Historically, most home-related purchases take place in store and through print or digital catalogues. However, as mobile is becoming more and more popular, it's beginning to change the way that people discover and purchase home goods. From January to March 2016, roughly one fifth of US digital sales in the home category took place on mobile.¹ And that's just the beginning of the opportunity mobile offers for brands in the home category.

With the ubiquity of smartphones, many companies, including those in the home category, are seeing customers make purchases on mobile rather than desktop. "The narrative a few years ago was that people would use mobile to do preliminary research on the fly, but they would wait to make that large purchase until they were at their computer. That's no longer a general truth," says Bob Sherwin, VP of Direct Marketing at Wayfair.

And some home brands are experiencing even more mobile growth than the average. Ashley Wahl, Customer Relationship Manager at popular furniture and home accessory company Ikea, recently said: "Nationally, we're seeing about one in three purchases coming from mobile devices. And this trend is continuing to grow."

It's no secret that Instagram is one of the best places where customers can discover new products on mobile. With more than 500 million monthly active users, Instagram has a community that's bigger than Snapchat, Twitter and Pinterest combined.² And our home category audience is part of that highly engaged community. Instagrammers interested in home goods are active seven more days during the month and follow 140% more accounts than the average Instagrammer. They also consume four-times more content and have on average 3.5-times more followers.³

With such an active audience continually seeking visual discovery on Instagram, brands are taking note. Home retailers are using Instagram as an extension of their showrooms and catalogues to give consumers a more in-depth look at their products. With our new shopping experience being tested on Instagram starting next week, retailers are also sharing posts that let consumers review, learn about and consider products directly within the app before making a purchase.

And we're seeing several home brands such as Home Depot and Lowes Home Improvement taking advantage of carousel and video adverts to showcase their products through do-it-yourself project tutorials.

In addition to showcasing products in action, home goods brands are making sales on Instagram. To increase sales, online direct-to-consumer furniture company Article turned to Instagram link adverts. Through a combination of video and carousel adverts, the company showed its furniture in aspirational but attainable settings to express the quality of its products. After the campaign ended, Article.com saw an eight-fold return on advertising spend – 1.6-times higher than its original goal. It also attributed Instagram in the path to purchase for 36% of its transactions. "The path to purchase for our customers is often complex, but the proportion of transactions which Instagram makes up as part of that journey continues to surprise me," says Duncan Blair, Director of Marketing at Article.

With such an active audience of home goods consumers, there's no better place to reach your key audience. Whether you're looking to inspire through highly visual content, be discovered by potential consumers or sell products in store or online, you can with Instagram.