The success of online platforms such as Airbnb, Etsy, and Fiverr demonstrate the variety of online marketplaces that exist today. The main challenges that online marketplaces or platforms face are bringing value to users through quality, pricing, flexibility, and dependability, while sellers are looking to grow a loyal customer base.
It’s important to create trust between buyers and sellers, in order to foster quality engagement and ensure that your online marketplace achieves success and sustainable scalability.
This article will explore the top 10 digital marketing strategies to build a successful online marketplace.
1. Identify Your Market Segment
Focusing on a specific market segment will help you reach your target audience. When you target a smaller market segment, it allows you to design your niche thoughtfully and if all goes well, you can build on it. Dedicating resources to a more specific segment gives you a better chance of being able to execute your performance objectives.
Growing your customer base involves continuous improvement to maintain quality. A well planned scaling process ensures continued satisfaction from customers and efficient use resources such as time, effort, and financial reserves.
For instance, if you want to create an online marketplace for sustainable apparel, focus on a specific sector such as women’s leisure wear. Becoming an expert in a smaller field will allow you to establish yourself and give your brand credibility. As you gain trust and increase your customers, you can look at expanding into other related sectors, like men’s leisure wear.
2. Know Your Buyer Personas
Your marketplace should cater to specific buyer personas. Explore who you target audience is and draw up the key characteristics that define them.
In our buyer persona analyses, we include key questions which can help you understand the following:
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- What demographics define your buyer?
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- What motivates your customers?
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- How can you address your buyer’s needs?
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- What are their pain points?
- What does an empathy map of the user’s experience look like according to your research?
3. Strengthen Relationships with Existing Users
It’s a lot more expensive to get new users than it is to keep and grow existing user relationships. 80% of new leads never translate into sales and companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Strengthening your existing user base is all about user relationship management. Incentivize your existing user base to engage regularly with your online marketplace. Email marketing has proven to be particularly successful and cost-effective here. Actively and regularly contact users with relevant with personally targeted offers.
4. Foster Trust to Drive Meaningful Engagement
Trust is essential in order to have meaningful engagement. As you build your reputation, remember that to foster trust, all the actions your company takes need to represent your values.
You can also foster quality engagement through prioritizing performance objectives like speed, quality, cost, flexibility, dependability. Get the most out of your efforts by making them visible. Use seals of approval and testimonials to build your reputation.
5. Storytelling
Don’t sell, tell a story. Inbound marketing is a natural way of sharing knowledge and building relationships. A successful inbound marketing strategy will engage users by educating, entertaining, and empowering them. Create content and stories that focus on the interests and needs of your target audience. Craft your content in an engaging language that tells a story, while also demonstrating the value that you provide. Users know what they are looking for so align your content accordingly but steering clear of clickbait. When researching topics, analyze the most relevant metrics (CTR, time of visit, bounce rate, etc.) and make adjustments as necessary.
Your main goal here is to create content that is relevant and adds value. Present stories that are helpful, informative, or entertaining, and that transmit your company’s values.
6. Referrals and Testimonials
While everyone wants to go viral and quickly reach millions of users online, viral marketing is difficult to achieve because it’s hard to predict what will go actually go viral. If you’d like to try your hand at viral marketing, create quality content that is easy to share on social networks.
However, it’s a good idea to also incentivize users to refer your online marketplace to their networks. Although you may not reach millions of people in a day, steady referrals are a great, sustainable way to go. You can offer existing customers a discount or promotion if they refer someone to you who in turn purchases your product or service. This can save time, effort, and financial resources for your marketing department. It has also proven to be a very effective method of gaining customers as people place a high value on recommendations from those they know.
7. Use Popular Platforms to Your Advantage
Popular platforms like social media are a great way to spread the word about your brand and the products or services that you offer. They also allow you interact with your customers and quickly receive feedback
You can implement inbound marketing strategies on these platforms as well by posting useful and relevant content. Over time, this will attract potential buyers. People like to see images and videos depicting what a brand has to offer and what others are saying about it before they decide to buy.
It’s important to maintaining active engagement so check your social media accounts daily and keep them up to date. Post links to new content on your blog or site, and establish a presence as an active, friendly company.
8. Convey Your Values
Get users interested in your brand by getting them to understand your values. Social media can again be very useful here. It gives you a way to define your company culture, share relevant content, and allow the public to better understand the principles that drive your brand.
Give potential customers an insight into why and how you started your brand and explain what it can do for them. This again helps to build trust and establish your marketplace as reliable and ethical.
9. Community Development
Transform users into a loyal community by regularly creating high quality content, in addition to your products or services. Keep users coming back for more by keeping them up to date on key events, new products or services, and industry insights. Encouraging your users to feel like they are part of a community further develops an emotional dimension to the relationship and fosters customer loyalty.
10. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) determines your ranking on Google. It’s crucial because this is how users find you when they are searching online.
SEO can be a joint effort if you create guidelines for anyone selling on your platform to help their content appear on the first page of a search. Give your sellers the opportunity to provide detailed product descriptions. Optimized content will allow the data stored on your site to be more easily accessed by search engine algorithms and therefore rank higher.
Have your online community improve your SEO score for you by encouraging them to post content such as product reviews and comments.
While buyers and sellers can contribute, really it’s the online marketplaces themselves that have to position their sites. Having a high position in search results communicates that you are a trustworthy and popular site. Though search engine optimization is a profession on its own, a great place to start is by dividing your products into categories and subcategories to make it easier for search engines to review and list your individual pages.
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