
// Marketing
What Should the Best Marketplace Marketing Strategy Look Like
// Marketing
To understand what the best marketing strategy for marketplaces should look like, just look at the successful campaigns of competitors. In our article you will find 15 such examples, as well as instructions on how to use these examples to promote your own online trading platform.
Many large companies have gone from vertical to horizontal markets, starting with Microsoft (programming languages) or Apple (personal computers) and ending with Facebook (social networking) or Google (search engine). Another good example is Lululemon.
How to apply it to your business. Like Amazon, select one product group and focus on becoming a market leader. When this is done, begin the gradual expansion of the assortment.
Choose a niche based on the following factors:
How to apply it to your business. Study the target audience and create personalized advertising content that takes into account the socio-demographic characteristics and habits of potential buyers. This can be an orientation to a specific time of display of advertising, as in the case of ShopClues, or something else, for example, type of work, marital status, favorite films, series and other entertainments.
Robert Yerkes, one of the founders of ethology and zoopsychology, conducted an interesting experiment. From a typical group of chimpanzees, they took a low-ranking monkey and taught it, using several complex manipulations, to get bananas (and other sweets) from a special puzzle feeder. After the monkey left the skill, it was returned to the relatives with the feeder. A trained “smart” monkey deftly got a treat, but the trouble is, high-ranking males immediately took away its earned banana.
None of the relatives of the low-ranking “smart” monkey had the idea to learn how to get a banana from a puzzle on their own - “And really, why strain, mastering difficult tricks, if you can just take a delicacy”.
However, when the experiment was repeated in another typical group of chimpanzees, but with a high-ranking monkey (leader), after returning to the group, its relatives quickly learned to get a banana from the feeder on their own. At first, the chimpanzee watched with interest how the “smart” leader deftly handled with the feeder, and then the animals began to imitate it, thus learning a new skill.
The conclusion from the experiment is this: primates (including humans) imitate the behavior of those who are above them on the hierarchical ladder, and with those who are below, they do not stand on ceremony. This is the essence of influence marketing: you want to sell something, show that it something buys or uses a high-ranking individual: a celebrity, a leader politician, a person with a large number of followers on social networks.
A great example of using influence marketing is the Airbnb campaign. So, when Mariah Carey used Airbnb to rent a house in Israel, the company paid for her reservation in exchange for an Instagram post with 45,000 likes.
Content marketing is the creation of online materials (for example, blog posts, infographics, GIFs, images, photos and videos) that appeal to your target audience. It is used as another communication channel with which you can tell potential customers about products, develop leadership and increase awareness of your brand.
A striking example of a content-based marketing strategy is the Beardbrand campaign. They have a blog called Urban Bearded Man focused on bearded men (men who pride for caring a beard).
How to apply it to your business. Examine the pages of your competitors. Find out what search queries they get traffic from and use this data to create alternative landing pages. But remember that competitors will not sit with their hands clasped, if they see a threat in you, they will begin a similar campaign. Drift did exactly that when they found out that Intercom was “stealing” their customers.
Despite the growing popularity of messenger apps and social networks, the email newsletter is still one of the best channels to attract customers to your marketplace. If we talk about specific numbers, then according to studies, the return on investment in this channel is 3800%, while the average check for purchases through e-mail is 3 times more, than when buying through social networks.
A good example of such a marketing strategy for the marketplace is the Huckberry advertising mailing list, which relied on the so-called “beer goggles effect” (the hypothesis that “the closer to the closure of the bar, the more beautiful the girls.” Previously, it was believed that this was due to alcohol, but scientists found that it was a shortage (“the closer to closure, the fewer girls remain, therefore, the more valuable the remaining individuals become”). And this effect extends not only to the girls in the bar.
So, in the experiment of Stephen Worchel, people were offered two cans: one had ten cookies, and the other only two. When participants were asked which can they would prefer, they overwhelmingly chose a can with two cookies! In the case of online marketing, the following tricks are used instead of two cookie cans:
As you can see, Huckberry already on the first screen of the letter used three triggers to launch the “beer goggles effect”. If you look below, there will be another trigger:
In addition to using the “beer goggles effect” when advertising a marketplace by e-mail, you also need to either demonstrate the product on models using photographs or somehow visualize the “exclusivity” of the offer. For example, as J.Crew does in his mailing list:
To get a better response from such letters, you can make them fun, as in the case of Dollar Shave Club mailings:
Or glossy like Glossier do:
How to apply it to your business. Email marketing campaign consists of two steps: