The trend of furniture shopping is changing and many people are searching, selecting, and buying furniture online. Further, there are more furniture retail shops and showrooms opening every passing year which is decreasing the market share of existing businesses. This means growing your furniture business is no longer primarily dependent on the range and design of furniture because furniture stores with a good marketing plan can easily outrank your business in customers and sales. The furniture marketing ideas listed here will, therefore, provide you with the much-needed guidance on promoting your furniture business to reach more people and consequently boost sales.
1) Structure Your Digital Showroom i.e. Website
What things apart from a good design are important for a website to get your site visitors to convert to customers? Most business owners don’t have any idea about this question and this makes them lose the effective potential of their website. However, after reading and implementing the following points, you will start seeing a rise in the number of customers resulting from your site visitors:
a) As a significant number of people are buying furniture online, make your furniture portfolio live on your website with online payment options and a home delivery feature.
b) Introduce your furniture business to your site visitors through video on your site because the impact that a video will leave on your site visitors will be way higher than text.
c) To show your furniture business is genuine and credible, list all the prominent features on your site like affiliation, awards, achievements, media inclusion of your business, testimonials, etc.
d) If your site looks jam-packed, it will confuse the visitors and will cause the loss of many potential customers. So get your site content well arranged and easy to navigate.
e) Certain elements in your site can negatively affect the loading time of your site which will in turn cause visitor loss. So test the site loading time and if it has been rendered slow, remove or adjust the factors negatively affecting your site loading time.
f) Provide many options to your site visitors to communicate with your business like phone, email, chat support, fax, and skype.
2) Finding Your Business Online Should be Easy
The first page of Google is the hotspot for finding businesses and services online because the traffic to page 2 and beyond on Google ceases drastically. This is why your furniture business website should be present on page 1 of Google if any potential customer searches “furniture shops in [name of your town/city]”. This also means that the SEO (search engine optimization) of your website should be a match to the site ranking on the first page because SEO decides what position your site will rank in Google. So get a solid SEO in place and enjoy good ranking, good traffic, and more sales. To handle SEO professionally in line with the latest updates, give the task to a well-qualified SEO agency.
3) Add Bonus Visibility Online with Local Pack
On the first page of Google, you can not only show your furniture business website but can also show your business in the Google Local Pack i.e. the special 3 results that display the business name, phone number, ratings, direction, etc. This additional display will lead to more customers and sales. As SEO is required for the organic ranking of a website, similarly there is a different set of optimization required to rank in Google Local Pack. Learn the process and implement it or get it implemented by a professional agency.
4) Let Media Work on Your Side
Every business likes to get its name published on media portals but sadly very few know how to do it on a budget. This is where the role of premium press releases starts as their distribution network is so powerful that it can land your press release on world-class news portals. However, it is easy to get lost among the many different service providers of press release. So before sending a press release, first confirm if the press release distribution network has the capacity to give you proper media coverage. Once you achieve press coverage, this coverage will set you apart from many of your competing furniture businesses.
5) Move Faster with Ads
Ads, if used the right way and through a good advertising network, can grow your furniture business at a faster pace. By “right way”, we mean running ad campaigns after acquiring the necessary knowledge of the fundamentals of the advertising network. By “good advertising network”, we mean those advertising networks that have quality traffic like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Mismanagement in ad campaigns can easily deplete your budget quite fast while giving nominal results. The paid option of using a marketing agency is also open if you are stuck with handling ads profitably.
6) Get Your Social Media Profile in Action
Social media marketing gives mixed results for businesses and services because good outcome from social media promotion starts yielding results only after a few months of consistent effort in growing the follower base. Businesses that do not work on growing their follower base and expect quick results usually fail at achieving any significant results. Therefore, start activities like sharing new content, posting content with hashtags, joining groups from your city, etc to get a steady rise in followers to your social media profile. After achieving a few thousand followers, you can step up the game of promoting your furniture business and can also start seeing favorable results.
7) Excel at LinkedIn Marketing
If your furniture business can get connected with people who can buy furniture in bulk from you regularly or can refer your business regularly to new clients, then this will take your business to new heights. Mostly, such people will be in professions like interior designers, real estate developers, etc. Such people can be conveniently connected through the medium of LinkedIn as it is the largest network of professionals. So get a LinkedIn profile and start building your connections.
8) Use Email Marketing for Dual Advantage
Email marketing if done in an untargeted and unsolicited way is spam and doesn’t yield any good results. However, if you collect email addresses through your website, you will finally have a targeted list that will give you two major benefits
a) It will give you the power to announce new furniture items, offers, and discounts to your subscribers anytime resulting in repeat sales over time.
b) It will help build a close relationship with your customers that will result in more referrals from them.
9) Benefit from the Duo of Coupons and Referrals
A very old-school and simple marketing method is to ask your customers to come again and to refer other people to your business. However, people have less interaction with others nowadays and most of them won’t be motivated to refer your furniture business for no reason. This is where the role of referral coupons comes into the picture. Start giving referral coupons to your customers with two-way benefits both for the referrer and the coupon receiver. This will result in more of your customers referring others to your business.
10) Mesmerize and Attract with Video Marketing
Collect town-specific keywords (search terms) related to the furniture business by using a keyword tool or by paying a freelancer to do so. Then start uploading videos on Youtube by using these keywords in the title and description. When the number of videos posted by you will start growing, it will result in more traffic coming to your website and this will impact sales too. Further, these videos will also promote your business name and will give backlinks to your furniture website which will be an indirect advantage.
