Designer Lighting Digital Marketing Strategies

Every home needs lights, and the growth of the UK lighting market by 44% from 2013 – 2017 with a further 4% growth each year shows that it is a market to be involved in (AMA Research). A lot of the growth maybe attributable to the increase in LED bulbs.

But when it comes to high end, designer lighting, how should you be selling it online?

We’ve focused on three aspects of the best digital ecommerce marketing strategies for high end, designer lighting, Organic Search, Paid Advertising and Social Advertising.

Start with the customer

We always start with getting as clear an understanding of your customer as possible. What are they like? What do they like? What are the problems they want to solve when they look for the products you are selling? Once we’ve shone some light on that, we can roll our sleeves up and start to think about the words they will be using when they search for the lights you are selling. Keyword research reveals the words consumers are using, not the words the industry thinks they should use.

Before we get into a couple of examples, how do you choose the words to research?

Choose the right mix of keywords

Keyword	Avg Monthly Searches	Page One Competition	Suggested Pay Per Click (PPC) Bid	Estimated Monthly Traffic	Estimated Monthly PPC Budget
ceiling lights	110,000	100	£0.80	22,000	£17,600
wall lights	60,500	100	£0.82	12,100	£9,922
lighting	49,500	100	£0.88	9,900	£8,712
led lights	33,100	100	£0.69	6,620	£4,568
lights	27,100	100	£0.88	5,420	£4,770
led ceiling lights	18,100	100	£0.72	3,620	£2,606
designer lighting	2,900	100	£0.43	580	£249
lighting design	1,600	61	£3.66	320	£1,171
lux light	720	26	£1.38	144	£199
luxury lighting	720	100	£1.82	144	£262
ceiling light design	720	100	£1.43	144	£206
designer pendant lights	390	100	£1.80	78	£140
bedroom wall lamps	390	100	£0.76	78	£59
bedside table lights	390	100	£0.92	78	£72
led light fixtures	390	100	£1.01	78	£79
exterior led lighting	390	100	£0.64	78	£50
bedroom wall lamps	390	100	£0.76	78	£59
decorative wall lights	390	100	£1.15	78	£90
luxury lamps	210	100	£1.32	42	£55

Keywords fall into three categories according to how people are searching. There are general, simple terms, we sometimes refer to them as caveman search terms. Often just one or two words such as ‘light’ or ‘wall light’ they are often used for research and have little ‘buying intent’. Consideration terms are more sophisticated and will often be a simple, caveman type term plus an adjective, for example ‘brass wall light’. These are searches by people who, at least to some extent, know what they want. The third category are buying search terms, often including brand names such as ‘octagonal brass led pendent light’ or ‘Tom Dixon style pendent light’. There’s less people searching but a greater proportion are heading for the buy now button. In other words, as buying intent increases the number of searches decreases. You need to use a mix of all three and to use them with care.

Strategic metadata – careful what you do with those words

This is the meta data from high end, lighting designer Tom Dixon. You can see your meta data by typing ‘Site:’ and then the main part of your website URL into Google.

Meta data is the most important place to use keywords that you want to be found for in Google search results. However, there’s no point in spraying your carefully researched keywords here, there, and everywhere. We sometimes see the same keywords in the meta data for many pages on the same site. Google responds to that by either sharing the attention between them, so none of them rank highly, or ignoring your most cherished page completely. You need a clear strategy to determine what goes where. Category pages are important, as are products. But beware blogs. It’s great to have a blog but optimising them with keywords which ought to be sending people to the products they are ready to buy is plain daft. And be sure to use all the space available. You have 60 characters available. Maybe rather than ‘Tom Dixon – Official’ something like ‘High End Designer Lights Pendants, Wall Lights by Tom Dixon’.

The competitive landscape

Let’s imagine that you’ve found a keyword that lots of people are using to search for the very product you want them to buy from you. You’ve also thought about exactly where to use the key word for the greatest impact on your sales. Part of your strategy to get your site to rank highly for that search term needs to consider where you are now and what you need to do to compete.

Here’s page one of Google for the search term ‘designer lighting’

The first thing that strikes you is how dominated the page is by paid advertising – text based and shopping ads. We will come back to that.

The point is, you want to rank as highly as you can. Our own research has shown that companies at the top of page one can get 98% of the clicks. That doesn’t leave much for the others.

Let’s have a close look at the companies who are ranking well up at the top of page one.

Once you get to the organic listings you find search results for companies who will sell you something to light up your life. Houseology are an interior design resource with backers which, according to The Furnishings Report includes former Tesco’s boss Sir Terry Leahy and which has also raised funds from Crowdfunding source Seedrs. Nest is a very fine designer furniture store, the Sheffield based, 17-year-old, project of Christian Hawley. So, the question we need to ask, is how did they get there?

Loving the links