IKEA online strategy: what to learn from the Deco line giant

We are going to close our series of posts about the decoration giant talking about the online strategy of IKEA. Previously, we did of its inspiring story that began in the first half of the last century and its strategy of communication on other channels. 

In the last paragraph of the post on its communication strategy we called you to this post. That is because we realized that it is a deep enough issue and you would be much interested in that it deserved a new post. 

Before talking about communication, we should stop at its business strategy. 

Ecommerce has not exactly been a priority for IKEA. Its online store is fairly basic. In addition, it was not worried about creating its own eCommerce. That did not happened until 2016 (10 minutes ago, so to speak) when it began selling through this channel. 

However, although online sales may not be critical to IKEA´s strategy, it does not mean that it does not exploit the digital channel in its communication, by no means. 

We have already mentioned through this serie of posts that IKEA has two very marked features in its own DNA: 

For IKEA that came from sale catalogue and put all their interest to open physical stores, the fact of moving to Internet is, essentially, returning to the start box at a communication level. But on the other hand, it understands that its customers are digital and they are on the network. Because of that, it considers that it should be able to capitalize on this channel, not so much for online sale (that could be just 5% of its turnover), but as a way to be present enhancing its global branding and causing rotation in their physical stores. 

It is not difficult to imagine that, not having its online shop until very recently, it was not very interested in SEM channel (directly was virtually useless for them until recently)

Anyway, it is very interesting to see how IKEA applies lateral thinking to almost everything they do. It is well known the specific case of a campaign carried out in the United Kingdom. 

The goal was to generate visits to the store (so it enhanced bids from mobile devices as much as possible) and analyze a report offered by Adwords that IKEA considered key: visits to shop. This way of measuring offline conversions uses (of course) bigdata and algorithms to establish how many users have gone to retail physical after clicking on an advertisement and, moreover, it can tell you what creativity and what specific keyword is generating the visit. 

At a communication level, IKEA always saw its page as an opportunity to: 

Especially for these two points, SEO is a great ally, the best way to collect that information searches and help accelerate the advance of users through the process of purchase, find those products from home and having part of prospective work done. 

One of the campaigns better raised focusing on SEO that Iremember was that which it renamed hundreds of its products using the most searched key phrases on Google and it did not randomly: renowned products provided a solution to the problem (in many cases in a comic tone). For example, it changed the name of one of its plush dogs for  "Dad is allergic to pet hairs" or a USB charger for "Why does not he answer to my messages?" You can see these items on its website "ikearetailtherapy.se". 

IKEA social network strategies might be perfectly in the compilation that we presented recently. They are really good and pull lots of strings. 

Seriously: few companies of this size really understand this channel so well, in too many cases it becomes a place to leave promotions and respond to complaints from users. 

IKEA carries out a fairly intelligent management. On the one hand, we can say that the mix of content is balanced between: