After listening to Jon Trivers audio interview on TalkFloor (see: Trivers on Stainmaster’s Shift to Lowes) where he discusses StainMaster's move to Lowes I began to think about how dealers could use their website to drive potential Stainmaster® customers to their stores.
If you go to Lowe's website and look at the flooring section you will see they are promoting $39 whole house installation on StainMaster® Carpets when you buy the carpet and padding from them. This does not include tear-up, old carpet removal, furniture moving, installing on stairs and customization. As Trivers points out in his FloorRadio interview the idea of making labor seem cheap is not smart, since we all know installing carpet is very labor-intensive and doing the seams correctly takes skill. Yet, Lowes has a great reputation in the eyes of many homeowners and have numerous reasons why homeowners frequent there.
So how do retailers use their websites to combat this? First off, your goal should be to get the consumer to visit your specialty flooring store where you can have an intelligent conversation with them and show them some of your real carpet values and carpet expertise. Whether you sell them StainMaster®, Shaw's Anso® or Mohawk's SmartStrand® Carpet doesn't really matter at this moment, the key is to use your website to help get the potential carpet shoppers to visit your store before they buy.
To get them to visit your store via your website means we have to first get local, online StainMaster® shoppers to visit your website. If you sell StainMaster® Carpets then you need to add a geo-targeted web page to your website that is dedicated to StainMaster Carpets that you offer. Otherwise, consumers don't know you sell it. Plus, you won't have a chance of getting found in the search engine results by online Stainmaster® Carpet shoppers. Be sure to make this geo-targeted, Stainmaster® Carpet landing page compelling enough so the local shoppers will want to interact with you and make your store a must visit before buying their new carpet. I know this will work because it is the kind of strategy I use at Webstream Dynamics all the time with our retail clients and have had great success.
Hey John, thank you so much for writing about this. Yes, we've all been overwhelmed by people talking they've been to Lowe's and do we have stainmaster?
ReplyDeleteGreat idea to use that to showcase our strengths and expertise. I like it and am going to suggest it to my boss and see what we can do with our website. Great insights?
Paul Thompson, Sales, McCool's Flooring