different times of the year. You can keep a watch on such antique shows and must mark your presence there in order to get the chance to showcase your antique business to affluent clients who visit such shows. You can also utilize other gatherings which are related to luxury items like luxury cars, luxury watches, etc to display your antique business to an affluent audience.
19) Harness the Power of Specialized Magazines
Specific magazines related to antiques like “antique trader magazine” are a good means to let your antique business be known by a targeted and relevant section of people. By browsing online for popular antique-related magazines, you can very easily find magazines with good circulation. You can contribute articles or can put ads in such magazines in order to promote your antique business.
20) Associate with Most Relevant Functions
The frequency of art exhibitions is much more than antique exhibitions. You can reach out to the event organizing committees of such art exhibitions to get your antiques showcased along with the arts. As art exhibitions are usually visited by the well-off population, you can get good sales by marketing your antique business on such functions.
21) Build Relevant Partners
Almost all businesses have some complementary niches that share a very close customer demographic. Regarding the antique niche, you can get a good number of referrals from interior designers, architects, Vastu consultants, etc. You can associate with all such people who are related to the aesthetics of houses, shops, etc.
22) Start Affiliate Program
You can get your antique business promoted by hundreds of other individuals if you come up with an affiliate program. With an affiliate program, you will simply have to pay a fixed percentage for every sale to your affiliates. You can either host the affiliate program directly on your website or can join any big affiliate network so that you can readily gain exposure to your affiliate model to thousands of affiliates.
23) Have Compelling Reviews Online
Reviews were never as important as they are today because due to the increase in internet use, the tendency to check reviews of businesses is growing over the years. This makes it essential for every business to maintain and strive for more positive reviews. The normal way of approaching more positive reviews is to ask your customers to leave reviews online but this way of asking and acquiring reviews is a slow process as customers have no incentives to do so. By adding a flavor of some good incentives like offers, gift cards, etc., you can definitely increase the number of positive reviews that your antique business has currently.
These are our top recommended antique store marketing ideas. If you have something to contribute to this list or want to ask out any questions, let us know using the comment section just underneath this article.
