Grow Your Marketplace Platform: A Step-by-Step Guide

Learn how to grow your marketplace platform successfully with this step-by-step guide! Discover how to create an effective go-to-market strategy and utilize different growth channels such as viral marketing and SEO.

Grow Your Marketplace Platform: A Step-by-Step Guide

Launching a product can be a daunting task, especially if you haven't validated your concept thoroughly. To ensure success, it's best to open up your marketplace platform to a small group of people before promoting it widely. Start by selecting the most enthusiastic users from your mailing list and offering them exclusive discounts and feedback opportunities. Make sure to communicate your marketing launch strategy to your suppliers so they don't spread the word before the time is right.

When you're ready to scale, you need to try out different growth channels to find the one that works best for that stage of growth and focus on it until you run out. Common market growth channels include viral marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing, paid advertising, email marketing, community building, and engineering as marketing.

A go-to-market strategy is a step-by-step plan created to successfully launch and grow a product or service. It usually includes your target audience, marketing plan, and sales strategy. Building with a marketplace SaaS tool is the fastest way to launch an online marketplace platform. Educating suppliers on how to market their offering outside their market is also a sound strategy. You can also use an open source marketplace software or a generic website builder and pay someone to develop a market on it.

Set up a simple landing page in your marketplace to collect email addresses a few months before opening the market. The greatest added value of a market business is convenience, and companies that have years of experience in the market often know how to offer it. As market owners, you need to focus on your existing user base as they are familiar with the expert and will not have trust issues with the platform.

API-based marketplace software gives you complete freedom to develop the unique features of your market without needing to pay attention to market essentials. For example, the Sharetribe software is designed to be optimal for the rental markets and the services market. A good sign that it's time to expand is when you start to see a lot of items in your market that don't have their own category. From professional photographs to detailed descriptions of that moment, everything counts when a user searches for a query in a market.

In other situations, options such as creating a marketplace with the best open source software, choosing a website builder, using an online marketplace maker without code, creating a marketplace with a set of tools without code, or creating a marketplace on a SaaS tool may be preferable API-based marketplace.

To rank on Google and grow your marketplace platform successfully, you must create an effective go-to-market strategy that includes your target audience, marketing plan, and sales strategy. Utilize different growth channels such as viral marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing, paid advertising, email marketing, community building, and engineering as marketing.