Flooring Industry Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide to the Customer Journey

Flooring is one of those things you don’t think about until you need it. To most of us, it’s simply a memory of our grandparents old linoleum floors, or stained carpet that evoke certain memories. 

However, behind all of this is a bustling industry with a huge breadth of surfaces, styles, colors, and more. Understandably, this makes choosing new flooring very complicated as the multitude of options cause a sort of analysis paralysis.

Because of this, flooring marketing is also incredibly challenging as there are often times many steps of consideration, decision makers, and parties involved in the process of purchase. This article will explore marketing strategy used across the flooring industry with a particular focus on digital marketing and in-store experiences.

Looking for data-backed insights? Read my follow-up: Lessons From Spending $15M on Flooring Ads

Understanding the Flooring Industry Business Model

The flooring industry has several key players involved in distributing, selling, and installing product. Among these, the two most important channels are manufacturers and retailers.

• Manufacturers: Design, create, and distribute the product
• Retailers: Sell the product to consumers (Customers of manufacturers)
• Consumers: Purchase product from retailers (customers of retail)

While manufacturers focus on creating demand through product education, retailers drive foot traffic and close sales. Direct-to-consumer models exist, but most flooring buyers still prefer in-person experiences — making collaboration between the two channels essential.

Key Flooring Marketing Players

Both manufacturers and retailers play central roles in the purchase process, but occupy different stages and efforts.

• Manufacturers: Focus on educational marketing and brand awareness — content, visualizers, and design inspiration.
  • Providing educational resources on a website (i.e. blog, installation materials, warranties, etc.)
  • Advertising (pay per click, social media, traditional media)
  • Better in-store experiences (product showcases)
• Retailers: Focus on localized promotions and showroom experiences that convert.
  • Better educational resources (pricing, installation, style lookbooks)
  • Proactive customer support (sales reps)
  • Incentives (Financing, seasonal discounts/promotions)
• Together: Sharing data between both parties (leads, style preferences, warranties) improves visibility into which marketing drives in-store sales.

The Flooring Customer Journey: A Comprehensive Breakdown

The consumer journey involves a long process split between online and offline channels. Both manufacturers and retailers have the opportunity to engage with consumers along this journey, but each phase has its key player.

Digital Marketing Customer Journey

Offline Marketing Customer Journey

Awareness Stage: How Flooring Manufacturers Create Demand

Key Player: Manufacturers

At the awareness stage, consumers recognize a need but haven’t yet identified a solution. Manufacturers play a leading role here through educational content—blogs, videos, and influencer partnerships that introduce product benefits and differentiate materials.

Creative variety matters: visual storytelling, lifestyle imagery, and problem-solution messaging build brand recognition and guide customers into the research phase.

For example, a consumer that has a 10 year-old dog may learn that there are fully waterproof vinyl floors with benefits like ease of maintenance and easy cleaning specific to their needs. 

Consideration Stage: Collaborative Flooring Marketing Strategies

Key Players: Manufacturers, Retailers

In the consideration phase, consumers compare flooring types, brands, and price points. Both manufacturers and retailers share responsibility: manufacturers provide detailed resources like buying guides, product catalogs, and visualizer tools, while retailers enhance the online experience with clear pricing and calls to action.

For manufacturers, this is a key step in providing value that’s differentiated from competitors. This could be a more streamlined website experience, a visualizer tool, unique marketing offers or high quality content that details expectations and next steps.

Digital tools like Roomvo that personalize recommendations or capture email leads bridge users from research to intent. Many customers also visit local retailers during this stage to validate their options in person—a crucial step in high-touch industries like flooring.

Popups offering incentives or guides can aid in email capture as well as providing additional content for users to engage with. Once a user has built a room visualization, it can be sent through to their email and a lead is captured in the tool.

Calls to action within the tool direct the user to the next desired action, and subsequently increase conversion potential. Optimizing tools to capture user information and provide a more seamless experience is becoming the norm in the flooring industry.

Consideration doesn’t only happen online, however. In an industry where most consumers are looking for a personalized experience, visits to a local retailer happen during consideration.

Evaluation Stage: Bridging Online and In-Store Flooring Experiences

Key Players: Retailers & Manufacturers

At the evaluation stage, online research turns into in-person validation. Manufacturer tools like retailer locators help guide customers to local stores, while digital campaigns keep brands visible during this decision window.

In-store, displays and merchandising reinforce online messaging—organized collections, color palettes, and knowledgeable staff make product discovery effortless. When retailers and manufacturers share data from these interactions, they create a continuous feedback loop that shortens the path from interest to purchase.

Manufacturers must create visually striking displays that make product discovery and experience easy, organizing based on colors, features, and collections are just a few ways to make browsing feel easier.

Retailers must educate sales reps on the breadth of product offerings to ensure they provide support to customers as they browse. This can be aided by manufacturers with regular sales enablement tools (product specs, guides, lookbooks).

