Marketplaces largely rely on user-generated content: vendors create listings and customers write reviews. Adding a platform-produced content marketing campaign to user-generated items can have multiple benefits for a marketplace. Here’s what a content marketing campaign can do for a marketplace, and how to go about starting one.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing method that uses captivating content to draw in prospective customers. For marketplaces, “customers” includes both vendors and customers/clients.
The goal of content marketing isn’t to immediately make a sale, but rather to attract people who are interested in a marketplace’s niche. By attracting interested people, a marketplace gains both visibility and authority. Eventually, that visibility and authority leads to more people joining the marketplace as vendors or customers.
Content marketing is a fairly young form of marketing, but it’s proven highly effective. People go online to be informed, amused and entertained by content, and companies that provide this content are often successful.
How Does Content Marketing Help Search Engine Optimization?
The main objective of content marketing is often to increase website traffic, for the marketing method is focused on drawing in prospective customers. To this end, content marketing aides search engine optimization efforts in several ways.
First, content itself can bring in visitors. Engaging content that’s shared on social media will attract visitors, and some people will find content via search if it’s on-page keyword usage is well calculated. Additionally, some sites may link to especially interesting content, which can lead to referral traffic from those sites.
Second, links from other sites usually help a page rank higher in search results. Moreover, some of the rankings boost that comes from external links can be passed onto other pages via internal links. Thus, getting links to a piece of content might also help a marketplace rank other pages that the content links to.
Finally, internal links from a piece of content to other pages also help search engines determine what the other pages are about. As search engines determine what the other pages are about, they’re able to more accurately include those pages in their results.
Does Content Marketing Help Marketplaces In Other Ways?
The SEO benefits of content marketing are true for any kind of website. With the right type of content, marketplaces see other benefits from content marketing as well.
How-to guides created for vendors can lead to better listings. Vendors can use tips in these guides to improve their listing format, images, videos and on-page SEO, all of which benefit both individual vendors and the marketplace platform.
Frequently asked questions sections can reduce how many support emails and phone calls a marketplace receives. If vendors and customers can find questions to their answers in these resources, they won’t need — or want — to send in a question and wait for a response. (Because vendors and customers normally have different questions, it’s often wise to create two separate FAQs.)
Buying guides made for customers can be used to highlight select vendors or listings. Marketplaces might want to give the extra exposure to their top-performing vendors, vendors with seasonal items, new vendors who need help getting established, or others.
What Kinds Of Content Can Marketplaces Publish?
As mentioned, how-to guides, FAQs and buying guides are natural pieces for marketplaces to publish. So are reviews, vendor profiles, and industry reports. First-person stories from past customers can even work well for some platforms, particularly those that offer fun services like Airbnb. There’s no shortage of topics to cover.
There’s also no shortage of ways to publish content. Depending on the topic being covered, marketplaces might put out:
- Whitepapers
- Case studies
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Memes
- Videos
- Social media posts
- Other types of content
In many cases, the same content can be repurposed to reduce research time.
To see how repurposing content works, assume a marketplace wants to showcase products related to an upcoming holiday. The marketplace might start with some research into what products sold well last year. With this information, the marketplace can create a(n):
- Vendor-facing whitepaper that details statistics related to these products’ sales
- Vendor-facing infographic that relays the statistics in a more visual way
- Vendor-facing blog post that highlights the products with less detailed information
- Customer-facing blog post that showcases similar products that are available
- Customer-facing social media post for each individual product
- Customer-facing slideshow video that strings the social media posts together
With so many separate pieces of content, a marketplace has plenty for posting on its own site, different social media platforms and other websites that allow third-party posts.
What Content Marketing Mistakes Should Marketplaces Avoid?
There are three common mistakes that marketplaces should avoid in their content marketing campaign.
First, quality shouldn’t be sacrificed for quantity. Sometimes, marketplaces spread their resources over too many projects. This leads to mediocre content, which doesn’t stand out on blogs, social platforms or other websites. Investing in fewer high-quality pieces is more effective than making more low-quality ones.
Second, marketplaces must resist the temptation to publish outside their niche. Off-topic pieces of content, even if trendy, cause marketplaces to lose focus and reduces its brand authority. The pieces often also take more time to research, as they’re outside the marketing team’s area of knowledge. Instead, repeatedly posting on-topic pieces related to a marketplace’s niche will build the platform’s authority and following.
Finally, marketplaces must regularly invest in content marketing. This is a marketing strategy that works, but it takes time and must be done with consistency. Many marketplaces (especially new ones with limited resources) approach content marketing with quick bursts of energy, which has only limited, short-term results. Doing a little bit on a regular basis will have a more profound and long-term impact.
If you have a marketplace, make sure sufficient resources are being invested in its content marketing campaigns. Setting aside time, people and money to make and promote content may be difficult, but it can have a lasting impact on the success of your platform.