If you’re in the furniture or home wares industry, you must have heard about Coco Republic’s massive success and ongoing sales for their well-known products.

Their site is currently ranking in the 24th spot at the subcategory furniture in the whole world.

Of course, this just illustrates their online visitors. The reality that also includes their offline sales is even better looking, as they’re one of the top industry players in Australia.

Their revenue growth speaks for itself, as they have managed to double their sales just in the past year, reaching a total of $63.4M at the beginning of 2021.

With a history of over 40 years, Coco Republic has been a well-established furniture provider that differentiates itself with stylish products. But is it just their stylish products that guarantee their success?

This article goes through the exact marketing steps and tactics that a multi-million dollar company follows to reach such a success. Following real numbers, data and results, we’ll get behind the scenes of Coco Republic and their strategy.

Let’s do it step by step.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
[TIP #1] – Create a clear brand positioning and messaging that resonates with your key audience
[TIP #2] – Focus on the top 3 social media platforms that generate traffic for furniture & home wares websites
[TIP #3] – Seize the keywords and fine-tune your landing pages to match your audience’s searches
[TIP #4] – Take your PR to the next level — associate with top personalities in the industry
[TIP #5] – Create a seamless experience for your users by making the best use of social commerce
[TIP #6] – Harness the power of your top-performing channel by creating more content for that specific audience
[TIP #7] – Make your customers feel special by creating a sense of exclusivity within your newsletter strategy
[TIP #8] – Create the ultimate ad strategy to turn your prospects into customers

Coco Republic was founded by Paul Spon-Smith in 1979 and it represents a legendary example of how family-owned businesses can become leaders with the right strategy in place.

❝ Coco Republic has been an admired, family-operated fixture in Australia’s luxury lifestyle sector for more than 40 years, led by Chairman and Founder, Paul Spon-Smith. The business is deeply embedded in Australian culture and design, having used market insights and a deep consumer understanding to stay at the forefront of omnichannel Australian retail through thought leadership, product and technology innovation, and data analytics.

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Their organic website traffic showcases an average number of ~60k organic visits per month, which illustrates just how big of an audience they have.

Not to mention that with a small search on Google Trends, we can witness how their brand name is increasing in popularity through the years.

[TIP #1] – Create a clear brand positioning and messaging that resonates with your key audience

One core aspect where Coco Republic excels at is its branding and clear positioning on the market. They are self-proclaimed luxury products providers, and their entire image resonates with this high-end experience they have built.

What are the main characteristics that reinforce their unique brand identity?

The main goal when creating a clear brand positioning is making your target market look at your brand in a distinct way. Coco Republic does so, simply with the help of the following:

1. A clear vision that can drive aspiration

Their communication is driven by this statement, which can be found on all their major communication channels. This vision can drive a sense of liberty and uniqueness, to the point where their clients picture their dream homes built with Coco Republic products.

The product presentation also includes this element, as they sparkle their prospect customers’ imagination by representing the best placement for every product visually. For example, if you visit one of their category pages, you can visualise both the product and its best setting when hovering over the image.

Product Presentation

2. Experiences

Successful marketing strategies touch on the audience’s emotional cords. Coco Republic taps into this tactic by enabling experiences even before their customers buy their products.

From going into the details of the design to associating certain lifestyles or other products to their furniture pieces, the company manages to create an entire experience to which their audience can relate.

3. Differentiated, but simple

 The main goal of brand positioning and successful communication is to differentiate from competitors through a visible set of traits and practices. However, simplicity always wins, especially when you want to tackle a big market and must have a large set of target personas in mind.

Simple branding does not equal a poor choice of elements — on the contrary, it equals a clear positioning that can drive action and enable a larger means for discovery.

4. Big success requires a global consumer perspective

Ultimately, if you want to follow Coco Republic’s success, your brand has to have a global positioning from the start. 

Many brands fall into the common mistake of marketing themselves to a small segment of the audience, and not having a global perspective in mind.

