The Trends and Challenges in Home & Garden
The industry is now stronger than it has been in the last ten years. Unlike many other industries that struggled significantly during the pandemic, Home & Garden thrived and its steady growth is predicted to be 4% until 2025. On average, US homeowners spent an average of $13,667 on home improvement, home maintenance and emergency repairs in 2023, improvements which, in many cases, will have already paid for themselves by adding value to the property.
But does this mean that the industry is resting on its laurels? Certainly not; there’s even more pressure on the key decision-makers in the boardrooms of the industry’s best-known players to respond to a quickly-evolving market and invest more in e-commerce in order to gain a winning foothold.
Increasing Competition
Any thriving market is bound to attract new entrants – extremely agile start-ups that have zero ties to shop locations, and therefore no accompanying overheads. Although more competitors naturally mean widening choices and good prices for the consumer, it can also mean a smaller slice of the pie for the legacy giants if they don’t react to the challenge of driving personalization in their online advertising.
Decreasing Loyalty
With the shift to online shopping away from physical locations, the idea of a catchment area to serve nearby homes goes out of the window. And that means there is no opportunity to build rapport and trust with friendly faces in-store.
Consumers now are far more likely to conduct their own research online, and carefully sift through the options for the best prices, particularly in periods of rising inflation.
The Need To Drive Personalization
Decreasing loyalty puts a massive imperative on better leveraging data to serve hyper-personalized ads. Today’s technology allows for an array of ad formats, each honed to deliver the business goals of every stage of the funnel.
The major challenge for the Home & Garden industry is to not only calibrate ads to a user’s correct position in the funnel—to the awareness, consideration, and conversion stage—but to identify exactly which Buyer Persona they are addressing (are they diligent, heavy, or spontaneous buyers?).
Add the need to personalize the context of seasonality and promo periods and to facilitate product discovery while boosting AOV, despite a large catalog, and you have a situation in which only the very best capabilities will do.
Deep Learning for Home & Garden
Of course, the capability to perform millions of complex calculations in milliseconds is way beyond the capacity of humans—this is the domain of AI. Only AI can determine the statistical probability of a given user converting (or fulfilling other campaign metrics) and appraising an ad placement’s value, against this, in real-time.
This process is known as real-time bidding. In fact, it’s where our name, RTB House, comes from. Where we’re different is that we use Deep Learning; a step beyond the industry standard Machine Learning.
Deep Learning gives Home & Garden organizations an edge over competitors by serving more precise recommendations, across all buying personas, promo periods, channels, and devices. It’s capable of analyzing many times more touchpoints and consumer patterns than Machine Learning, in an ultra-flexible and efficient way. This allows it to better reach registered users who are yet to make a purchase, re-engage customers at a high risk of churning, and reactivate high-value customers who have become inactive.
But we don’t think of Deep Learning as a Home & Garden organization’s revolution, it’s an evolution—a simple redecoration of the marketing stack.
Quick Redecorating Tips for Home & Garden Organizations
Re-energize the customer journey
One huge influence on client loyalty is physical store proximity; however, apart from ROPO sales, it doesn’t come into play with e-commerce. It’s personalization that wins the day.
You have to take visitors on a carefully curated customer journey. The aim is to create predictive relationships with customers instead of reactive ones – taking you from “just another player” to a “trusted advisor”.
Relate to your user with hyper-personalization
Research has found that 80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a brand that offers a personalized experience. This means if Home & Garden brands can mirror the kind of personal and friendly experience customers receive in-store by way of online ads, they can drive results. Employing behavioral segmentation, and extremely targeted product recommendations based on the users’ exact preferences, is a great start.
Reemphasize Promos and Seasonality
Boost results from promotional activities by creating different campaigns for seasons, sales, and product lines. A more granular and focused segmentation will allow you to offer recommendations based on trending products dependent on weather and season to retain high levels of revenue throughout the year.
Revel in huge product ranges
With Deep Learning, having a huge product range is a big advantage, not a hindrance. Carefully personalized creatives can help the shopper discover items that are typically purchased alongside whatever they’re currently viewing or promote particular brands to customers, i.e. those with a higher margin.
Don’t miss the next 3 posts in this 4-part blog series, with a more in-depth look at:
Personalization in Promotional Periods
The Omnichannel Experience
Recommendations and Pro-buyers
To find out how RTB House can help your organization redecorate its marketing stack and evolve, contact redecorate@rtbhouse.com.
