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Strategic Marketing for Your Showroom and Design Studio

February 27, 2023

Remodelers who have a place for clients to come visit have a definite advantage over those who are running their business from home, or those who do have an office but it is not conducive to hosting visitors. Just having a showroom and design center is one thing, but making it appealing for those who know it exists and making them want to come visit your business is another. To understand how to accomplish this – and why it is important – let’s review the creation of a focused, inbound strategic marketing campaign.

It goes without saying that the marketing of a showroom should use professional photography. Similar to having great images to show off a project, this is even more important for your place of business. Professional photographers know to optimize angles, composition and lighting in ways that showroom owners may overlook if they try taking pictures themselves.

Rushing to post the images on social media once you receive them from the photographer is a common mistake. Overexposure on these platforms dilutes their impact and wastes the opportunity to attract people to a firm’s website. The company website is the first place the images need to be placed. Organize the pictures in a sequence that allows someone to visualize walking through the establishment. You also want to provide commentary for people to know what they are looking at as they read your webpage. This helps educate people just enough to entice them to visit the location.

Strategic Marketing 101

Featuring a video interview with the company owner on the website adds personalization and passion, which are impossible to convey with static images. If there is more than one person staffing the showroom (such as a designer), then create multiple videos to illustrate the company’s range of capabilities and services. Of course, a customer testimonial video will complete your efforts to get people excited to visit. Just as with still images, resist placing these clips on social media once they are edited, as they are more useful on the website.

While having a narrative, photography and videos are important to strategic marketing, so is using this content to attract consumers who are searching the internet to find a kitchen showroom or kitchen designer. That process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To maximize the visibility of your revitalized web page, you need to ensure all its elements are designed to support your indexing. For example, an image that may have a file name of DSC_001.jpg should be renamed Kitchen Bathroom Showroom Entrance.jpg. The same is true for mp4 video files.

In addition to making sure all images and video filenames are supportive of your showroom marketing, you need to ensure the webpage itself is fully optimized. The goal is to make sure the title tag of the webpage is worded to attract a search engine. The description that people see just below the title tag in search results, called a “meta tag”, should be short and to-the-point to get people to click on the information to get to your showroom’s landing page.

kitchen showroom display

Once your webpage is live, you are ready to share its content on social media platforms such as Facebook. The trick is to provide very few images and enough wording to entice people to not only “Like” your social post, but to click on the webpage link that is part of the post. The more engagement you get with the showroom marketing, the more likely someone will be enthusiastic about visiting.

Linking to your webpage via social media continues with all other forms of online marketing. For instance, you will want to ensure the best showroom images are part of your “My Business Profile” page on Google. Do not assume that someone looking for a remodeler knows you have a brick-and-mortar showroom to visit. Show them – everywhere!

Don’t overlook any opportunities to market your showroom. Even when replying to emails, include the phrase “Visit Our Showroom” in your signature, and hyperlink it to your webpage.

Razzano Homes & Remodelers, Inc. followed these tips with success. As part of its growth, the company built a nice showroom and design center, but it originally wasn’t marketed effectively. Now, with quality photography (shown in this article) and strategic content, their website is structured to present their showroom in a way that emphasizes their expertise, their approach to design and their customer service. It welcomes and educates potential customers to come visit, either physically or virtually.

—By Brian Javeline, president of MyOnlineToolbox, an industry leader for online marketing education and strategy planning