Measuring In-Store Impact with Store Visit Tracking

Even with great digital marketing, the majority of flooring purchases still happen in person — making it essential to connect online engagement with showroom traffic.

Store visit tracking helps flooring brands understand which ads, audiences, and campaigns actually drive customers into retail locations. By linking ad impressions or clicks to real-world visits, marketers can finally measure ROI across the full customer journey.

Platforms like Google Ads, Meta, and programmatic partners (e.g., GroundTruth or Foursquare) now allow modeled or privacy-safe store visit measurement. These insights can reveal, for example, which YouTube or Display creatives are generating the most in-store visits — even when direct sales data isn’t available.

📊 Example: In one campaign, video sequences featuring customer stories drove 2× more store visits than brand-intro ads — proving which content truly inspired action.

For flooring manufacturers and retailers, this data is transformative. It validates upper-funnel investments (like video or display) that previously couldn’t be tied to revenue and ensures local ad dollars drive measurable showroom traffic.

👉 For a deep dive on setup across Google, Meta, and programmatic channels, see Three Ways to Track Store Visits (and Prove Real-World ROI).

Conversion Stage: Removing Barriers in the Flooring Purchase Process

Key Players: Manufacturers and Retailers

Once consumers understand what product they are interested in, the key message shifts to an offer – what will they need next to make a decision?

There are some common blockers to making a decision when purchasing flooring:

• What will it look like in my space?
• How will the color match my room?
• What does the material feel like underfoot?

To alleviate these blockers, marketing offers a set of solutions to better compare flooring options.

Robust tracking in your CRM to import offline conversions through Meta or pass hashed customer data is especially critical for success in this phase.

Sample Programs: A Critical Flooring Marketing Tool

Sample programs ease common buying hesitations by letting customers see and feel products in their own space. Beyond reassurance, they’re powerful data tools—capturing style preferences, location, and contact details that connect online interest to offline sales.

Samples can be free or sold for a small fee, but either way they generate high-intent leads manufacturers can share with retailers to personalize follow-up and improve closing rates. This same principle of personalized guidance extends to another key offering: Design Services.

The Role of Design Services in Flooring Marketing

Design services act as a virtual interior consultant, helping customers choose flooring styles that match their home’s aesthetic and functional needs. Whether offered by manufacturers or retailers, these programs personalize the shopping experience and capture valuable customer data—style preferences, contact info, and design feedback.

Often provided free of charge, design consultations not only build trust but also connect ad-driven leads to verified sales, giving marketing teams direct insight into campaign ROI.

Financing Options as a Flooring Marketing Strategy

Financing options help customers overcome cost hesitation, turning interest into action. Offered by both manufacturers and retailers through third-party partners, financing programs make large purchases accessible while capturing pre-sale data like credit eligibility and purchase intent.

When structured with privacy-safe data sharing, they provide another measurable link between marketing efforts and final conversion.

Installation Planning: A Critical Phase in the Flooring Journey

Key Players: Retailers, Manufacturers

At this stage of the journey, flooring contractors enter into the conversation. Often times, a consumer will find a flooring contractor through their local retailer, but may also use online resources to obtain quotes (think platforms like Thumbtack or Angi).

Some of the key considerations at this stage of the journey are:

• Price (cost of the service)
• Timing (how long the installation will take)
• Reputation (experience, past projects)

Retailers and manufacturers can provide guidance during this process with a network of trusted installers. This not only builds a positive relationship with installers, but also provides an additional service to consumers.

Solving for the common challenge of not knowing which installer to pick only helps to speed the consumer along in making their decision. While the purchase is made in-store, the decision is made before that.

Purchase Decision: Finalizing the Flooring Sale

Key Players: Retailers, Manufacturers

At this stage, the consumer has their project planned – product style chosen, square footage of renovation determined, installer picked – all that’s left is to go to their local retailer, credit card in hand.

There are several key considerations for retailers and manufacturers at this stage:

• Warranty information
• Care & maintenance information
• Customer sentiment feedback

Manufacturers can offer a warranty in order to capture customer information when retailers don’t share that information direct. It’s important that in-store sales material makes this clear, and the value propositions are communicated.

Warranties not only help the consumer buy with confidence, but they also open up a line of communication with the manufacturer for any potential questions or concerns.

Maintenance and care information can be provided through email marketing, both from manufacturers and retailers as a value-add that builds trust with the consumer. Retailers can obtain this information from manufacturers as part of an ongoing relationship built on the sharing of content and data.

Customer sentiment is key to understanding how to improve the purchase process. This can be measured in the form of surveys or ratings/reviews. Both captured at the point of sale or during the post-purchase period.

Post-Purchase: Maximizing Flooring Customer Satisfaction

Key Players: Retailers, Manufacturers

Once the purchase is made and installation is completed, flooring businesses must look to capture customer feedback including:

• Reviews/Testimonials
• User-generated content (UGC)

Reviews/Testimonials are most easily captured through email marketing. Setting up an automated sequence following conversion events (for example, 3 months after a sample order) is recommended.

