With digital marketing technologies changing as quickly as the season’s decorating trends, knowing which platforms your furniture store needs to run on can be intimidating and confusing. OTT, Google AdWords, Facebook/Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat: the list of technologies keeps on growing, but in all likelihood, your marketing budget stays relatively the same. So, it would be best to make educated choices for your budget. Which furniture retail digital marketing technologies should you choose?
To a certain extent, there is no easy answer to this. Every furniture store and every market is unique, and that cookie-cutter duplicate plans that were successful for one store won’t necessarily work for another. Conquest Digital has had the privilege of helping furniture stores grow their share and profits in markets nationwide for years now! And while we always take the time to be sure, below is a list of some of the heavy-hitter furniture retail digital technologies that we most often see as successful strategies for the furniture industry, along with the best practices for measuring their effectiveness.
Amazon Premium
If you’re only considering Amazon as a potential competitor or a digital storefront to sell your furniture, you’re missing out on its true potential! In 2020, the e-commerce giant decided to make their ad platform specifically for brick & mortar stores that AREN’T selling their products on Amazon.
You can display the Amazon ads, Pre-Roll Video or OTT, and run on Amazon.com, Freevee, the FireTV stick, and thousands of websites, apps, and streaming platforms referred to as Amazon Partners. The ads are pinpoint targeted through Amazon’s incredible database of information gathered over the years from the 2/3 of Americans who buy on the platform. Whether it’s Behavioral targeting, Product targeting, Custom Audience, or Lookalike Audiences, Amazon has powerful ways to deliver your ads to the right consumer.
Remember, while clicks to your website should measure their Display and Pre-Roll Video ads and Conversions on key points on your site, the OTT ads will be more challenging to measure by traditional digital metrics. Instead, you should pay attention to your overall site traffic, foot traffic to your locations, and valuable metrics like Video Completion Rate to measure performance.
Social Mirroring
Social Media has become much more complicated and diverse than a few years ago. It’s more than just Facebook; even that platform has changed radically! Besides increasing restrictions and frustrations on the granddaddy of all social apps, how is your brand supposed to still be visible on Facebook while also making sure to saturate Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and the countless others that crop up?
That’s one of the many reasons Conquest has introduced Social Mirroring to our clients. Social Mirror ads look like posts from your Social Media pages but appear on thousands of websites and apps we can access. The ads can be a carousel, a video, or a single image. When users click the Call-To-Action button, it takes them to your website. When users click on any social icons, it takes them to your Social Media page. We can mirror posts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok.
With diverse targeting options, including Behavioral, Keyword, Retargeting, Artificial Intelligence, and Custom/Lookalike Audience targeting, these ads have been the fastest-growing furniture retail digital marketing technologies over the last year and have a 7x higher click-thru rate than the national average!
Tracking for Social Mirror ads is robust, including CTR, website Conversions, View-Thru tracking, and even QR code scanning for our Social Mirror OTT ads!
Facebook/Instagram Premium
Everything we said above is accurate, yet there’s no denying that Facebook is the king of the hill regarding numbers and engagement, still the #1 social media platform among the pack. In all likelihood, your furniture store has been on Facebook for years. But are you getting the same engagement that you used to, and are you fully leveraging the power of the Facebook platform?
Boosting posts and running a standard ad campaign have their place, but those strategies have a different weight than running a campaign through an agency like Conquest with access to their Premium Suite. With Facebook Premium, your ads run in the News Feed, Messenger, FB Audience Network, Instant Articles, Marketplace, Stories, Search placement, and on Instagram in the Newsfeed and Stories. According to Facebook, when advertising across the entire family of apps, conversion rates were 8x higher than audiences only exposed to placement on Facebook.
And if your ideal audience spends more time on Instagram, a Premium campaign will automatically shift the delivery of your ads to whichever platform the targeted user chooses to go on. So you don’t have to compromise or split your budget!
Measurement of Facebook/Insta campaigns can include all traditional metrics, including CTR, website Conversions, View-Thru tracking, and form fill-out if your ads have a form.
Mobile Conquesting
Facebook has been a favorite furniture retail digital marketing technology for years because it’s undeniably successful and trackable. Behavioral targeting will always be important, so with this technology, you can deliver Display and Pre-Roll Video ads to anyone in your market which falls into the behavioral and demographic categories that are important to you on thousands of websites, apps, and games.
But what makes Mobile Conquesting work is pairing that behavioral targeting with the power of geo-fencing and geo-retargeting. If you have a list of competitor stores or high-value locations like shopping malls or popular dining options in the area, we can draw a “fence” around that location and serve ads to the mobile devices inside the fence. Plus, since we’re scanning device IDs, you can continue to serve ads to them wherever they go until they take action! Plus, with a geo-retargeting lookalike audience, you can follow the people you’ve geo-fenced back home and then start to serve ads to their neighbors to generate a brand-new list of potential customers!
The best part about Mobile Conquesting is the trackability. Besides including all traditional digital metrics like CTR, Conversions, and View-Thrus, these ads can track In-Store Visit tracking so you can directly tie your ad campaign to foot traffic. It doesn’t get better than that!
OTT
Of all the irreversible changes that took place during 2020 that aren’t going anywhere, the rise of Streaming TV as the preferred method of consuming programming is probably the biggest of them all. The numbers make the case clearly: 87% of US TV Households have at least one Connected TV device. The average time spent with OTT is one hour and 44 minutes daily. And on average, streamers used four free ad-supported platforms every week.
So, it’s clear streaming has overtaken traditional broadcasts to engage potential customers, and there’s plenty of opportunity to get your ads in front of them. But with all the OTT providers, how can you be confident you’re choosing the right one?
With Conquest’s furniture retail clients, 100% of our OTT ads are served on Connected TVs with non-skippable ads, so there’s no cushioning our numbers with low-quality impressions. Plus, our OTT ads can cut down on waste by precisely targeting users based on Behavioral, Artificial Intelligence, Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences, and Site Retargeting. And, unlike traditional TV, you no longer have to buy the entire DMA in your market. You can ensure your ads only run in the zip codes you choose or within a certain mile radius of your stores.
OTT has exploded over the last few years because the ads are incredibly effective. But if there’s been one challenge to the technology, it’s been trackability. Since OTT ads run on TVs, they can’t be clicked or drive people to your website. And even if they go to your site after seeing the ad, they do it on a different device, which can be hard to track.
Our standard advice has been to closely monitor your Google Analytics for a boost in site visits, along with monitoring in-store traffic. But now we can also scan all of the mobile devices in the household where the ad served and see if any of those devices come into your stores! So now, trackability is no problem!
You have the tools
The choices of furniture retail digital marketing technologies can be overwhelming! But armed with the knowledge and best practices for measuring their effectiveness provided in this blog post, you should feel confident taking action on choosing which tools and channels to use for your store’s purposes. As with any marketing plan, success in using furniture retail digital marketing technologies takes time and multiple iterations before the desired results start showing. Digital technology is not a “set it and forget it” solution; it only acts as a crutch when you don’t have time or resources to keep up with current trends. Taking the time upfront to learn how each technology fits into a larger digital marketing strategy will ensure smoother operations down the road—and pay dividends if appropriately utilized.