With today’s fast-spreading information, people can discover your brand even from the opposite side of the globe, and it’s in your hands the opportunity to make them relate to it. 

Make sure you have:

• an omnichannel presence so that your prospects can find you anywhere they will look for you
• an international brand identity (avoid using local phrasing or any aspect that could limit your brand to a tiny audience)
• communication materials that can resonate with a wider set of target personas

e.g. Coco Republic inserts a wide variety of design references to cover a wider set of tastes and even cultural resonance.

[TIP #2] – Focus on the top 3 social media platforms that generate traffic for furniture & home wares websites

Even though social traffic represents only 2.14% of Coco Republic’s website traffic, it still counts to over 4K visits per month. 

Social media is also a powerful method to keep an active presence for your audience and generate organic traffic. The higher the quality of your content, the more your audience will keep your brand in mind and search for it later.

Effective social media platforms for furniture and home wares are different from other industries. As we can conclude from Coco Republic’s social results, Pinterest rules the scene, followed by Facebook and Instagram.

There’s no surprise Coco Republic is winning at the Pinterest game, as they craft their content exactly how this platform likes it:

• high-quality images with no faces, little background, and multiple colours
• clear content with a high congruence between images and text
• descriptive captions with short text and highly-searched keywords

And even though their number of subscribers isn’t that high for such a well-known company, their monthly visits round up to almost 1M.

Also, every single pin is connected to their website. This is a vital practice, as their Pinterest visitors can get all their product-related questions answered with just a click.

Moving on to their most followed platform — Instagram, the social strategy seems to resonate much with Pinterest’s, as these two are the most visual mediums. They currently have 389,000 followers on this social platform.

While analysing their Instagram content strategy, I have identified the same recipe for all the posts: high-quality image, followed by a descriptive caption, and always four keywords: #CocoRepublic + 3 more top-performing ones that resonate with that product.

🖱️Pro Tip: Hashtags are game-changers in an Instagram strategy. Research the top-performing hashtags on your niche domain and accompany every post with a number of 3-4. As Coco Republic does it, it is best to also add your branded hashtag — it can be either your brand name or a catchy and short tagline. 

Coco Republic is making the best use of Instagram, as it not only increases their overall traffic but generates more brand awareness. Their current branded hashtag #CocoRepublic is at over 18k posts, which translates into a loyal audience. Your loyal audience ultimately becomes brand advocates by advertising your company for free.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a more action-driven platform, and Coco Republic has understood this aspect. Every post is followed by a CTA to their site.

💡Key Takeaways: Coco Republic keeps consistent posting across all these channels and synchronises their content to resemble. Also, their strategy is built around selling, as you see each post emphasises a product, and it is always accompanied by necessary details or site links, so they don’t make their visitors lose interest.

[TIP #3] – Seize the keywords and fine-tune your landing pages to match your audience’s searches

In the home wares & furniture industry, people mostly directly search for their favourite or needed products. With some in-depth research, you can find out where you can meet your target personas’ needs and create converting landing pages for them.

Coco Republic’s website traffic is 90% organic, with 60k+ visits/month. They do this by making the best use of simple keywords like:

Another great practice that they follow is categorising their products to the core. They indeed have a large selection of products, but creating special categories for these, takes their SEO to the next level.

This will also help your customers better navigate through your website and find their favourite products. Put simply, it can be transformed into a hook to keep them engaged in your pages.

Landing pages have the most potential to drive conversions, and this is why you have to focus on optimising both existing and new content.

When creating our landing pages, the keyword strategy has to lead the way and not the other way around. Best practices include:

• creating the same or similar structure to help search engines understand our content

• having clear URLs 

• building backlinks (authoritative links that Google recognises as quality content and help your pages rank better)

💡 Key Takeaways: Conduct research to identify what your audience is searching for the most on Google, and build your landing pages around them. Product categorising, landing page structure, simple and long-tailed keywords are a must if you want to transform your visitors into customers.