11) Don’t Disregard Sites like Yelp
Yelp, Nextdoor, and a few other directories that are performing well in search engines, especially on Google can be your additional digital assets if you utilize them by listing your furniture business at such sites. Some of such sites do give the choice of paid promotion for greater visibility through their sites which you can avail of if you witness some good results from the non-paid listing of your business.
12) Engage Influencers, Attract Customers
Influencers in the home and lifestyle niche can be good partners for promoting your furniture business. Since influencers on social media usually have a mix of followers from different regions, choose the local ones who have a larger share of followers from your city/town else there is no meaning in promoting to people outside your area of operation. If you discover good influencer profiles, influencer marketing can yield wonderful results.
13) Use Perks to Boost Store Visits
To boost in-store visits to your furniture store, give some added perks like coupons, free additional items (inexpensive ones), free home delivery, etc. You can announce these coupons, deals, and extra features of your furniture store by posting ads in regional newspapers and on your furniture store website.
14) Get More Sales Through Coupon Sites
Coupon and discount sites like RetailMeNot, Fatwallet, Slickdeals, eBates, etc have a monthly traffic of millions. By posting your furniture store coupons on such sites, your furniture site will get many new customers who will come to get furniture for a discounted price.
15) Give Financing Options and See Your Sales Rise
Not all people have the ability to pay in full in one go. To drive more furniture sales, give good financing options with low interest or even zero interest (depending on your budget and needs). This option can enable people to afford costly furniture items with less financial load and hence it will cause faster rolling of expensive items from your furniture store.
16) Feature Personal Stories to Get More Sales
Ask your customers if they would like to get their furniture-buying experience to be published on your website along with the furniture purchased from you. This process will serve two main features. It will help in building trust and appreciation for your furniture store as real-life people from your region will share their stories. Secondly, these people will also share their published stories on their social media which will give extra publicity to your business along with generating new backlinks to your site.
17) Be Open to Customizations
Whenever possible, offer minor/major customizations so that people will prefer your furniture outlet to get furniture matching their interests. This option of customization will also help you separate from the rest of your competitors. You can also print out brochures of common customizations so that your potential customers can get a closer feel of the expected end product. You must also announce this customization offer on your website.
18) Drive More Traffic and Sales with Educational Resources
Offer educational resources in form of videos, text content, etc for various house decoration-type topics like “how to style a room”, “selecting the right blend of colors for exteriors”, etc. As more people looking for such topics are likely to buy furniture too, you will get many new sales this way.
19) Offer Many Payment Methods
As you will also be integrating online payment options, consider all popular payment forms present on your website like Google Pay, Apple Pay, Credit Card, Paypal, etc. Different people have different reasons for adopting various kinds of payment methods and your furniture outlet must not miss customers due to very rigid and limited payment options.
20) Get a Step Better with Augmented Reality
With augmented reality, your potential customers can easily get a feel of the image of your furniture being placed at their house. This will have a more profound impact on the customer decision and will help to push your sales further. You must definitely announce this feature of augmented reality in your marketing materials.
21) Form a Customer-Oriented Network
All businesses and services that meet with people who are likely to buy furniture soon should be teamed up by you for getting more customers to your furniture shop/store. Some good potential partners in this category can be real estate agents, interior designers, Vastu consultants, etc.
22) Benefit from Customer Thanksgiving Events
Host customer thanksgiving events annually so that this event can not only show your gratitude to your customers but can also help to develop a loyal feeling towards your furniture store. Encourage your customers to bring their friends and colleagues too in such events so as to expand your potential customer base.
23) Use Loyalty Programs
Award loyalty points to your customers for their purchases made at your furniture store. To redeem their loyalty points, many customers will come back to your store and this will cause many repeat sales. There are applications and services online that provide building such setup easily.
24) Get More Leverage with Events
Event participation is a simple method to get your furniture business known to participants of events. Watch out for local events, trade fairs, and have your stall and marketing materials ready for promotion.
25) Get an Affiliate Program Ready
Open an affiliate program for your furniture store by joining any big affiliate network so that you can benefit from the advertising efforts put by affiliates in marketing your furniture store. As you will be paying commissions for confirmed sales, the affiliate model is great for your business.
26) Take Advantage of eCommerce Shops
Start listing your furniture items on prominent e-commerce sites to get additional sales by utilizing the traffic of such sites. The most prominent sites to list your furniture can be Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc.
27) Online is Not the Only Option
SEO, website, directories, influencer marketing, etc are all online marketing methods. Your furniture business promotion strategy is not complete without offline marketing methods. To start the offline promotion of your business, use the conventional tried and tested methods like putting ads in the classified sections of local newspapers, sticking banners in crowded areas, using billboard advertisements, announcing business through promotion stalls, etc.
28) Don’t Lose Customers on Reviews
The online reviews left by people for your business works as a guide for many new potential customers in shaping their decisions. If your furniture business has fetched many positive reviews, any potential customer searching your business name will become much more likely to buy from you. The reverse situation is also true i.e. negative reviews will cause many dropped sales. So start managing your reviews online by encouraging your customers to leave reviews.
Take benefits from these furniture store marketing ideas and if you are unclear on any point explained above, let us know below in the comment section.
