Optimising the online journey for brands of home improvement products more important than ever before

Online orientation for home improvement products has been on the rise for many years now. Almost half of consumers search for information on home improvement products online, even though the majority of these products are bought off-line. For manufacturers and brands of home improvement products, this gives the opportunity to catch the eye of the consumer very early by establishing solid online presence in the right channels.

The importance of optimising that early online stage of the customer journey is increasing, as appears in the results of the latest report of USP Marketing Consultancy’s European Home Improvement Monitor. In the Q1 2022 report, we focus on the media orientation of consumers of home improvement products in eleven European countries. Results show that while online orientation is still rising steadily, the impact of that orientation on consumers’ decision making process is rising rapidly.

Online orientation is becoming the norm

As mentioned, nearly half of consumers search for information on home improvement solutions and products online. This shows the necessity for manufacturers and brands of home improvement products to present themselves online, as roughly half of your target group can be reached by a solid presence on online channels.

As the above graph shows, online orientation is found either useful or very useful by 80% of those consumers who searched for information on home improvement products online. All this shows that online orientation for home improvement products is more and more becoming the norm. So much so that we now see that this early orientation affects the consumers’ decision-making process.

Brand choice more often based on online information

The above graph shows that the brand choice for a certain home improvement product is increasingly made before visiting a shop to make the purchase. For brands and manufacturers, this puts more pressure on successfully playing the game of online marketing. By catching the eye of the consumer early in the journey, and by optimising the online journey for your brand, you can stay ahead of your competition.  To find out which online channels are used most by consumers for orientation on certain product groups in 11 European countries, we refer you to the Q1 2022 report of USP Marketing Consultancy’s European Home Improvement Monitor.