This article will specifically focus on How We Do Marketing in the Wall-to-wall Carpet Industry, which is part of Zarif Carpets‘ collection of articles related to wall-to-wall carpets. Discover more articles related to the subject on our ‘All About Wall-to-wall Carpet‘ page.
If you are not familiar with the topic of wall-to-wall carpets, we recommend checking out our guide ‘Wall-to-wall Carpets: What You Should Know‘ first.
What Is Special About the Marketing in the Wall-to-wall Carpet Industry?
Wall-to-wall carpet and rug manufacturers typically follow traditional approaches, especially in Eastern countries. But what do we mean by “traditional”? Carpeting is a very old industry that has not been significantly updated with modern technologies. For example, as a professional computer programmer, you need to stay updated with the latest technologies in your field to work more effectively. Similarly, as a content creator, you should incorporate creativity into your work to make it more attractive. However, most carpet manufacturers continue to do what they have been doing for the past ten years, using the same designs, patterns, content, and marketing and advertising methods.
So, we call the industry traditional, meaning there are many challenges in marketing in the wall-to-wall carpet industry using modern and new methods. Of course, this varies from company to company and depends on factors such as organizational culture and competitive conditions.
In this article, we delve into what we do at Zarif Carpets to market our wall-to-wall carpets. As you may know, Zarif Carpets is the international brand of Zarif Mosavar, and our primary concern is selling our carpets internationally. Therefore, you will read about our marketing methods for export, especially in digital marketing.
Digital Marketing
Nowadays, digital marketing is an indispensable part of any business. So, let’s begin with what we do for digital marketing:
Content Creation
Content is king and forms the foundation of digital marketing in every industry. It can be an informative text, a picture, a video, or a mix of these elements. Content must be visually appealing, suitable for your target audience, and have a clear goal.
For instance, the content we create for our Afghan audience is entirely different from the content we create for our audience in Dubai. Over the years, we have discovered that Afghan people prefer wall-to-wall carpets in red, so we focus on creating content primarily featuring our red-colored carpets. This approach ensures that our content is tailored to our audience’s preferences.
As mentioned, this industry is traditional, and many companies limit their content creation to merely taking photos of their carpets. While images of the carpets are important, they are not sufficient. The entire content creation process must aim to help the audience and increase their knowledge about carpets.
At Zarif Carpets, our primary goal in content creation is to help the audience choose the right carpet that suits their needs.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving your website’s position in search engines, especially Google. Google is the first priority for almost all of us when searching for something. Enhancing your SEO score will significantly impact your business by driving more traffic to your website, which can lead to more sales leads.
There is just one straightforward way to improve the SEO score: creating good articles consistently. A good article provides useful and sufficient information about a subject in a simple and clear manner. Producing such articles must be done regularly over a long period of time.
SEO requires special expertise and should be handled by an expert. Beyond content creation, it involves skills in keyword research, SEO tools like GTM and GA, CMS platforms like WordPress, and many other areas.
At Zarif Carpets, we strive to produce two quality articles weekly. Our articles aim to help the audience gather more information about issues or questions when buying a wall-to-wall carpet. Although our business is B2B, our articles are written for end customers. These articles help audiences choose the right carpet and help us gain more traffic, creating a win-win situation.
Social Media
Social media is probably the most influential factor today. There is a significant opportunity for companies to publish their content on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and others.
Each social media platform has its own advantages and disadvantages, and managing each one effectively requires time and effort. It’s important to choose platforms that are most suitable for your target market. For example, in one of our markets, Iraq, Facebook is highly popular among people. Therefore, using Facebook allows us to more effectively deliver our content to our target audience compared to other social media platforms.
The key factor in social media is engaging the audience, which means creating content that prompts them to interact with us. This interaction can take the form of likes, comments, or messages.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers have a significant impact on the lives of many people, playing a crucial role in shaping market trends. Utilizing carpet-related influencers or famous interior designers is important for achieving better results when promoting your carpets through content.
We interviewed many interior designers and lifestyle bloggers to promote our wall-to-wall carpets. For instance, Mahshad Bazdar, a renowned architect in Tehran and Dubai, joined us for an interview during the International Carpet Exhibition in Tehran, 2023.
Lead Generation
Lead generation refers to the process of finding and collecting sales leads who have the potential to purchase from you. It is crucial to find these leads and nurture them until they become customers, especially when you want to expand your business.
When we were about to start exporting wall-to-wall carpets, we used web scraping techniques to efficiently collect sales leads from our target country. As Zarif Carpets expanded, we began to obtain our sales leads from other sources as well, such as our website, social media and events.
Event Participation
Participating in carpet-related events such as exhibitions and conferences is always beneficial. At an exhibition, you can showcase your carpets, meet potential sales leads face-to-face, become familiar with the latest industry trends, assess your competitors, and even sell your carpets.
There are some global and popular exhibitions in the carpet industry, such as Domotex. However, we recommend identifying the popular exhibitions relevant to your target country.
At Zarif Carpets, we participate in many international exhibitions annually, either as an exhibitor or visitors. For example, we attended the recent Domotex in Dubai and CFE in Istanbul as visitors. We will also attend TEXTILLEGPROM, held in Russia on September 17-20, 2024.
Field Marketing
In today’s world, most of us have experienced online shopping, and many people prefer it. However, visiting stores and shopping in person is still a significant part of life. Since we are discussing a B2B business, physical shopping becomes even more prominent. Therefore, field marketing and face-to-face marketing of your wall-to-wall carpets remain excellent options.
We use this type of marketing to enter new markets. For example, a couple of weeks ago (as of July 2024, when this article was written), we conducted field marketing in Kurdistan, Iraq. Through our market research, we discovered that this market prefers cut pile tufted carpets with high filament yarn, this insight gave us a broader perspective of what to expect in this field marketing.
Final Words
Everything we’ve discussed would be meaningless without quality carpets and excellent customer service. It’s crucial to remember that an unsatisfied customer can destroy an entire marketing campaign, whereas a satisfied customer can provide lifetime marketing for your brand.
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