The home improvement business is booming. According to reports, home improvement products experienced an annual growth of 5.2% from 2012 to 2017. “Consumers have undertaken more home improvement projects, boosting industry revenue,” writes industry research firm IBISWorld.
With revenue on the rise, marketers are faced with an opportunity: Influence home improvement purchase decisions by leveraging location targeting. Doing so can help you secure your share of a retail market that’s expected to top $409 billion in the US in 2019.
Get to Know the Home Improvement Shopper
The place to start is by getting to know the average home improvement shopper. According to GroundTruth data from Q1 2018, this consumer is likely to visit home improvement retail stores on Fridays and Saturdays, presumably in preparation for weekend projects. Foot traffic to these retailers typically peaks at 4 pm.
Drive Visits for a Flash or Short-Term Sale
Once you have a better sense of where and when to connect with your customer, it’s time to introduce location into the mix. Targeting home improvement shoppers who have been observed visiting your store — along with your competitors’ locations — can help you drive more foot traffic. That’s especially useful when you’re promoting a flash sale or short-term deals related to holidays like Memorial Day or Thanksgiving. You can use location to raise awareness of your sale in areas frequented by consumers who are likely to visit your store location.
GroundTruth’s scale can get your targeted messaging to key geographical areas. Use our Location Audiences to reach people who visited your brand or home improvement retailers within a specified time frame. Our Neighborhoods solution, meanwhile, lets you home in on areas with a high visitation affinity to your store, providing you with scalable, custom-targeting for every one of your sales.
Drive Visits to Your E-Commerce Channel
Increasingly, home improvement shoppers don’t just visit brick-and-mortar stores but e-commerce channels as well — and location targeting can also play a role in driving traffic to your desktop and mobile site.
Make it your goal to target shoppers who’ve been observed visiting your store or your competitors in the past, along with shoppers who haven’t visited your physical store in a while. Next, suggest that they switch to your e-commerce channel. You can match your CRM data with GroundTruth to reach customers who are already shopping online.
Location Audiences will help you reach your existing customers and competitor brand shoppers with targeted e-commerce messaging. Meanwhile, Behavioral Audiences allows you to reach customers who are interested in home improvement and therefore represent qualified potential visitors. This approach can increase the frequency of customer visits to your e-commerce channel. Considering that online sales of home improvement products rose by 34% in 2017 to reach almost $20 billion, that’s a big opportunity for your brand to connect with and meet the needs of your digital customer.
Steal Competitor Share
Just as it’s important to understand the home improvement customer, their behavior, and their shopping needs, you’ve got to know your competitors’ customers. A big part of this is determining where to find them.
When you use Location Audiences, you can target groups that over-index for cross-shopping at home improvement stores that include your competitors’ locations. Serve them ads tailored to their particular location or audience group for maximum relevance. To drive them to your store and increase your market share, our Neighborhoods targeting solutions is also a must, as is our Cost Per Visit ad model, which lets you only pay for an ad that results in a verified observed store visit on our platform. Through a combination of precise targeting and performance-based advertising, you can capture a sizable share of your competitors’ customer base.
When it comes to taking full advantage of the home improvement market, maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing campaign is the first step. Contact us today to learn more about our location targeting solutions.
