Online Marketing Plan for Doe Furniture

Doe Furniture is a new business venture that will be located in State. The business wants to focus on building custom heirloom quality furniture however; there is a current customer base that also knows Doe Furniture for its custom kitchen and kitchen refinishing. The focus of the online presence is building custom furniture without ignoring the current customer base that is previously purchased custom kitchen cabinetry.
Viability
Doe Furniture does not currently have a website but it is looking to create one to drive business to its brick and mortar location. Having an online presence for a brick and mortar store would allow Doe Furniture to have an online portfolio to showcase their work, have a place for previous customers to drive referrals, and allow the company to find new customers and interact with current customers.
The initial plan of the website would not be to actually sell furniture because each item is custom made. The customer niche that Doe Furniture is trying to fill is for customers who want high-end quality custom furniture. When working at this caliber a website would be useful to schedule appointments and show previous examples of work, but when it comes to a discussion of what will actually be built a personal consultation is more effective and less confusion about style and detail arises.
The market for higher-end furniture can be tapped into most easily by interior designers and customer referrals. Having an online presence can allow Doe Furniture to connect with local Interior Designers as well as allow customers to easily refer their friends. Doe Furniture can also use its online presence to encourage previous customers to refer their friends or purchase new items by offering discounts on services.
Current Online Competitors
Doe Furniture is looking to grow its local business with its online presence so the scope used to define the online competitors were furniture manufacturers who make wood furniture for the local market.
Rustic Log Furniture of State Inc.
The Rustic Log Furniture Company is located in Orem, UT about sixty-five miles south of Doe Furniture. They specialize in log-style furniture. Customers can select from a variety of different pieces, like a table or headboard, and then select from pre-determined sizes. They offer an online catalogue, a testimonial webpage, and an information page. Their Testimonial page is particularly well done because it shows pictures of the items purchased alongside the customer’s testimonial.
The Facebook page for Rustic Log Furniture is very basic offering an address, phone number, store hours, and a link to their webpage. They do have an online photo album that highlights pieces from their collection but the photos are pictures of the furniture against a white background so it is impossible to really see size, scale, or have a reference for the color of the wood.
The company does not have a LinkedIn or Twitter presence.
Sugar House Furniture
Sugar House Furniture specializes in Mission style furniture and it is located about thirty-three miles from Doe Furniture. They offer an online catalogue of furniture but do not offer the option of custom pieces of furniture through their website. Their website’s information page features a Google map of their location and a link to create driving directions to their store. Their main page is very basic with links to its catalogue. There is the option of joining a mailing list and a link to view their specials.
Sugar House Furniture has a Facebook page but there are no pictures and no link to its webpage. It only lists the address and phone number for the company. They have no presence on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Jay’s Fine Woodworking is forty-three miles away and has a very basic website with pictures of past work, a links page with companies listed but no actual links, and a contact page with basic contact information listed. There is no presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Online Marketing Suggestions and Strategies
Doe Furniture’s target audience is customers in State who are looking to have true custom furniture built. Most of the competitors offer custom furniture in specific styles or with limited choices. Doe Furniture needs to emphasize the custom nature of their work. They can offer to build specific pieces to order based on a picture a customer brings in, on the size and design of a room, or a customer may suggest the functionality needed for a piece and a piece will be designed for them.
Doe Furniture’s greatest asset is their ability to custom design pieces to fit rooms or function, like storage or display, while assuring customers of the quality of workmanship. The company’s online presence needs to maximize this asset.
In order to generate new customers for the business and reach the high end market using social media sites like LinkedIn, Doe Furniture can reach Interior Designers who can then offer their customers custom designed pieces as part of their work. Facebook and Twitter can also be used to reach these designers as well as connect with friends and acquaintances of previous and current customers.
Doe Furniture must make sure that its logo and icon are prominent and cohesive in all aspects of its online presence to create brand recognition and awareness. When a customer has been on the webpage and then searches for Doe Furniture on Facebook or Twitter it should be easy to locate based on the recognition of the Doe Furniture logo.
Doe Furniture can create a presence on sites like www.justanswer.com or www.askapro.net and answer user questions about wood furniture in order to drive traffic to the website and improve search engine ranking.
Search Engine Optimization
As a new company Doe Furniture does not have the resources available to pay for Google Ad words, professional Search Engine Optimization, or priority search engine rating. It then becomes imperative that the keywords used in the coding of the webpages are applicable and effective. It is important the webpage be spider friendly so that it can be found by search engines without having to pay to be seen.
Search engine spider’s use the number and quality of links to a website from other websites to help determine a webpage’s rankings. Doe Furniture must then place a priority on creating a banner for other sites, like Interior Designer, or customers to place on their webpages or blogs. Another way to get quality links to the website is by answering questions on websites like www.justanswer.com or www.askapro.net. By finding questions that are applicable to the business and answering them it allows the person who has asked the question to see the company’s webpage as well as anyone else who asks a similar question to link to the webpage. From a spider standpoint, each individually answered question is a quality link to the company’ webpage and that can increase the webpage’s search ranking.
