Best Market Penetration Strategy for eMarketplace

FORM A MARKET PENETRATION STRATEGY ON DAY ONE

Common Market Penetration Strategies

Due to the major benefits of penetrating a certain market for an eCommerce marketplace, it’s best to focus strategically on this from day one.

There are several ways to do this depending on the market.

Some of the most common strategies include organic SEO (search engine optimization) and focusing on long tail keywords. Also common strategies are using transactional email lists, databases, and paid advertising.

Paid advertising is a more traditional model of marketing which might be beneficial to focus on a particular region or market.

UNIQUE MARKET PENETRATION STRATEGIES

Conduct Interviews with Vendors

Opportunities to penetrate the market can include unique strategies as well. For example, working closely with the vendors who would be part of the marketplace, and conducting interviews with them and building the marketplace around them.

You could ask, “We’re building this marketplace for you. How can we make it the best marketplace possible?”

Part of our go-to market strategy is working with you to announce and feature your products based on how many people you can bring to the site and convert.

There are a lot of different strategies that work well. Here are some scenarios.

Use Specific Keyword Phrases

The long-tail SEO approach works well for markets that may not be as competitive. There are a lot of facets of this.

For example, a market may be competitive with short keyword phrases or non-regional specific keyword phrases.

For instance, if we’re looking to penetrate a market that’s for our automotive brake rotors, that phrase may not be specific enough.

We may need to focus in on the particular year, make, and/or model of every brake rotor that’s in the system, and then focus on particular regions.

We’d use that more specific information to penetrate a particular long tail SEO portion of the market.

Use Synonyms

Another method is to look at synonyms of terms that describe your services, for use in long-tail keyword phrases.

A lot of competitors will not use synonyms. They'll simply use whatever they have in their system.

Therefore, you can take advantage of that and penetrate long-tail SEO by using synonyms. You can also generate unique content for some of the high-payoff categories.

Think from the Buyer’s Perspective

Anything that’s providing value to the end user that’s extensive will generate website traffic from SEO.

Therefore, it’s valuable to think about things from the buyer’s perspective. What information do they need?

A lot of marketplaces don’t include the full product manuals and technical specifications, they just have a dehydrated skeleton of a set of data.

Well, if you hydrate the page and fully flesh out a set of content that includes things like technical specs and OCR (object character recognition), which brings PDFs into text version in HTML, converting it to on-page content, this can be a game changer for the search engines.

The search engines will see this as a valuable, rich page with unique content, relative to other indexed pages out there for this set of keywords.

This will boost your content on the search page results, giving you many more chances for someone to click on your webpage. This is one of things you can do to differentiate between your competitors.

Internal and External Link Building

In addition, there's a lot of onsite strategy that focuses on internal linking strategies both dynamically and manually, as well as with organic SEO.

A lot of the benefits of organic SEO can be seen through external link building.

One of the best ways for a marketplace to build external links is by offering widgets that point back to the primary site.

With the Clarity eCommerce platform, you can have widgets that are embedded in the vendors’ websites.

They are just like what you’d use with YouTube or Google Maps, but they’re usable for selling items on their site via the marketplace technology. This is commonly referred to as a headless eCommerce.

This is helpful when put into coupled eCommerce, where there’s already a template for a user interface built into place.

We offer this for our marketplace eCommerce platforms, such that your marketplace can have external sites linking back to it because they’re using your widgets.

This is also helpful for the vendors, distributors, and sellers because they can have the functionality of your marketplace on their website.

This makes it convenient for people to purchase items from their website, but all the while linking back to your website.

These strategies allow you to have this evergreen set of content that drives traffic constantly and can grow over time.

Once you get enough of a footprint in a particular set of keywords, you can get market penetration. This works well long-term.

As far as short term strategies, tactical marketing is a good way to go. You would get databases, and work with different partners, vendors, and sellers to determine email marketing campaigns that would target lists of potential buyers.

These are helpful to send out promotionally when the marketplace is launching or when you’re working to penetrate a particular market.

These could be things like collaborating with a vendor to provide a discount or special offering for the marketplace in collaboration with this vendor.

Then bring that to market with a direct or transactional email campaign, a drip campaign, webinar, or special event.

There might be a particular person or celebrity who will make an announcement, and the email campaigns lead up to that.

There are numerous creative things you can do in order to get people thinking about and engaging with the content in the email.

The fundamental is being able to target and segment for a particular category or set of categories that makes sense and then building out those lists for transactionally interacting with them via email.

This is a powerful method because transactional emails don't cost anything. It takes some time to put the content together, but from an advertising cost perspective, it doesn't cost anything.

And once you have an audience that fits into a particular category that makes sense to advertise to, you know that they’re a good fit long-term, so you can continue to market to them and provide them value.

BEST PRACTICES FOR MARKETING YOUR PRODUCTS

Paid Advertising Strategies for Market Penetration

Another strategy that works well is to take advantage of paid advertising. Paid advertising can be used in a dual effort.

A lot of traditional paid advertising is a simple paid form where you would take some of the products in the marketplace and dynamically generate ads, possibly including their pricing or some of the benefits.

You’d focus on long tail ads that are really precise. This is an effective method when there are powerful, dynamic ads that we can run based on categories, subcategories, or products themselves, or even vendors.

It’s also effective to use retargeting with some of the advertising. A lot of advertising is expensive for different categories that are popular among marketplace eCommerce platforms, and generally they’ll be saturated with competition.

So instead of focusing on these bigger markets, you can focus on long-tail keyword phrases that might represent somebody who’s further up the funnel and their research about a particular topic. Proper research will also inform you about the keyword bidding strategies to use.

Then leverage retargeting techniques to track when someone has visited your marketplace eCommerce properties, and essentially follow them around with useful and valuable content that will help them progress through their evaluation process.

It will help them progress through their selection process of the right marketplace to purchase from. So you can provide this valuable resource of, for example, a comparison tool.

You could present it to them with perhaps some words:

“Here is this great way of getting all the product details and spec docs for this particular product that you’re interested in. Are you interested in some of the alternatives? Here are some comparisons between the most popular products in this category.”

If it’s relevant to their offering, you could also highlight how important it is to have free refunds, no questions asked, if the buyer’s item isn’t a good fit.

You can also provide value with how they deal with logistics and containers if it’s a complex intermodal shipment.

With things like this, you can see someone’s progression on your site and with retargeting, focus on providing value.

This can result in a branding effect, where you’re giving the buyer impressions and they capitulate to the value that you’re offering versus all other competitors.

Or in other words, the buyer forms a higher opinion of your offering compared to others, based on the value you’ve provided them thus far. This helps with market penetration.

Doing direct or paid advertising can be challenging, but there are strategies that we can implement to pierce through that surface layer of competition where things may already be saturated.

DEVELOP THE BEST MARKET PENETRATION STRATEGY

Learn What Works Best for Your eMarketplace

Fundamentally, there are a lot of different options for going about executing on market penetration with your eMarketplace. The most important thing overall is to evaluate what’s going to work for your market.

You may want to try many, if not all, of these strategies, and you’ll want to be measuring and validating as you go.

A lot of these strategies can work, but they have certain settings and configurations that have to be in place in order to get it to work properly.

Many of these strategies you’ll need to stick with for an extended period of time and measure, review, and iterate on changes in order to get them to yield great results.