How to Promote Your Marketplace with 4 Easy Steps

marketplace marketing

Why is it important to promote your marketplace? For a new eCommerce business, it is important to understand that creating a great eCommerce website is only part of the equation. The other part is promoting your store to boost sales, and a shop or website alone is not enough.

Create a plan on using different digital marketing techniques like SEO, Social media marketing, Content Marketing, PPC to reach out to your potential customers. Convince your vendors that your products and services can satisfy their needs, and that they can trust your website to make a deal. We now consume a lot of digital content due to our gadgets. We use the Internet for almost every errand. The recent pandemic raised the bar even higher, making online shopping a norm. It seems like marketing on digital channels is the only marketing left.

Where to begin?

4 Steps to Get Started with Digital Marketing for eCommerce

  1. Create a solid plan
  2. Define your target market
  3. Figure out your value proposition
  4. Start promoting your online store

To avoid wasting time and money on things that won’t positively impact sales you have. To have a plan that includes both short-term and long-term goals.

marketplace marketing

When setting your goals, make sure they are SMART

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Realistic
  • Time-bound

You will also need to define objectives to help you achieve your smart goals. Tracking your progress is critical, as you will be able to measure your results.

Define Your Target Market

The next step is to figure out who’s your target market. Ask yourself what problem your product solves, find people who are experiencing this problem. Understand the demographics and the psychographics to craft your marketing message better.

Any information about your target will be useful. Gather data!

Understand Your Value Proposition

If you were to ask me what’s the main reason why people fail in eCommerce, it’s because they haven’t figured out what makes their brand or product unique. Why would people choose YOUR product and not the one from the competition? Your value proposition tells prospects why people should do business with you rather than your competitors and makes the benefits of your products or services crystal clear from the outset. This will help to craft your marketing message better when speaking or advertising to your target audience.

Start To Promote Your Marketplace

Create awareness for your product by promoting your business on digital marketing channels.

Which ones, you may ask. Here’s a tip: Promote your business where your target audience is.

Promoting your online store on search engines is one of the most popular driving traffic methods to a website. People search the Internet to find answers to questions, search for a place, search for information, or search for a product. A large percentage of people make these searches on Google.com, Bing, and Yahoo. Youtube.com is a major search engine when it comes to videos. Building an online presence in search engines, creating profitable PPC campaigns, or running successful social media campaigns takes time so you need to be patient.

The following directions may work wonders in promoting your online business to real success:

  1. Run a Facebook Campaign
  2. Use Google Ads
  3. Use Bing ads
  4. Start a blog, and publish more than blog posts
  5. Start a newsletter and email marketing
  6. Create a Chrome app
  7. Do guest posting on other websites
  8. Don’t stop on-going SEO
  9. Go Social

After all, it’s hard to do anything well when you spread yourself too thin.

Most e-commerce property owners tackle every method all at once in hopes of growing fast. Not only will your efforts consume all of your time, but you’ll likely produce obscure results.

The better approach is to choose a limited number of ways to promote your online store. Focus your efforts on those channels and measure your results to see what’s working and what isn’t.

You can expand and refine your efforts based on what you know is driving growth and sales over time.

Last but not least, while content, influencers, social media, and paid search and social media topped our list of the most effective ways to promote a new online store, don’t neglect to promote your store online and offline. Hopefully, you now have tons of ideas for new ways to promote your online store. But where should you start?

And finally, consider your budget when choosing a promotion channel, too. If on budget influencers, blogging, and email are best. At scale, the best long-term strategy is dialing into advertising profitability.

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Jamie is the founder and lead developer of WC Vendors. He has been working in the WordPress, WooCommerce and Marketplace space for more than 15 years, 9 of those dedicated to multivendor marketplaces.