Competing in the online market has never been more difficult. However, there are always ways to stand out from the crowd.
As Richard Branson said,
“If you want to stand out from the crowd, give people a reason to remember you.“
To beat the competition and stand out from the crowd, you need to promote your marketplace globally. Don’t let your audience forget you.
Strategy planning and development are the main ones to drive the market. To stand out in the market, you need to demonstrate the value of your online marketplace to buyers and sellers.
As a platform owner, you should give the same priority and effort to promoting your marketplace as you would to creating your platform. Smart launch for best results. To do that, you need to pitch your online marketplace platform before launch.
The best way to get your audience excited about your Marketplace is to promote it before launch.
This blog will help you get started with your marketplace and want to know how to pitch your marketplace platform before launch.
Why Promote Your Marketplace Before Launch
When promoting your marketplace before launch, make sure your marketplace is perfect. So it could be profitable. Let’s define what a marketplace should be.
- Marketplaces should contain interesting and useful content.
- Your marketplace should stand out from the competition. This way you can convince your customers that your market is the best and that it is different from others.
- An online marketplace platform should be user-friendly and intuitive. More precisely, the site should allow customers to navigate and get what they want.
If you’re already building an online marketplace, make sure your marketplace meets all the listed requirements.
Every entrepreneur wants to see profits after market launch. Users are in no hurry. It takes time for them to trust your marketplace because they are initially unaware of your existence.
This is the main reason for promoting the marketplace pre-launch. It also has the following benefits:
- Get desired results faster
- Opportunity to spend time marketing the platform
- Test your ideas with end users beforehand
- Increase brand awareness
- Pre-launch user acquisition
So let’s dive into this topic and take a look at the pre-promotion options.
9 ways to pitch your online marketplace platform before launch
1. Social media marketing
SMM, also known as social media marketing, is a powerful tool that you can use to promote your company and learn more about your target market. Before you launch your marketplace, you can use social media to your advantage in two important ways.
- Communicate with your target audience
- Create social media pages that increase brand awareness
2. Communicate with your target audience
The first technique for using SMM in business is communicating with your target audience.
By attending places where your target audience gathers, you may discover their problems, passions, and desires.
Not only that, but by surveying prospects on social media, you may get data that will allow you to better communicate with them through your website content and advertisements.
Moreover, once you know them, you can start promoting your market. You can use this to initiate marketplace promotional activities. You can also determine if your business concept will appeal to your customers.
3. Create social media pages to increase brand awareness
Building brand awareness on your social media site is another way to promote your marketplace before launch. Appearing in people’s news feeds can get you noticed and engaging.
The planned online marketplace platform will allow you to post short descriptions of your features and monitor reactions from your target market. You can use this to determine your prospect’s preferences.
The main advantages of using social media for market promotion are:
- Cover large audiences in one place.
- Your platform may gain popularity.
- Opportunity to maintain good relationships with users.
4. Create a landing page
A landing page is a single page that attempts to convert a visitor into a potential customer or vendor. One of the key tasks your teaser landing page should perform is collecting potential consumer emails.
Having a list of potential customers at your disposal can effectively promote your Internet business.
Your landing page should offer a reward in exchange for a visitor’s email address. New e-commerce sites and marketplaces usually offer incentives.
For example, Creative Market, an online store that offers design materials, offered each customer a $5 credit when it first opened.
Use your landing page to learn more about your target audience. You can learn more about your website visitors by looking at your landing page traffic using Google Analytics.
Learn about device preferences, frequency of visits, time spent on websites, and more.
Including a cookie policy on your landing page allows you to track data such as visitor age, gender and location. With this knowledge, you can identify additional layers for your client that you may not have considered before.
5. Leverage your current platform to find potential customers
If you’re not sure where to find your first consumers, consider whether you can attract people from other platforms, whether online or offline. As seen when the Airbnb founder reached out to his first potential customers via his Craigslist, this could be a successful tactic.
You can also promote your marketplace during in-person gatherings, like Tinder did. Co-founder Whitney Wolfe arranged meetups with nearby college students and introduced the app to Tinder since its early days.
Additionally, she encouraged all attendees to sign up. This gave Tinder her first 15,000 members.
6. Email marketing
Email marketing allows you to promote your marketplace by sending emails to people who have agreed to receive your emails. Email marketing is the most effective way to stay in touch with your audience.
You need a huge contact base to hint at email marketing. Otherwise it’s a useless idea. Some of the email marketing ideas are:
- email newsletter
- transaction email
- action email
Having an email list of potential consumers allows you to initiate and maintain effective communication with your users before and after your marketplace launches.
However, you should be very careful when communicating via email. Don’t send emails too often. Otherwise, the client may think you are a nuisance.
Consistent and engaging email communication is ideal. Email product news and educational materials. People will visit your website as a result of this information.
7. Video sneak peek
Compared to articles and other content, videos are more engaging and provide information quickly. Additionally, in a 2017 HubSpot survey, 54% of respondents said they would like to see more video content from their favorite companies.
To take advantage of the growing demand for video content, you can use videos to promote your marketplace. The topics range from key marketplace features to potential usage-related queries.
All the topics covered in your videos are great content that you can share anywhere: email, landing page, social media.
Video sneak peek content must follow these rules:
- The start of the video should be more informative, as information held in the first few minutes of the video may inform the viewer.
- Videos should be dynamic and concise. Users can get bored watching excessively long dead-alive videos.
- Delight your users by using every opportunity of your video to explain your market in an exciting way.
- If your video contains narration, we recommend adding subtitles to your video. Because not everyone can watch videos with audio.
8. Promotional Events or Complementary Brand Partnerships
You can further promote your online marketplace by partnering with companies that complement your online marketplace. In this situation, even if the platform is new, it can develop a user base that will be interested in the future.
If you want to get more customers, share one podcast or blog post as one of your promotional strategies. Additionally, the two of you may recommend joint gifts. If you manage to build a customer base with consistent interest in your brand, offer discounts or free follow-up purchases.
Another strategy for increasing market exposure is webinars and online conferences. This method exposes different individuals to his website.
Additionally, you can deepen your knowledge of specific Internet market areas. So, as a founder, you can also benefit from your ability to influence your brand.
Meetings like this help create important contacts if your market is a start-up. Additionally, meetings create the first user experience. This helps power your internet store. Online presentations are a way for established markets to find new vendors and investors.
9. Market-appropriate marketing strategies
A marketing plan is essential to expanding or growing your online marketplace platform. Making the right decisions can help you attract more customers and help your company.
Understanding client requirements is the cornerstone of any marketplace marketing approach. Correctly presenting the unique value of the market is another important aspect. Based on these key factors, you can choose tools to promote your internet company to more people.
The last word
We hope you have some ideas to promote your marketplace platform before launch. Never underestimate the benefits of marketing your market before it is open to the public.
Use pre-launch marketing strategies to attract enough leads to launch your company. So implement these tips to promote your online marketplace platform.
You may like reading:
Author bio: I’m Divyamina, Content Strategist at SaaS Marketplace Startup. QoreUps. I am an explorer of numerous markets, the trends that shape them, and the strategies to get them ready to build the markets that best fit the trends. With the readers of my site, I would like to share my expertise in many areas. Need more information? Follow my blog for more information.Follow Divya Mia FB & TW.
14
