Out with the old and in with the new. Nothing reflects this old adage more than household furniture retail in the new year. But with many brands fighting for coverage and exposure, getting yourself to the top of the pile can be a real challenge.
Though household furniture retail has been slow on the uptake of e-commerce, social media has proven time and again how effective it is for furniture stores in delivering wide, cost effective exposure relative to TV and other traditional advertising channels.
According to statistics published last year by the Office for National Statistics, sales of furniture in the UK was the main contributor to the largest year-on-year increase in retail sales since 2001 (12.7%).
In fact, the growth seen by furniture stores in 2014 – 23.4% – was ‘the largest growth since records began in 1988.’ And as the uptick in Britain’s economy continues, so will sales of household furniture. With online retail sales set to grow by 40% by 2016 (from a 2014 baseline), now is the time to capitalise on that potential.
With the positive trend of furniture sales in mind, our head of creative – Simon Quance – has put together two cutting-edge social media campaign ideas that will help your business gain exposure across all social media channels now, and into the new year.
Though different in style and mechanic, both campaign approaches offer an insight into the style preferences of your customers, which in conjunction with captured email addresses can feed into your future marketing efforts.
Arriving on your Facebook page, users click through to a competition tab and are asked to select their 3 favourite interior design schemes. Incentivising the competition is the chance to win a shopping spree at your store. But first, entrants must complete their entry on a separate data collection page.
Post entry, users will be prompted to share the promotion and directed to a custom thank you page. Here they’ll receive style and design tips informing them about their chosen trends.
Throughout the entry process, users will be given the option to visit your online store and/or product page, driving website traffic and direct sales.
Employing a different mechanic from the first, this campaign poses a daily changing question based around knowledge of current design trends.
Given 3 options to choose from, users are prompted to visit your site to find the correct answer – it’s a strategy that’s met with roaring success for our work with Visit Japan.
And because the question is daily changing, users are able to enter and – more importantly – share the promotion every day of the campaign, becoming more receptive to your brand through repeated exposure.
Post entry, users will be prompted to share the promotion and directed to a custom thank you page. Here they’ll find out whether or not they answered the question correctly as well as a product carousel, providing your promotion with a direct line to sales.
The beauty of this campaign is the extent to which it encourages those genuinely interested in interiors to enter, educating entrants and ensuring the highest possible quality of data capture.
Recent developments mean that social media is, every day, becoming a better platform for brands to acquire targeted audiences.
To put that into context, we’d expect campaigns like the two featured here to have a minimum targeted reach of 1 million, netting you thousands of relevant and – importantly – opted-in email addresses to use in ongoing marketing communications.
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Digital Visitor is the UK’s leading digital agency in travel and tourism. We help leading Hotels, Attractions and Destinations attract more visitors, more tickets and more sales through their digital channels to find out more please get in touch.