How to activate furniture content across digital channels

The digital home furnishing journey is anything but linear

Most furniture shopping journeys begin online. Today’s shoppers discover brands via various platforms, depending on their digital habits and demographics, including:

• TikTok
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Organic search (for specific furniture keywords)
• LLMs like ChatGPT
• Product review sites

With a robust strategy in place, you can make your furniture discoverable across these various channels. However, awareness is just the first step. Customers often go on to browse brand sites and marketplaces to compare items, with 73% of shoppers comparing at least three retailers before buying.

Customers may even visit physical stores to see pieces in person. From there, they may pick up a catalogue, return to your digital shelf, or both.

On this winding journey, customers expect rich, consistent content everywhere they see your product—from dimensions to materials to sourcing and beyond. 

Where most furniture brands lose content control

Accurate content is a key tool in converting buyers to high-consideration furniture products. However, outdated systems make it difficult for some furniture brands to deliver.

As a furniture brand, you manage numerous stock-keeping units (SKUs), with more arriving all the time. Marketing, sales, and product teams need to collaborate to update product information whenever changes or new assets are introduced.

Without an efficient system to manage product content, you risk introducing friction points:

• Disjointed assets: Every product needs to match up with the correct image (including color and material). If customers are met with conflicting information, they may abandon their carts altogether.
• Outdated product information: Do your mobile ads and organic social content align with your retail portals? If not, you’ll create confusion, and with it, distrust.
• Inconsistent descriptions: Customers don’t have time to decode conflicting product specifications across sales channels. Instead, they’ll find another brand.

This is why control over your content throughout the product lifecycle is critical.

What “content activation” really means in furniture

If your team thinks of “content activation” as publishing new content, you’re only working on part of the conversion equation. Setting content live is just the first step in the activation cycle. 

Next, you need to syndicate it across your channels while taking their differences into account.

Syndicating enriched product content

Furniture brands should establish a single point of truth for their catalogues. This allows for easy management of descriptions, photos, dimensions, and material specifications. These are the bread and butter of your print catalogue.

With that in place, your marketing and product teams should collaborate to enrich content across your digital channels.

Enriched furniture content might include:

• User-generated content (UGC): User-generated photos help prospective buyers visualize furniture in various contexts and lighting conditions. Aggregating all UGC in a single location allows for easy syndication.
• 360° visualizations: 78% of consumers want to see 3D visualizations. They also want to customize them further based on their chosen fabric, finish, and accessories, making visualization a must-have.
• Related products: Charts and interactive comparisons can help customers choose between similar inventory. Likewise, you can cross-sell by making related and compatible products easily discoverable.

While these sales assets should be front and center, you should also syndicate with awareness of each channel.

Tailoring for individual channels

If your product is available on other marketplaces, consider syndication with their technical capabilities and user bases in mind. For example, your photographs may need to be optimized for their specifications.

Likewise, the 3D renderings you’ve created for your digital shelf may be clunky or even incompatible with some retail channels. Be particularly aware of how product information appears on mobile-first marketplaces.

Content also resonates differently on different channels. Gathering quantitative data on interactions and conversions can help you decide what to highlight, where. 

Why manual syndication can’t keep up with channel demands

Manual syndication is time-consuming, especially if you track product data via spreadsheets or sales decks with custom templates. Moreover, disconnected systems hinder teams and increase the likelihood of manual errors. As you introduce new products, the problems are only compounded. 

Because customers conduct extensive comparison shopping for high-consideration purchases, inconsistencies like these at any point in the journey can cause confusion, friction, and ultimately, lost sales.

The solution? A PIM software. A product information management (PIM) software aggregates and structures your product data, guides enrichment, and syndicates it with a few clicks.

How Inriver powers channel-ready furniture content

Furniture brands, much like their products, need to be equal parts eye-catching and reliable. Activating consistent, compelling, and enriched digital content across all channels is key to a positive brand experience. And with brand trust comes increased sales.

The Inriver PIM is uniquely attuned to the needs of furniture brands with countless SKUs. Our solution imports all your assets—including spreadsheets, PDFs, supplier info, and UGC—to create a custom data set that establishes hierarchical relationships between your products, simplifying comparisons and cross-selling. Our system also identifies opportunities for enrichment based on real-time data.

With Inriver’s powerful tools at your fingertips, you can effortlessly syndicate to marketplaces, retailers, D2C, and print, bringing new products to market faster and more consistently.