Social media is an essential marketing tool for homes and interior brands.
However, without a considered strategy, you might as well be posting for the sake of posting. You need to take the time to decide your goal, target audience and what they want from you, or it will be hard to measure any success from your effort.
Whether you want to grow your brand, change preconceptions, find leads or sell more products, creating a robust social media marketing strategy is crucial.
Here are a few things you’ll want to consider:
Identify your target audience
Ask yourself who you want to be speaking to on your platforms. Understanding this will help you decide what, where, and when you are going share.
A great way of doing this is to create a pen portrait of your average customer(s). Give your imaginary consumer a name then build a background for them. Ask things such as what is their job?; how much do they earn?; what are their interests?; do they have a family?; how and when do they use social media?; and what are their aspirations?
You may identify several contradictory target consumers. Many homes and interior brands will need to reach both trade and consumer customers. The language of these groups and how they engage with social media can be very different and trying to accommodate both in one feed can feel ill-harmonious. Ways around this include identifying different platforms where the audiences sit and speak purely to them on that channel or divide platforms and create specifically trade facing accounts.
Pick your platforms
Different platforms will have different audiences and your followers will expect different content and engage differently there. Here are a few of the main channels you will want to map against your target audience and marketing goals.
Facebook is still the most popular social media network. With 15 million UK users interested in interior design and home decor and the platform accounting for 50% of total social referrals and 64% of total social revenue, it’s a safe bet for any interiors brand.
80% of users follow a business on Instagram and 65% of top-performing the platform’s post feature products. It’s an aspirational channel and suited perfectly for high-end lifestyle images and videos. It’s also the main channel influencers prefer for brand collaborations.
Home decor category is one of the strongest verticals on Pinterest – approximately 140 million saves relating to the keyword ‘HOME DECOR’ in the UK in 2018 alone. 88% of pinners use Pinterest to discover new products and 87% purchased something because of the platform.
Houzz
Houzz is a platform designed specifically for the home and interiors industry. It connects home renovators with the right tradesman for them, including, architects, builders, painters and decorators, and interior designers. With around 200,000 users in the UK, the platform could prove a useful place to connect with customers.
YouTube
YouTube has a large and diverse audience, with around 37.1 million active users in the UK last year. Unlike other platforms, where users scroll passively through their feed, YouTube viewers are intentionally searching for content to watch. This would be the perfect platform for your brand’s long-form video content, such as how-to or transformation films.
Choose your content
When brainstorming and developing your content, think back to the target customers you identified and the goals you’ve set out to achieve. You should be able to trace back every post to these.
Research into what consumers want to see from brands on social media, revealed posts about discounts and sales was by far the desired content. This makes sense as it offers real and immediate value to the customer. However social marketers can’t build strategies solely around deals and promotions. While it does lead to conversions, it does not build long-term relationships with target audiences.
As such, it’s important to look at other social post types that engage consumers. Posts which teach or showcase new products relate to consumers’ tendency to use social as a vehicle to learn about new brands, and also to their repeated desire for informative content.
However, simply repetitively showcasing your products and educating about your brand can become stale. This is an opportunity to be creative and find new ways to engage your audience. Looking for inspiration? Try looking at what other brands are doing on social media – these don’t need to be other home and interior brands. Creativity comes from the total of everything you expose your brain, so take the time to explore.
Leverage influencers
Influencer marketing shows no signs of slowing down in 2020, having grown into a core strategy that is practised by over 93% of marketers and 63% of which intend to increase their influencer marketing budget in the next year.
As spending from brands increases, it is more important for brands to invest wisely, not in one-off sponsored posts but in long term campaigns with authentic ambassadors who already like and represent brand values.
Micro-influencers, with only a few thousand followers, who post about their home renovation and design projects, are often seen as more approachable and relatable than big social media celebrities. An effective influencer campaign is effectively word-of-mouth marketing on a massive scale.
Measure your success
Results on social media are easy to track, but it’s important to not collect data for the sake of having it. Instead, you should measure your results against your goals so you can learn what’s successful, what isn’t, and how you can improve.
For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, useful things to track are follower growth among your target customers, total post impressions and if your content receives lots of shares and generates discussion. If your goal is driving sales, you can use Google Analytics to track the customers coming from social media to see if they buy directly or they show intent to purchase by looking at their local stockists.
Revisit the goals and track results over time to figure out what you can improve and make changes.