Another way to help customers find the website is by creating an informational page that answers a question, like how do you measure a space to create wall to wall bookcases? Or what type of wood is best used in specific applications? These informational pages can then be found by the spider and ranked highly when people are looking to build custom bookcases or what type of wood to use on a kid’s desktop.
Social Media Integration
Facebook
Doe Furniture must create a company Facebook page that includes the logo as the profile picture. It is important to list the address, phone number, and website information but it is also crucial to include pictures of previous work. The company can contact previous customers and ask them to post pictures to the Facebook account with brief testimonials about the company or the workmanship. This will not only make the Facebook page more dynamic it will also highlight the new page to all of the previous customer’s Facebook friends. A discount for future purchases can be offered to customers to incentivize them to post to Facebook. Doe Furniture should use its company page to affiliate with Interior Designers they have worked with and offer testimonials to their Facebook pages in order to reinforce the relationship with the designers as well as attract some of their customers to Doe Furniture.
LinkedIn
Doe Furniture needs to create a LinkedIn page using its logo and contact information as well as highlight their portfolio. Then linking to local Interior Designer’s accounts can help create relationships or deepen current ones. Joining professional association on LinkedIn can also be helpful and increase the networking potential of LinkedIn. Taking the time to write recommendations for Interior Designer pages and soliciting recommendations from previous connections can strengthen the LinkedIn portfolio and raise awareness among the other designers in the State area.
Twitter
Twitter is not as high a priority as Facebook and LinkedIn but it can be useful to create an account making sure to add the Logo as your user picture and all contact information to your account. Twitter can be an effective way to communicate sales or specials to previous clients. Twitter is valuable to the marketing strategy because if customers tweet that they just got their custom furniture they can direct their followers to your Twitter account and all of your contact information.
Online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) By developing the company’s ability to strengthen its relationship with its customers, new business can be brought in by referral or new furniture can be made for previous customers. CRM can also it easier for Interior Designers to work with Doe Furniture encouraging them to use the company more often. Doe Furniture can use customer’s email addresses they have collected to direct previous customers to the new Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages. They can also be used to incentivize repeat business and referrals. As part of creating a good relationship these emails can be sent regularly but not too frequently; regularly to help them they stay out of the spam folder but not so frequently as to be dismissed without opening. It is important in all aspects of contacting the customer’s online, whether it be by email, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to communicate often enough that users are aware of the company but not so often that customers block communication. It is also important that these communications have something to say or a specific reason for being sent to take advantage of the customer’s time and attention and encourage a continued relationship. By properly building and using CRM the viability of Doe Furniture will increase. Because of the high-end nature of the business it is especially important to get customer referrals and repeated business. The online CRM can be critical to this goal.
E-commerce solutions
Because of the custom nature of the business it is not necessary to immediately set have an online shopping cart. However, the functionality of allowing people to pay their invoices online or purchase gift cards makes adding a shopping cart to the webpage worthwhile. www.Bill.com allows the company to create invoices online and process the payment for services online. It is $29.99 a month for this service and offers live customer support. Bill.com can take payment via check, ACH, and PayPal and is easy to sync with Quickbooks, Intacct or Peachtree. An added advantage provided is online document storage so if you were to lose your digital or hard copy of the invoice the company would have off-site backup of its invoices.
International Considerations Because Doe Furniture is focusing on building its business locally and using its online presence to drive customers to it brick and mortar store there not international considerations at this time.
Projected web development and maintenance costs The website will be developed by a family member who has a graphic design degree. In lieu of payment Doe Furniture is allowing its website to be used in their portfolio as they build their web development business. As for maintenance costs an hour a week needs to be set aside to maintain the online presence on social media sites. An hour a week needs to be set aside to answer questions on ask a pro websites. It costs $11.99 a year to register the domain name. The website will be hosted by ipage.com for $2.95 a month. The cost of the bill.com services is $29.99 a month. The total cost per year is $407.27.
Summary
Doe Furniture can benefit from having an online presence by driving new customers to its store, creating and developing relationships with Interior Designers, and encourage old customers to purchase new items and to refer their friends. The website can also allow current customers to view and pay their invoice online. Creating a social media presence will help further the relationship with customers and design professionals as well as bringing in new customers. Doe Furniture can start and maintain its online presence at an affordable rate to maximize its profitability.

Appendix 1. Web Site Index
Doe Furniture About Us Frequently Asked Questions Photo Gallery Bedroom Bathroom Living Room Office Entry Kitchen
Testimonials
Why Choose Custom Furniture Contact Us Request a quote

Appendix 2: Web page examples.