If you’re an online retailer selling products for the home, it can be highly beneficial to present key products in the context of trends, themes and styles that they relate to, in order to drive more sales and present extra opportunities to cross-sell complementary products at the same time. Jumping on 2022’s trends can provide a great foundation for this, so we’ve looked at what’s expected to be hot in the coming year and how ecommerce home brands can capitalise on this.
Bold patterns and colours
As an antidote to the neutral greys and pop of bright colour that have become the staple of many homes in the last decade, 2022 could well see a move towards bolder and stronger looks that give spaces in our homes a more individual look and feel.
Search trends back this up, and although greys are still in demand, blues and greens are beginning to climb. Home decor brands can take advantage of these trends with inspirational and how-to content on their websites – including variations of “top green paint”, even smaller challenger brands could create data-led campaigns around top sellers and their application to boost traffic and grow market share on search.
Making the most of small spaces using levels and storage solutions
Millions of people have turned small areas of their home into work spaces or multi-functional zones during the pandemic, whether for home working, home schooling, a home gym or to give a dedicated place to hobbies, side hustles or family activities. While we’re not all going to move into tiny homes, taking inspiration from this movement can help provide great ideas of how to make small spaces perform several functions and how to do more with less.
Leading some of the top searches around small spaces are hallways and bedrooms. Marketing teams should continue to showcase great ways to use these kinds of spaces, keeping things organised and simple – leveraging key platforms to bring it to life. TikTok, Pinterest and Instagram are great platforms to drive ecommerce traffic (depending on your audience of course) – using short and snappy videos that are “hands-on” or “before and afters” will drive traffic, especially if you link directly to key products highlighted.
The outdoors indoors
If there’s one thing that lockdowns and pandemic isolations have taught us, it’s the importance of the outdoors to our mental and emotional health. Bringing some of that indoors is looking to be a key trend for the next few years, whether that’s with clever use of wallpaper, houseplants or even living walls.
Sustainability and upcycling
Upcycling existing pieces or furniture might seem to be anti-retail in the sense that people are using what they already have rather than buying new, but retailers can still jump on this trend by showing shoppers options for accessorising and making the most of upcycled home items.
Everyone wants to shop sustainably when possible, so retailers that can effectively communicate how certain products have sustainable credentials can certainly stand out.
Very Peri
The Pantone colour of 2022, Very Peri is a blue/violet shade that is expected to be showing up in everything from mugs and rugs to sofas and ceilings. Even if you don’t sell anything in this shade, creating visual content to show how what you do sell can complement and enhance home products of this colour can help to inspire shoppers to make a purchase from your ecommerce site.
Cottagecore
Cottagecore was big in 2021 and this looks set to continue throughout the next year at least. Floral prints and organic textures abound in this look that gives countryside vibes even if you live in an inner-city high-rise apartment. Another way to bring some of the outdoors in, cottagecore is backed up by huge amounts of content on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, so brands getting in on this action using these social channels can certainly drive sales directly this way too.
Shades of green
An alternative way to get a feel of the green outdoors inside your home is to use shades of green within your home. The great thing about a green sofa is that it doesn’t need watering like a houseplant does! Green is a colour that goes really well with a wide range of other tones and shades, so you can play it down for a calm and neutral feel, or easily play it up for a more striking look by choosing different colours accents.
Unexpected wallpaper
We all know the impact of a feature wall but using wallpaper in less usual places is certainly also a trend at the moment. How about a wallpapered section within a larger wall or even a ceiling? Or perhaps consider lining the inside of cupboards and other storage with wallpaper for some additional interest and colour – there’s plenty to play with for home-decor brands to capitalise on this.
Different textures for touchabilty
A trend that seems to be gathering pace is using different textures on walls, furniture and accessories to increase the tactile appeal of spaces. Whether that’s a cork wall in your living space, a rattan room divider, a textured headboard in your bedroom, or some hessian used on cupboard doors or in your soft furnishings. With soft and neutral tones but a surface that adds variety to the textures in your home, products like this can bring a whole new dimension to a bedroom, kitchen or living area.
Making the most of these interior trends with your marketing activity
Inspirational interior visuals
Whether you sell paint, wallpaper, art, furniture, lighting, houseplants or soft furnishings, creating aspirational visuals of your products in the context of finished rooms with complementary decoration or furnishings can be absolutely key to driving more sales.
Trend pages to group products together
Consider developing trend pages containing these visuals, product details and optimised content to help bring organic traffic in. Carrying out marketing activity such as digital PR campaigns that link back to these pages can help with ecommerce SEO performance.
Cross-sell during checkout
Showing related and complementary products during the checkout process can also help nudge up the average order value and maximise the revenue generated by every transaction. Delivering this in the context of showing the product in their basket in the same scene as the other products can help shoppers visualise how this will look in their own home. Using your own unique images, which are also properly optimised for search engines, will also help bring in search traffic.
Make the most of visual social media channels to drive traffic
Pinterest is still a top platform for home inspiration and traffic driving to product pages, so don’t neglect this channel even if you also want to focus on Instagram and Facebook audiences for generating sales. Home inspiration content is also still hugely popular on TikTok, with transformations of rooms, homes and furniture provides good opportunities for ecommerce brands to create their own content or work with content creators on the platform as part of their influencer marketing strategy.
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