How To Promote a Marketplace Before Launch
Pre-launch promotion campaigns give significant competitive advantages since those activities allow getting positive results faster, finding customers before a marketplace is even launched, testing the concept with ultimate clients beforehand, strengthening brand recognition, and more. So, we shall enumerate the key approaches to benefit from.
# Landing page
It might not be that easy to promote a service that doesn’t exist. What you could do is to make an initial landing page which would be similar to your final resource from the thematic point of view. While still building a two-sided marketplace of yours, such a mechanism will be an excellent start-up point to advertise your future platform.
Creating a landing page is considered to be a great solution since it enables you to:
- Extend resource age. By maximizing the time of your marketplace existence, you’ll help Google better treat it. You just need to purchase a domain and position your landing page there to strengthen the relations with different search engines.
- Collect feedback. Thanks to a landing page you’ll manage to obtain users’ feedback even when the resource hasn’t been released yet.
- Compile data on clients. It’ll be pretty easy to figure out what gadgets customers apply for, and determine their behavior while visiting the platform.
- Gather your own database of valuable contacts. You need contacts of people who could potentially become your real customers, people who could be interested in what you offer. You could add the email address field into your feedback form to get two cracks at bat.
- Present your future marketplace to the audience. Use that chance to describe all the attractive features and benefits of the platform you’re making.
# Analysis of the competitors
Honestly speaking, before you start any campaigns, it’s critical to explore your rivals, examine their strengths and weaknesses, and learn their marketing strategies. You shall have a clear understanding of how those businesses manage to attract clients, and what traffic sources they take advantage of.
Moreover, you’ll need to know which platforms (both offline and online) they apply for to reach their customers. You could also check their publications on social media since you might want to adopt the most effective approaches to make them part of your own strategy.
# Social media marketing
These days promotion via different social media platforms is a real must-have. To figure out which networks to go for, you just have to determine what resources your targeted audience prefers. As a rule, social media marketing involves such activities, as:
- Data collection. You as a business owner have to gather as many details on your potential clients as possible. You can’t overdo it. Check groups where your customers spend most of their time, take a look at the topics discussed there to better understand what people are interested in. The key point here is to define users’ expectations and problems.
- Interaction with people. When you visit those thematic groups, you could easily get in touch with the audience to describe your project. You’ll be able to check if people like your concept, and also, advertise your solution.
- Create a corresponding social media page. Depending on your audience preferences, you could make your own page to communicate with your future clients.
- Advertising. Why not take advantage of social media from the advertising point of view?
SMM is essential since it helps you enlarge client coverage, ensure project virality, advertise the marketplace unobtrusively, and be a friend to your clients.
# Video content
Far-sighted entrepreneurs realize the value of the mentioned approach, so you could enjoy its benefits as well. Moreover, even stats prove the video content demand increase. To achieve greater results from video content you have to present the most important details in the first minute of the video, and keep it all concise and dynamic.
Videos shall be used to present the future marketplace in the most favorable light making the viewers delighted with your project. In case you decide to make voiceover work as well, put the subtitles to those who’ll watch the video having the sound off.
You could place your videos on social media, your YouTube channel, as well as on the landing page.
# Mobile-first manner
This technique is more about how to ensure success for your marketplace under development. In the process of planning and designing your platform you have to remember about one interesting point: as from 2018 in accordance with the Mobile-First Index ranking regulations, all platforms that have mobile versions in addition to web ones obtain an advantage when it comes to getting listed in the Top10.
