If you have a furniture business, then you should know how important it is for you to properly market it online and offline. Unfortunately, many businesses only focus on offline marketing and this is often to the detriment of the business. If you don’t do any type of digital marketing, you will be at a high risk of losing hundreds of potential customers. Most people these days go online first and look for businesses there, before interacting and buying from them. So, by not having an online presence, you will be putting your own business at a disadvantage. We will now look at 5 ways in which most furniture businesses struggle online and what you can do about it.
The first struggle is actually having a website and blog. Most furniture stores are focused on actually selling furniture and are not in the business of website development. However, it is essential that you build up a website, either by learning how to do so or hiring an experienced web developer. Thankfully, due to platforms such as WordPress it is relatively easy for anyone to learn how to build a website. However, if you want to leave this job to the professionals, you should hire a local web developer or even go online and hire one off of a freelancer site such as UpWork or People Per Hour.
Another way in which these stores struggle online is through not having an e-commerce type website. Even though it can be easy to build a website on your own or with a developer, you should also aim to have an e-commerce website where you can actually sell furniture online. This can be quite challenging to do and you will definitely need to hire a web developer who specializes in building e-commerce sites and can also build out a database and inventory system for you. You will need to be able to list each product that you have for sale as well as the quantities available. Also, you will need to figure out shipping and provide customer service that deals with people who order from your website.
A third problem is not having a presence on social media. In addition to using Google to search for furniture companies, many people also use social media to do so. For example, this includes Facebook and Instagram which are the two most popular platforms. Thankfully, it is easy to set up a business page on these platforms, however, you will need to develop and execute a social media strategy. You can either hand this off to your marketing department or you can hire a freelance social media manager. A social media manager can greatly help to create and implement a social media strategy that will get your brand more attention and more sales in the long run.
The fourth problem is being able to run ads across various online platforms. Running paid ads are extremely important since it can help to immediately bring in more customers and sales. This is particularly effective when paid ads are run to your e-commerce store. However, running effective ads that generate a good return is an art and you may need to hire a specialist to do so.
Lastly, the fifth most common problem that many furniture businesses struggle with is getting organic traffic from SEO. Once you have a website, it will not automatically get targeted visitors. In addition to doing paid traffic, you should also invest in SEO which is a long term strategy that ensures your site gets traffic, without you having to directly spend money. In SEO, you will need to hire an SEO consultant or agency who will optimize your on-site as well as build high quality white hat backlinks to your site.
To wrap things up, we have just looked at 5 ways in which a furniture business may struggle online. Once you identify the struggles that are relevant to your store, you can then take the steps necessary to solve them and turn them into a competitive advantage.
