Consumer Trends

Consumer behaviors have definitely changed due to COVID-19, and one of the biggest effects has been increased relocation. Many people have moved out of smaller living spaces in dense cities due to spending more time at home, often opting to search for houses to spread out. Zillow alone has seen a 26% increase in traffic for its ‘sales pages’ year-over-year, setting records for the site. 

In addition to the moving trend, 66% of people also expect their income to remain the same or be higher in 2020 than in 2019. With disposable income holding steady, folks that are moving into a larger living space are likely looking to furnish more rooms, leading to an increase in interest for furniture and household goods. 

Home office supplies were in high demand in April and May, and while that demand has slowed in recent months, general searches for furniture remain high. Many consumers are finding that what they currently have in their homes doesn’t work for them as well as it used to, and they are looking to upgrade, especially as we move into Q4 and a new year.

Maximizing These Opportunities

The House and Home sector is still well-positioned to thrive in the current market, and brands should take advantage of these opportunities to maximize both their marketing success and business profitability. 

At Incubeta, we’ve developed a new approach to digital marketing – known as CLIMB – that can help brands advance their strategies and excel amongst the competition. Now that 60% of all media budgets are directed to digital marketing, and the biggest players (Google, Facebook, and Amazon) function as auction-based, programmatic spaces, brands need to prioritize digital and employ innovative tactics to win auctions efficiently.

CLIMB starts with Convert. It’s very obvious to say if you increase your conversion rate by 10%, your business will do 10% better, but there’s so much more to converting customers than just that final conversion point on your website or in your store. Every interaction with a potential customer is important. For example, in display advertising with retargeting capabilities, increasing your click-through rate by 10% means 10% more people coming to your website that you’ve engaged with previously. If you can show them a more relevant message and drive them back to your website, they’re more likely to convert. We build on this experience to maximize the conversion of every consumer interaction, but it’s useless without knowing what conversion you’re trying to drive when engaging with someone.

This leads into the second aspect of CLIMB, Leverage, which focuses on data. This starts with understanding who your most valuable consumers are and being able to find more of them. If you can find more of those customers, your profitability, and the revenue that you can drive increases significantly. 

We then move onto Integrate. Many businesses fall down because they work in silos. We see it as an agency all the time, where if we don’t work with our clients close enough, or we’re not able to work with all of our clients’ partners, we start to hit roadblocks in how quickly we can improve performance. People are most familiar with the creative-to-media side, where media and creative teams don’t understand each other’s difficulties. If these teams are integrated and work together more effectively, performance goes up.

The next part of CLIMB is all about Measure, which is directly related to the KPIs marketers want to understand and improve. With so many different channels, platforms, and campaigns, it can be hard to get a full picture of how your marketing activity drives clicks, sales, or revenue. We work to ensure that activity is measured accurately across the conversion funnel, allowing brands to optimize towards the right KPIs moving forward.

Buy, the final piece of the CLIMB puzzle, brings all of these strategies and ideas together to make sure the platform algorithms that programmatic auctions use have the most relevant information. It’s simple to bid towards a CPA or revenue metric, but that may not be the most effective way for an algorithm to work for your business. 

CLIMB has already helped us deliver client success in the House & Home industry, even during COVID. In the five months prior to partnering and implementing a comprehensive CLIMB strategy in March, one of our clients was down 35% year-over-year. With our new approach, they are now up 23% year-over-year, which is equivalent to a $935,000 swing in revenue. 

House and Home brands have a great opportunity to maximize their performance in Q4 and beyond. CLIMB is an effective way to break down key elements of digital marketing that can propel a business forward, driving growth and profitability.

If you’re interested in learning more about CLIMB, be sure to check out our in-depth blog series. If you’re ready to see how CLIMB can help your brand, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.