[TIP #4] – Take your PR to the next level — associate with top personalities in the industry

Good PR always improves a brand image or even helps it reach a larger audience. As Coco Republic has a high-end, luxury image, they have collaborated with industry personalities that can only validate or take this to the next level.

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What is more exquisite than Vogue? A PR collaboration with this timeless brand that is a trendsetter in anything fashion or design related is a great success for a company that strives to be an initiator in lifestyle choices.

The association between Coco Republic and Vogue’s Editor in Chief — Neale Whitaker is a strong boost in their credibility, and such activities are a great means for driving sales.

It has also generated other media appearances as well — Coco Republic- A night with Neale Whitaker. Such types of cross-promotions highly contribute to website traffic.

Another great collab and a smart move for Coco Republic is their alliance with Ralph Lauren, giving once again a boost to their luxury image and reputation.

Also, they are currently expanding their business globally with investment from Story3, and this type of exposure is skyrocketing their searches in the US.

💡Key Takeaways: Find top personalities and brands to associate with to establish credibility, position your brand as a category leader and improve website traffic. If you’re a small brand at the beginning of its journey, you can research micro or nano influencers, as well as brands that share the same values as you, to gain more exposure.

[TIP #5] – Create a seamless experience for your users by making the best use of social commerce

Social commerce has become the best extension of eCommerce since the changes in customer behaviour due to the pandemic. By creating a seamless experience and not forcing customers to leave their favourite apps when shopping, you’re one step closer to creating brand advocates.

Coco Republic has done this with each of their top-performing platforms:

• on Pinterest, by directly attaching the product link to the image (as mentioned above)
• Instagram shop

• Facebook shop

Luxury and high-end products usually function on a different premise than the rest — their prices aren’t displayed publicly and customers have to request a quote when interested.

Just the fact that Coco Republic showcases its prices everywhere, gets one step closer to their customers, and widen their access to their public. By having all the information at hand, your customers are already engaged with your business, and closer to the selling process.

💡Key Takeaways: As the famous Steve Krug book says about web visitors and Internet users in general — Don’t Make Me Think. Always explore ways of making your prospects’ lives easier when interacting with your brand and ensuring a seamless experience. Most social media tools also offer a shopping platform that can integrate directly with your site, and it’s a great addition to your selling process.

[TIP #6] – Harness the power of your top-performing channel by creating more content for that specific audience

It’s essential to re-adapt your eCommerce strategy to how the audience responds, and this is where Coco Republic doesn’t hesitate to boost their content.

As previously observed, Coco Republic is the most engaged on Pinterest. If you take a look at their business profile, the main reason is that they have a finely-curated board with aesthetically pleasing photos. But the secret they are leveraging here is to also create articles that match their audience’s search:

[TIP #7] – Make your customers feel special by creating a sense of exclusivity within your newsletter strategy

Newsletters are well-known to include exclusive offers and promotions that are not communicated elsewhere. Not only does Coco Republic include this type of promotional marketing, but they further reinforce a sense of exclusivity by creating a sense of lifestyle and belonging to a community.

e.g.: in this newsletter, they create an association between the units they’re selling and refined cocktails, to make their customers feel special.

The explanation behind why a sense of exclusivity is a powerful tool for marketing is greatly explained within The Scarcity Principle. This draws down to the simple formula of sample and demand — the more rare the product or service (or even experience in this case), the more valuable it is.

💡Key Takeaways: Always keep in mind your target audience when drafting your strategy. The focus should be on them — how they can interact with your products, what their benefits are, what added value these have on their lives.

[TIP #8] – Create the ultimate ad strategy to turn your prospects into customers

OK, but how do we turn all these platforms, data and statistics into actual revenue? Well, understanding the importance of all the above steps is key for creating a game-changing ad strategy. Or the ultimate converting strategy, we might call it.

