How Can Furniture Companies Reduce Marketing Costs?

Balancing marketing goals with a marketing budget is always hard. Fortunately, there are some ways for furniture companies to reduce marketing costs. One of the ways to do it is to pursue all the opportunities furniture photography has to offer. Of course, there are other ways to minimize marketing costs without sacrificing efficiency. The following tips can help your furniture company reach marketing goals without the need to re-budget or invest additional funds in the marketing departme

Why Having a Furniture Marketing Strategy Matters?

The furniture market is not constant. Every passing month delivers new changes and new challenges. The thing that drives these changes is connected to demand. And demand is shaped by the trends and what people currently prefer to purchase and have in their homes. Delivering what consumers want and need is not enough. Furniture companies need to find the most efficient way to inform consumers about products and offer them that sweet customer experience that will compel them to make a purchase.

Like many businesses, online furniture stores depend on photographs to convey a quality image and sell the product. Traditional photography is not always the best way to get the job done — for example; photo manipulation has a special role in both increasing sales and reducing marketing costs within the furniture industry.

IKEA took Furniture Photography as a Major Marketing Strategy

IKEA, the world’s largest furniture retailer, revealed in 2014 that 75 percent of its catalog images are produced with computerized photo manipulation.

The Advantages of Furniture Photo Manipulation

There are at least four major advantages of using photo manipulation in your marketing efforts:

• Improving the Bottom Line — saving money while improving quality.
• Increasing Productivity — enhances both branding and online marketing strategy.
• Offering More Choices to Customers — helping customers find the right combination to buy.
• Bridging the Image Quality Gap — changing “what is” to “what you want it to look like.”

IKEA: A World-Leading Example

It is always instructive to pay attention to industry leaders like IKEA — emulating the most successful furniture retailing company in the world can provide helpful lessons for businesses of all sizes. IKEA discovered that catalog viewers could not typically tell the difference between unaltered photographs and manipulated images. 

Only 25 percent of furniture images used by IKEA in their marketing efforts is the original, untouched image. The result? Using computer-generated images, IKEA keeps customers coming back for more — 9.7 million e-catalog downloads and over a billion website visits. The unmistakable lesson: image manipulation works for IKEA.

A proper marketing strategy helps to identify the ideal customers and find out what they yearn for. Knowing their experience and why they should trust you as a furniture brand is more than half the job done. An excellent furniture marketing strategy will help you foster long-term customer engagement and give meaning to their purchasing habits, however, the marketing cost must be controlled to get better results.

Here is how to kickstart it.

What Can You Do to Reduce Marketing Costs?

For most businesses, improving the bottom line for marketing programs requires two-fold results — increase sales and reduce expenses. As demonstrated by IKEA’s impressive results, photo manipulation can help you achieve both goals. Here are 10 practical ways that image manipulation can reduce furniture marketing costs:

• Adding textures
• Obtaining 3D visualizations
• Resizing or compressing images to permit use in different locations
• Adding watermarks for copyright protection
• Removing blemishes and adding photogenic qualities
• Enhancing colors and artificially adjusting for inadequate lighting
• Converting to a painting or sketch appearance
• Removing distractions from nature shots
• Adding absent people to group photos
• Isolating products for advertising emphasis

For example, “Virtual Staging” can provide 3D furniture renderings and simulation of space planning for potential home buyers. With vacant real estate, it is usually difficult for buyers to visualize what a property would look like with furnishings. Other buyers have difficulty seeing past unattractive furniture arrangements. 

SmartPHOTOeditors can help your customers make the mental leap from empty or unappealing rooms to a designer home through the virtual magic of 3D rendering technology. With a professional touch built upon photo manipulation, virtual walkthroughs can be more effective in closing a sale than a physical walkthrough.

How to Assemble Your Furniture Marketing Strategy

Although sometimes robust, a furniture marketing strategy is nothing complicated in its essence. It encompasses a series of activities to see through and resources to use. The deliverables of furniture photography can prove an asset in your strategy as you can reuse them across different marketing channels.

How to Assemble Your Furniture Marketing Strategy

Although sometimes robust, a furniture marketing strategy is nothing complicated in its essence. It encompasses a series of activities to see through and resources to use. The deliverables of furniture photography can prove an asset in your strategy as you can reuse them across different marketing channels.

Virtual Staging to Communicate the Essence of Your Furniture

Virtual staging rooms are perfect for communicating the entire message of your design. To benefit from virtual staging, you should make as many combinations as possible. Leave your furniture and interior designers to it. Make it even more convenient by sorting virtual staging into categories such as classic, vintage, contemporary, and so on that depends on the style of the furniture you make.

These stunning 3D images of interior photography are attention-grabbing and inviting and less expensive. If you decide to incorporate them into your marketing strategy, you will experience the following benefits:

• Increase customers’ interest – When customers have the opportunity to see how the furniture looks when arranged in a room and how it transforms a room, they will spend more time browsing your offer thereby increasing their interest in buying your furniture.
• Cut down expenses – Marketing strategies based on traditional staging shows are expensive. Furniture photography services and making different 3D visual staging setups is easier on both your budget and time.
• Motivate the customers to make faster purchasing decisions – Customers who can see the furniture in all its glory and see it as a valuable element of home interior will be more efficient in making purchasing decisions. Therefore, you will be able to sell furniture faster.

Make Your Website as Attractive as Your Furniture

A great looking and easy-to-use website is a foundation every furniture marketing strategy need. Why? Because the shopping practices of modern consumers differ from those in the past. There are very few of them who are ready to shop for furniture by visiting all nearby furniture stores. Almost 90% of customers start their buyers’ journeys online. 

Whether it is searching for furniture or directly visiting a website of prominent furniture manufactures, a modern customer is more likely to use the internet rather than visit a furniture store.

The best way to capture consumers’ attention is to offer a delightful online experience with beautiful interior images. Adding high-quality photos can be of great help here. Just make it as beautiful as your furniture.

Go for a Social Display

Content is the wheel that drives social media engagement, and 45% of B2C marketers believe visual content is the most important type of content. Given the fact that 90% of Millennials use social networks and that visual content drives engagement and shares, social media marketing provides excellent opportunities to furniture companies.

In the US only, almost half of Millennials will research furniture online before they decide to go and buy it in a store. Sharing amazing furniture images is an efficient way to connect with social media savvy Millennials. Whether you want to feature them in your Facebook albums, integrate them in your blog posts, or promote them via Instagram tags and Pinterest pins, you stand to gain more followers and extend your brand reach.

Manipulation vs. Traditional Photography

Just as the world no longer relies on the Betamax videocassette format to record and display video entertainment, contemporary video editing technology has made some traditional photographic techniques obsolete. Even for photographers and videographers that prefer “real or traditional” versus “furniture photo manipulation” of images, the final test remains unavoidable — what do customers want? 

Conclusion

What makes your brand stand out from the crowd? What makes your furniture unique? All of these features can be captured in a high-quality photo that can easily be uploaded to your website and shared across your social media accounts.

With appropriate furniture photography and proper furniture image editing services, you can point out the features to appeal to specific customers and communicate the value your furniture will bring into their homes. On top of that, the idea of incorporating high-quality furniture images in your marketing strategy is feasible. It doesn’t cost a fortune and results in the pictures you can reuse to achieve different results. SmartPHOTOeditors can show you how to reduce your marketing costs while producing images that sell your products and services more effectively. Contact us to avail the furniture image manipulation for your furniture photography. 

– SmartPHOTOeditors