Marketing - Houzz.com?

[andrew whicker]

Hi,

I just got a cold call from Houzz.com. Does anyone use this site to market? Do you get business from them? How does it work?

Thanks and cheers,

[Erik Loza]

I might be able to lend some insight: A former company did some paid advertising through them. You pay them and have all these tags and such on their site like "woodworking" or whatever for your products. Some interested person is browsing their site, likes your stuff and then clicks "contact for more information". As soon as they do that, you then get an AUTOMATED PHONE CALL from some Houzz bot asking, "Would you like to connect?". LOL, it always dropped the call or when someone actually did pick up, they were clueless about why we were calling them. It did nor work for us but maybe it does for some people. Just my experience.

Erik

[andrew whicker]

Interesting. I'll hear them out. They set up a meeting for Monday! Big stuff! Haha. I also didn't see too many dining tables over $10k and the ones I did see looked like nothing special. Makes me wonder how many get sold.

[Patrick Kane]

I have a free site. It sends me some business, but not a ton. Houzz does hound me to sign up for their marketing, which I’ve never done. They wanted about $1000/month.

[andrew whicker]

Interesting. They said it was free, but I'm waiting for the catch

[andrew whicker]

It is ~$200 / month / county (1 year contracts only). They put you on their front page. They give you a team of experts (not sure exactly what this entails or how often you would use it). They drive business to your page.

My fear is getting pigeon holed into doing all types of work vs my dream of building high end furniture / high end custom work only. Then again, it would be easier to automate a business with more typical work....

[andrew whicker]

My original plan was to reach out to interior designers with a nice brochure and web page.

[Erik Loza]

My original plan was to reach out to interior designers with a nice brochure and web page. I was an A&D rep for a time and worked with lots of architects and designers and now, pretty much all the real high-end architectural millwork and furniture designers in the area are customers of mine, so I can tell you what it takes from both sides. If this is the market you want to go after, make sure your website looks great (skip the printed brochures, they will never read it). ID's are all about social media. If you don't already have an IG (not Twitter) profile, create one and then post original content at least once a week. Buff up your Linkedin profile and try to connect with as many ID's as possible in your area. Hope this helps,

Erik

[andrew whicker]

Thanks Erik,

Yes, I have an IG / FB page. I'm starting to clean it up and put more effort into it. I still need a webpage. I need a way to cold call ID's with something more than my IG page (my IG is full of work in progress, etc which I don't think shows me off well enough). I'm still experimenting and listening to all the advice I hear.

I've reached out to professional photographers and should have a good website with good photos of my work soon.

Noted on the printed brochure.

[andrew whicker]

How does the Furniture build / design / Interior Designer / Customer relationship work? I was imagining that the ID contacts the customer with a brochure of their own? Or do they have my work memorized and contact me when they have a customer who's interiors match my work?

In other words, how much time am I spending keeping in the good graces of the ID's? That's the relationship that would be most important to me.

The other option would be going directly to the customer I suppose. But I'm not sure how to find people that need or want high end furniture other than IG, which seems inefficient for local customers.