With our branding in place, well-defined positioning, real insight into our data and so on, we can turn our visitors into loyal customers.

Ads are paid communication tools or messages used in marketing and advertising campaigns to raise potential customers’ awareness, interest, and demand for the items or services being promoted.

An effective ad strategy for your brand can bring the following benefits:

• Increase brand & product awareness
• Differentiate your brand from the competition (and making you stand out)
• Attract potential customers
• Educate your customers (when there is a new solution or product)
• Increase sales volume & ROI
• Improve your overall brand image
• Support other business operations

To make a summary, a successful ad campaign employs strategies to determine how, when, where, and why a seller’s marketing efforts are being carried out. We’ll further analyse Coco Republic’s ad strategy to understand why it is vital for online retailers and what real benefits can be garnered from this practice.

1. They increase website visits with a leading PPC campaign

 Being the first result of Google searches is not as easy as it seems. Not even in the case of your own brand name. 

Effective PPC (pay per click) campaigns ensure your position in Google searches, and most of all, in your customers’ preferences. Competitors can resort to a tricky marketing medium, called PPC Competitor Campaign, where they use your brand name as the main keyword in their ad setup, in order to rank before you in searches. This often leads to a loss of customer base or even lower interest in your brand.

The second factor that can downgrade your position in Google searches is having a common name or one made of easily mistaken for terms, which can be Coco Republic’s case.

However, Coco Republic’s marketing efforts are once again top-notch as it is the leading result in searches and hasn’t been dethroned in all these years.

2. They focus on two different directions at the same time — paid search and organic search

In order to comprehend the importance of the two combined, let’s first analyse the benefits of each type of method:

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Using a combination of paid and organic search can maximise your presence on the SERP. Organic content is also one of the best in terms of ROI, as it can generate website traffic with no financial investment.

We can see that Coco Republic’s organic content game is getting better and better, and they are leveraging both branded and non-branded keywords:

One of their most popular searches at the moment is the Richmond Showroom, which proves that your prospects’ searches can be the simplest, and you have to keep in mind to integrate all the informational content about your products (especially in ecommerce — this is one of the most searched type of content):

3. They top these up with Google Shopping Ads

If we’re talking about ecommerce, Google Shopping Ads is a chapter not to be missed. 

One great benefit of using these types of ads is that they represent the last but one step in the conversion process, as they directly offer all the product details and shopping buttons in one search. 

By combining visual elements with all the informational content and a CTA, these ads are your must-have if you want to meet your customers’ online queries and send more qualified users to your site.

4. They successfully integrate their visual appearance in their ad strategy

 Being very aesthetically pleasing is one of Coco Republic’s predominant brand personality traits, and they capitalise on this with their ads’ strategy. Their Google Ads thoroughly follow branding guidelines and blend product images with complementary text visuals:

5. They adapt their strategies per location, devices used and type of user

 Keeping a versatile approach and addressing all your target personas is a game-changer in marketing. But what aspects are the most definitive?

Let’s take them one at a time:

• Location

 Although the adoption of digital technology in recent years has massively led to globalisation in ecommerce, and we now buy similar products as the rest of the globe, there still are clear differentiators in buying behaviour based on our location. For example, some countries are less willing to purchase internationally, so it is best to keep this in mind when going internationally with your offer.

Coco Republic markets internationally and applies its online consumer behaviour statistics to its ads. In the following example, we’ll observe a difference in the discount offered, which can be based on the spending behaviour of each country.

• Device

Users’ behaviour differs on desktop and mobile, and the type of content you offer them should follow these patterns. If we analyse Coco Republic’s traffic based on device, we’ll see a clear leader in desktop.

There is a clear explanation for this behaviour, as Google lets us know that 93% of people who used their mobile for research made a purchase, but only 17% made it on the same mobile device.

