Store-first growth strategy for Bol Piano’s

From a fragmented online presence to a strategy that fills the showroom

Bol Piano’s is a Dutch family-owned business and one of the largest piano retailers in Europe. With a showroom in Veenendaal, they offer a wide range of new and refurbished pianos, grand pianos, and organs.

The challenge Bol Piano’s shares with every retailer selling a physical product: how do you get people to come to you? You don’t buy a piano based on a product photo. You want to hear it, feel it, and play it. The showroom is essential. But the journey there starts online — and that’s where the approach was fragmented. There were campaigns, but no cohesion. A webshop, but no clear focus. And no insight into how online activity contributed to what happened in the showroom.

The question was simple: does digital marketing actually work for a product you can only buy in-store?

“You don’t buy a piano online. Yet that’s exactly where the journey begins.”

How we built a showroom-first marketing strategy

The core of the approach was a strategic choice: don’t optimize for online conversion, but for offline conversion with online as preparation. Awareness and intent through digital channels. The showroom converts. Every other decision was made from that starting point.

• Making offline conversion measurable
  A click on a product page isn’t a success. A customer navigating to the store via Google Maps or booking a play session is. We defined those offline signals and set them up as conversion points, each with a substantiated value based on what an average store visit has historically generated. It’s not an exact measurement, but for the first time it provides a framework that shows how much digital marketing contributes to what happens in the showroom. That changed how the budget was thought about.
• A channel mix built around purchase intent
  The channel mix was built around one question: what does someone want right now, and how do we meet them there? Branded search campaigns ensure visibility the moment someone is actively searching for Bol Piano’s. PMax campaigns focus on lower-priced digital pianos and accessories, where online conversion is the norm. Higher-priced acoustic instruments are deliberately kept out of PMax: you don’t buy those on a product page, so you don’t steer toward that outcome either. Meta drives visibility with people who are still exploring. On product pages for higher-priced acoustic instruments, a pop-up triggers after ten seconds: “Can’t decide? Come visit our store.” No hard sales push, just a targeted invitation at the moment a visitor gets stuck. Of the visitors who see it, more than half click through for more information. A CTR of 53%.
• Bringing focus where it was missing
  The online store had no clear focus. Everything was on it, but nothing pointed anywhere. We brought that focus in by making sharp choices about which products get pushed online and which explicitly point to the showroom. Lower-priced products and accessories are sold online. Higher-priced acoustic instruments are explored online but purchased in the showroom. That separation determines how campaigns are set up, which pages get priority, and how budgets are allocated.

More showroom visitors, lower acquisition costs

Does digital marketing work for a product you can only buy in-store? Yes. If you set it up for the right conversion.

Bol Piano’s now has a digital strategy that aligns with how their customers actually buy. Online and offline are no longer separate worlds, but one connected experience. The showroom is the conversion point of a digital journey.

In a market under pressure, they achieved more new customers, lower acquisition costs, and higher efficiency, with virtually the same budget. And perhaps what matters most: for the first time, there’s clear visibility into where every marketing dollar goes and what it delivers.

Curious how we’d approach this for your brand? Explore our solutions.