A marketplace marketing strategy to attract customers and sellers to your online marketplace platform

The sharing economy has evolved in the past few years, and everyone wants to own their own marketplace where they can sell their products, services, or both. The web-based marketplaces let you share goods, services, accommodation, and relevant information.

To start your own online marketplace platform, it is important to know the cost incurred to start one. It all depends on the choices you make. To build an online marketplace platform, the best option is to start one, that comes with readymade features.

This all works if you have the right marketing strategy to attract customers and sellers to your online marketplace platform. Hence you need to know everything about the strategies you can use optimally to find the right kind of business. This leads to making the right amount of ROI.

Yelo, a platform provided by Jungleworks provides easy multi-vendor marketplace development that offers various features and advantages over others. You should take a look at what they have to offer when it comes to building an online marketplace platform.

What are these strategies, and how do they help you establish your online marketplace platform and business? Let us take a look:

Make a marketable marketplace:

Your marketplace must be marketable first. If you have the right kind of marketplace with stunning features, but you don’t know how to position it, then it stands meaningless. It is important to know everything about your own online marketplace platform to market it in the right way.

If you know everything thoroughly, you can show people that you can solve a specific problem for them. For instance, Airbnb started with a very small idea that the local residents can put their residence on rent during vacation days, and marketed that the right way to witness huge success

2. Know your market thoroughly:

This step involves finding the right people who would need the services from your marketplace. You need to know everything about your target customers. Determine which kind of users need the services your multi-vendor marketplace platform has to offer.

Visit the websites where such users are seen more frequently. When you look at what people are up to in such websites, you see how your marketplace can bring value to them.

For instance, you want to look for a book. What will you do? You would run a quick search for the titles on Amazon. Once you find the right title, you read the feedback the readers have left behind once they are done reading the book.

When you read such feedback sections, you come to know what the users are actually thinking. Moreover, you can run through the thoughts they have and the way they need services to be more holistic and all-encompassing.

Also, reading blogs from your domain can help you learn about the requirements a user may have from an online marketplace platform. Reading blogs also include reading comments, feedback, and remarks.

Another way to do this is to talk to the people in a real environment. Ask questions, or conduct interviews to see what they have been looking for. This is one of the best ways to get an insight into how the users think. Moreover, it is important to know where you have to promote your marketplace, and which demographic of users it can benefit in the long run.

Bring more users to your marketplace:

Once you have figured out the pain point to solve, it is time to grow your marketplace and find out the right people to approach. This is the time to get the buyers and sellers at one place in your online marketplace platform.

But, you need to balance out the number of both the buyers and sellers. Because if there are more buyers than sellers, the buyers may choose to leave. Also, the reverse situation is also possible.

To grow the number of sellers in your multi-vendor marketplace platform, you have to contact sellers who are already conducting business on other marketplace platforms. This is because they know the importance of a marketplace, and can be easily convinced to conduct business with you too.

You can find sellers through online forums, groups on social media, and other marketplaces. For instance, you can search for potential sellers on Reddit, Facebook groups, and more. You can use the search query, like “keyword” + “online discussion board”.

To get buyers for your marketplace, you also have to apply all the marketing tactics to the buyers that you do to gain sellers. For this, you can target buyers on social media, other marketplaces, online forums, etc.

Improve marketing strategies and help your marketplace platform grow positively:

Once you have found the right number of sellers and buyers to build your marketplace, it is time to grow your marketplace. Use an autopilot system for marketing your online marketplace platform.

To do this, include SEO. SEO lets you target the people and the users who have been searching for the best online marketplace platform through a Google search. Optimize your marketplace to make it search-engine friendly.

This way, more people are bound to land upon your marketplace. You can use the keywords, a user-friendly website, and form an SEO for the sellers. When the right keywords are used for SEO of your marketplace, the chances of right and relevant users landing up at your marketplace increase.

A user-friendly website, with clear navigation and easy to use interface, has chances of getting more traffic than other marketplace websites. Make sure you use a user-friendly navigation system.

Additionally, marketing the content in the right way also gives you a lot of possibilities of users landing up on your website.

Determine the right marketplace personas:

When you create a marketplace, it is important to find the right marketplace persona. This includes the buyers and sellers profile.

When you analyse the buyer and seller profile, it means that you analyse their location, the services, or products they deal with, and other similar details. Also, it becomes important to study and research the buyer and seller pain points.

Determining this can help you build a marketplace suitable for buyers and sellers that can rightly fit into your multi-vendor marketplace platform.

Cost comparison of building an online marketplace platform:

Before you think of building an online marketplace platform, it is necessary to go through the budget you need to have. According to an estimate, a marketplace requires 87 story points, which translates to 750 hours of development.
Read How to Set a Pricing Strategy for Your Online Marketplace here.

But if you are planning to build an online marketplace platform from scratch, then the time of development may reach upto 1050 hours.

A study from Clutch.co, states certain facts when it comes down to the cost behind the web development. Let us take a look.

If you are based in Ukraine, then the rate of web development per hour is $25-60. When you have to build a website in Poland, then the rate may range from $50-80 per hour.

As far as Germany is concerned, the web development may take $50-90 per hour. With GBR, the rate may differ from $60-153 per hour, which gets costlier. In Australia, web development may range from $60-$150 per hour. For the web development to be done in the USA, the rate ranges from $125-300 per hour, which is the costliest.

The above figures give us a rough estimate of how the web development costs like with the changing countries, where the cost in the USA is the highest. When it comes to web marketplace development, Ukraine’s cost is $31.5 per hour.

All the cost estimation can be drafted out only after the client requirements are elicited and analysed.

Conclusion:

Once the cost is defined and meets your expected budget, you can go ahead and build an online marketplace platform. Also, this article lets you devise the right marketing strategy to find and retain customers and sellers on your online marketplace platform.

If you are eyeing a multi-vendor marketplace development, Yelo can help you out with the development. They offer plenty of features, to begin with. Also, you can check their live demo to get an idea of how they work.