Incentivizing reviews with add-ons, store credits, or features on the website are good considerations if email response rates are low.

Social media marketing drives effective UGC capture with the use of hashtags or contests. Remember, organic social followers are your evangelists – treat them as such and you’ll tap into a powerful source of content marketing.

Even with a perfect marketing strategy, flooring marketing is challenging. For more on effective messaging at each stage of the journey, see Ad Creative Examples That Convert: 6 Winning Strategies for 2025.

Overcoming Flooring Marketing Challenges

Along with a complicated customer journey, there are some key challenges flooring marketers face:

• Lack of direct attribution
• Long customer journey
• Fragmented path to purchase

Solving Attribution Challenges in Flooring Marketing Campaigns

A challenged faced by most marketers in 2025, direct attribution is crucial to understanding what marketing tactics are effective at driving new business. Creating a system of data capture that tracks users throughout their journey is essential to this process.

This can be categorized into different stages of touchpoint along the path. At each stage, some user data (most likely email addresses) should be captured that builds a user profile.

Capturing Customer Data at Early Touchpoints

Use channels like Google Ads or Social Media Marketing to acquire new leads.

• Guides (Educational Resources)
• Newsletter
• Room Visualizer Leads

Middle Touchpoint Marketing Strategies

Use email marketing, optimize website design to drive action, and utilize search engine marketing.

• Sample Order
• Design Services Appointment
• Financing Application
• Foot Traffic Attribution

Conversion Tracking at Late Touchpoints

Use follow up campaigns through email and marketing materials at point of sale.

• Warranty Submission
• Survey Response

This process stitches together a user journey through user data to offer deeper insight into:

• Time in each step
• Success rate of each touchpoint
• Scalability based on CPA

The key with this process is to track all touchpoints with persistent UTMs, stored in a CRM (customer relationship management) tool. This will allow for the creation of unique customer profiles that can be scored based on their proximity to sale.

Effective Strategies for Long Flooring Customer Journeys

The customer journey can take up to 6 months, or even longer in some cases, making analysis of what’s really driving results very challenging. There are two important steps in the process that need to be considered:

• New user acquisition
• Re-engagement

These two tactics fall into the consumer journey at different stages:

• New user acquisition: Awareness, Consideration
• Re-engagement: Evaluation, Conversion, Installation Planning

Different marketing channels will align with each depending on the goal:

• New user acquisition: SEO strategy, traditional marketing, social media marketing
• Re-engagement: Retargeting ads, email marketing, conversion rate optimization, customer support 

Given the length of the customer journey, re-engagement is crucial, but it can’t consist of the entire strategy. It’s recommended to have a 70/30 split in effort, new user acquisition to re-engagement.

Bridging the Fragmented Path to Purchase Through Digital Marketing

In today’s media ecosystem, cheap leads and profitable sales are not a given. It’s taking more tact and long-term thinking than ever before to run a profitable marketing campaign.

Due to this, the time for retailers and manufacturers to operate as completely separate entities is quickly ending. Establishing a relationship of sharing – data, content, leads, etc. – only works to support both parties.

Reference back to the consumer journey diagram above. The consumer has been in-market for up to a month before ever engaging with a retailer. Likewise, the in-store purchase happens completely independently from the manufacturers control. 

This presents problems for both parties. The key pieces of collaboration are:

• Manufacturers: Obtain retail sales data from retail partners
• Retailers: Obtain educational content, sales training, leads from manufacturers

Building these relationships can lead to lasting business impact for years to come. 

Conclusion: The Future of Flooring Marketing

The flooring industry presents unique marketing challenges due to its complex buyer journey, fragmented sales channels, and long consideration periods. Despite these challenges, success lies in creating a seamless experience that bridges online exploration with in-store validation.

As we’ve explored, effective flooring marketing requires collaboration between manufacturers and retailers rather than siloed approaches. The most successful companies in this space recognize that data sharing, content collaboration, and lead exchange create a symbiotic relationship that benefits all parties—including the consumer.

Looking ahead, several trends will likely shape the future of flooring marketing:

1. Data-Driven Personalization: As attribution models improve, expect more sophisticated personalization throughout the customer journey, from initial awareness content to in-store experiences tailored to previously expressed preferences.
2. Enhanced Visualization Technology: AR and VR tools will continue to evolve, potentially reducing the necessity for physical samples while shortening the decision-making timeline.
3. Streamlined Installation Services: Companies that can simplify the installation process through technology and service integration will gain competitive advantage in reducing purchase anxiety.

For marketers in the flooring industry, success will come from embracing this complexity rather than fighting against it. By creating marketing ecosystems that support consumers at each stage—from problem awareness to post-purchase satisfaction—brands can transform a traditionally challenging category into an opportunity for meaningful customer relationships.

The flooring beneath our feet may be something we only think about occasionally, but for marketers who understand this unique journey, it represents an opportunity to build lasting connections that extend well beyond a single purchase.