✍🏽 Moral of the story: craft ads based on user intent, and adapt to each device’s behaviour. For example, mobile users like video ads more than desktop users

• Type of user

 Your ecommerce site can have three types of target buyers:

1. People who have previously shopped from you or are at least aware of your online store
2. People who are looking for a product similar to yours
3. People who would be interested in your product if they knew about it

This brings us to how to segment your public and create ads on each type of behaviour. For example, Coco Republic does this greatly by retargeting people who have previously shopped from them or have been on their site. 

Whenever you’re interested in a product or visit a site, that represents pivotal behavioural information for a marketer. The following example is a retargeting campaign I personally experienced, and I find it very efficient how they use just the image to trigger my consumer behaviour.

6. They create strong CTAs

 Another vital practice they’re reinforcing within their ads is the feeling of urgency and strong calls to action: 

If you want to drive conversions, you have to make the best use of copywriting hacks that encourage your viewers to take action. These include creating feelings of urgency and exclusivity.

7. They create a seamless congruence between their ads and the associated landing pages

This example features a carousel ad, composed of a set of images, each linking to its own product. If we click on this image, we’ll land on a high-converting landing page:

This is also a common and very efficient practice for Shopify stores, as you have the option to create personalised ads right from the platform. By following the same behavioural patterns I have mentioned in a previous section, we can target users with ads containing their favourite products and associated product pages.

Do you want to learn how to do all the marketing right from your Shopify store? Let’s have a call

8. They always adapt their content to each platform’s audience

 Their Facebook and Instagram ads are also predominantly visual. In the following two examples, you can see how careful they are with their audiences, with subtleties in each copywriting caption:

The two images in the examples are the same ad, propelled on two different platforms: Instagram and Facebook. When creating an ad strategy, it is important to have in mind the different needs of these platforms’ audiences and adapt accordingly. A simple copywriting differentiation as follow for inspiration and follow for design news, inspiration and styling advice emphasise how Coco Republic are mastering their strategies.

💡Key Takeaways: This type of social media coverage and campaigns focus on the objective of building brand awareness and keeping a close relationship with their viewers. This is most used in a mature phase of a brand’s communication and doesn’t apply to smaller stores, looking to increase their sales. Keep this step in mind to pursue after ensuring brand recognition and customer interest within the first pool of prospects.

9. They keep their community engaged

 Besides well-defined copywriting, visuals, and targeting, one method through which Coco Republic drives engagement with their ads is by TELLING their audience to engage.

Giveaways are not that common for high-end products, but doing such activities is exactly what gives them a competitive edge. Below is an example of a social media giveaway Coco Republic has advertised and therefore, successfully driven engagement.

An effective ad strategy is the one that focuses on the right objectives to match your business goals, and with the right materials for your target audience. It leverages tactics to understand the consumer’s needs and optimise your ecommerce sales.

How you can apply a successful ad strategy:

• Step 1: Analyse & understand your traffic
• Identify where your website visitors are coming from and use this data as the main pillar for your ad strategy. By amplifying what’s already working, you can explode your online sales! 

• Step 2: Focus on conversions
• Strong calls to action, specific, benefit-rich product pages and a natural converting flow can be thought of before you create your ads. 

• Step 3: Get seen everywhere with an omnipresence approach
• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! Use a set of your top-performing channels to focus your strategy on, as well as leverage all the behavioural data at hand. By keeping an omnichannel approach, you’ll be at your audience’s top of mind.

Propel Your Online Furniture/Home Wares Store to Success

Do you want to follow Coco Republic’s path to success? Here’s what you need:

• An online furniture/home wares store. You’ll need to have a website where you can publish content, and at least one product you’ve sold before.

• Willing to have a designated budget to invest in your marketing efforts. Results come only with investment.

• Patience to see results. Results don’t come overnight, and you need to have the patience to see leads, conversions, and customers.

If you meet all the above criteria and want to commit to turning your online business into a sought-after company, then let’s have a call. You’re a few steps away from your dream revenue!