An online marketplace is an e-commerce site that offers products and services through multiple third parties. The marketplace operator processes consumer transactions and fulfilled by partnering retailers.
Online marketplaces are reported to have earned $1.66 Trillion in 2018. The revenues generated by big sites like Alibaba, e-bay, and Amazon accounted for more than 50 percent of the total global sales last year. Majority of the online marketplaces can be categorized into business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C) and customer to customer (C2C) briefly defined below:
- B2B – A marketplace that provides a platform for transaction of products or services between two or more businesses (Example: Alibaba)
- B2C – The marketplace facilitates the transaction of products or services from the company to customers (Example: Amazon, AliExpress, etc.)
- C2C – The marketplace for the transaction of products or services between customers (Example: OLX)
Apart from these, some online markets also offer crowdfunding, auctions, and peer to peer services. The revenue generated by an online marketplace depends on the meaningful and credible engagement between its clients. With an ever-increasing number of e-commerce sites, it becomes crucial to plan the marketing strategy.
This helps in gaining visibility and opening new markets for your business. A well-thought marketing practice not only builds your customer base, but it also gives your marketplace a professional image.
Apart from the SEO of your online marketplace, there are many more marketing tips that you should definitely apply to your market to generate maximum impressions and ROI. In this article, we bring you the seven best marketing tips to help your business. Let’s get started.
IMAGE: PEXELS
7 Marketing Tips To Boost Sales Of Online Marketplace
1. Email Marketing
You can use Email marketing to get high conversion rates, which can do wonders for your online marketplace. It helps to maintain a separate mailing list for most frequent customers of different departments. You can then send alerts for promotional offers and upcoming sales etc.
Alternatively, there would be some customers having products saved in their cart, which are yet to be purchased. Send an email to these customers as a reminder and include details of any offer available to leverage the most out of them.
2. Paid Marketing Platform
Each marketplace operates differently and focuses on a different set of customers. Therefore, you must adapt your strategy to cover as many platforms as you can. The paid marketing platforms and specially PPC Ads can help you gain visibility to reach the maximum audience.
Online ads on search engines like Google or Bing; social media websites like Facebook or Instagram and other e-commerce portals like Amazon or eBay can generate significant traffic. For any e-commerce store or online marketplace shopping ads are a must because they are considered as cheaper ads and gives the maximum output.
If you are running an e-commerce store, just set up your account in Google Ads & Merchant center, and you are good to go. Here is one example of a shopping ad. For such shopping ads, you need to prepare one Google Shopping feed and upload it on the merchant center account and create a shopping campaign in Google Ads.
Google will automatically fetch keywords from your product feed title and description and will show ads on Google network. Well, here you might be thinking that what if you don’t have an e-commerce store but running any virtual e-commerce store such as Game Source Code Marketplace and for that Google don’t allow running shopping ads.
Well, here all you need to do is to prepare one custom feed and can run Dynamic Remarketing Ads for your products directly in Google Ads. This can be done for any marketplace where Google doesn’t support separate feed. Additionally, you can use display ads and hoardings to reach a max target niche audience.
3. Content Is King
To engage with your customers, tell them a story. The content must be crafted in such a way that it educates and excites the reader at the same time. Most of the customers already know what they are looking for! The content on your website should tell how your marketplace is going to add value to their shopping experience.
Write unique content for the products and publish blog posts on a detailed topic. Update the blogs regularly and use explicit content for any article. Since visual contents are easy to share and understand, maximize the use of images and video in your marketplace.
If possible, prepare Infographic on any topic and share on your blog. “A picture is worth a thousand words” perfectly suits in this kind of strategy so, don’t wait and start now. Check out how Neil Patel explained about Content Marketing in detail with proper examples.
4. Social Media Marketing
Social media websites like Facebook and Twitter can be the best bet in attracting traffic to your marketplace. To make the most of your social media account, proper research on how your competitors are leveraging it to their maximum benefit is required. You can schedule posts directly to your different social media channels.
Additionally, complaints and grievance addressing are direct and effortless on social media. Many popular e-commerce stores now handling their complaint management system with the help of Social Media only such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Believe it or not, but Amazon is quite witty in their social media marketing.
5. Q & A Forums
Q & A forums are probably the best way to reach an extreme target audience. You can look into the questions on different discussion forums like Quora. Select the questions that are relevant to your marketplace and give detailed answers.
This platform gets you in touch with customers that are highly relevant to your business. Additionally, this group of clients not only generates credible traffic, but it also has a significant potential for conversion. Quora is just a straightforward example of Q & A Forum; here, you need to find some other forums which are relevant to your marketplace.
6. Freebies
To stand out of the competition, freebies can undoubtedly draw attention to your marketplace. Especially if your marketplace is new, you can offer freebies or rewards to provide a better deal to the customers.
The freebies need not always be in the form of products, and you can offer unique services as well. For example, if you are running an e-commerce store for Jewelry items, then you can give one free earring for having minimum purchase (Of course you know the profit margin to set freebie)
7. Leverage Reviews
Once you are getting good traffic, then the next step is about how to convert them into customers. This is where reviews can be beneficial. Showcasing the best reviews for your best-selling products improves the conversion rates significantly.
Reviews are a means to be rewarded for providing an excellent service to your customers. Send reminders to your clients after 3 to 4 days of purchase, requesting them to write a review on your website. Make sure each best-selling product must have a certain minimum amount of reviews at your marketplace.
Summing It Up
In order to boost the sales from your online marketplace, you must have a clear understanding of your market segment and customer base. During the initial days of your business, it makes sense to target a smaller market segment and focus all your resources on growing in the segment.
Having a specific market segment also helps in curating marketing strategies to reach out to your target groups. This allows you to concentrate on quality and gain the credibility of your clients. As your business grows and you prosper in your segment, you can consider expanding into different segments through sustainable scalability.
We have tried to include the best marketing tips for your online marketplace. We hope that the tips mentioned in the article help to boost your business. If you have any queries, please let us know in the comments section. Thank you for your time and patience!
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
COMMENTS