{"id":1388,"date":"2018-03-26T05:38:59","date_gmt":"2018-03-26T12:38:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3.14.248.234\/?p=1388"},"modified":"2020-06-26T15:48:56","modified_gmt":"2020-06-26T22:48:56","slug":"growth-hacks-online-marketplace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/growth-hacks-online-marketplace\/","title":{"rendered":"Use These 9 Growth Hacks for Your Online Marketplace"},"content":{"rendered":"

Want to create the next Uber?
\nHow about the next Airbnb?<\/em>
\nIf you’re in love with online marketplaces, then you’re in luck.
\nAs the former head of growth for one, I’ve learned most marketplaces work similarly in regards to ad copy, landing pages, personalization, and data.
\nTo give you get a head start, here are nine tips that helped scale our marketplace from zero to over a million dollars ARR:<\/p>\n

1. Use a Personalized Landing Page for Each City<\/h2>\n

If you’re running ads, then personalization is key. If you’re running ads to a city that means showing pictures of the city and mentioning the name multiple times. That’s exactly what we did here.
\nWe have a famous picture of Venice Beach in the background and mention “LA” or “Los Angeles” twice.
\n\"\"
\nWe make sure to darken the background so people can focus on the call-to-action.\u00a0This personalized landing page converts 11X better than the one that’s not. Powerful.<\/p>\n

2. Use Software to Personalize Your Website<\/h2>\n

What about the rest of your website?
\nHow do you personalize it for different audiences? You can’t show the same page to people in Chicago as you would San Francisco. That’d hurt your conversion rates.
\nThe good news is you can personalize your website for the different cities based on the visitor’s IP address. Many tools help you do this. Two renowned tools include\u00a0Geo Targetly<\/a>\u00a0and RightMessage<\/a> which can personalize any page based on your visitor’s location.<\/p>\n

3. Use the City Name and Picture in Your Ads<\/h2>\n

You want to keep all your paid media streamlined with the look and feel of your landing page. So if your landing page and homepage focus on Los Angeles, then make sure your ads have a picture of the city and the words “LA” or “Los Angeles.” Ideally, you can throw in some humor as well. For example, this ad says “You won’t find models here.” Perfect humor for startup entrepreneurs.
\n\"\"
\nWhen driving traffic from paid ads targeting a hyper-local area, it’s important to broaden your audience size. After all, the audience you’re now marketing to will be much smaller than if you were targeting nationwide. If the audience is too small, you’ll experience a high cost-per-click and cost-per-lead. To mitigate the cost, aim to keep your audience 40,000 people per a city.<\/p>\n

4. Have a Strong Referral Program<\/h2>\n

Below is a referral program we implemented for our client, GirlCrew. It’s critical to have a referral program present throughout the pages after the prospect becomes a lead. The reason is that marketplaces are community-based and referral programs work better when a community is one of the benefits of joining.
\n\"\"
\nIt’s important to make the rewards as clear as possible. In the picture above, you can see all the rewards and even get your referral link in the first fold. This means the visitor doesn’t have to scroll in order to find out why they should be referring people. As a result, rather than losing a quarter of your traffic that won’t scroll down to see the referral offer, they’ll now see it.<\/p>\n

5. Use Scarcity to Drive Acquisition<\/h2>\n

Scarcity offers drive more action when the benefit is community-based. Perfect for marketplaces.
\nA couple examples:
\n“Last five seats to join the community.”<\/em>
\n“We only accept 1\/10 people.”<\/em>
\nThere becomes a huge amount of FOMO.
\nLines like the ones above drive action.
\nPlay up scarcity in most of your copy to push people through your marketplace funnel.
\nFew marketplaces do this, but it makes a world of difference.<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0Have Several Traction Channels Before You Expand Cities<\/h2>\n

The number one killer of marketplaces is expanding to more cities too fast.
\nResources become thin and each city is growing at snail’s pace. Then a couple of traction channels stop working…and it’s all over. If you’re growing a marketplace, you need more than paid acquisition.
\nSmart marketplaces put an emphasis on other channels such as Instagram. When I was the head of growth for UpOut, I created an entirely automated Instagram strategy to drive us an additional $200K ARR for each city we were in.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/h2>\n

You can also try\u00a0cold email.
\nOne of my favorite tools for cold email is called Mailshake<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/h2>\n

It sends email at scale from Gmail accounts.
\nIt has sequences, great opt-out functionality, syncs with Zapier, and much more.
\nThe idea here is to test many avenues, then scale the ones that work.<\/p>\n

7. Don’t Be Afraid of Content Marketing<\/h2>\n

Founders of marketplaces get scared when they hear the words “Content Marketing.”
\nTo them, they feel it’s a slow way to grow a business that needs to expand fast. This is not always true, especially in the more niche B2B marketplaces like law. In the picture below, notice how Raad Ahmed<\/a> has written over 2,000 Quora answers about law to drive more people to his website.\"\"
\nIf you take a look at the data, it’s working.
\n\"\"
\nNow this is a lot of work. I recommend outsourcing a writer to publish this content for you. The trick is to get one writer to ask SEO optimized questions and the other to answer. If you can do that, then you got a golden ticket to Quora content marketing.<\/p>\n

8. Use Online Groups and Remarketing for Retention<\/h2>\n

Only half the battle is the acquisition.
\nThe other half?<\/em> Retention.
\nThere are a couple of ways to increase retention besides email and SMS notifications when users take particular actions. These ways include following them, interacting with their content, and creating a Facebook Group.
\nAs you notice below, Uber has a Facebook Group for each of their cities where they educate and update drivers. This helps keep the drivers active on their platform.
\n\"\"
\nAnother way is to grab their user profile URLs from other platforms they’re already active on. For example, if your customer base is active on LinkedIn, then ask a question in the funnel that grabs their LinkedIn profile URL. You can now create a tool that auto adds these people at scale with personalized messaging.
\nHere’s an example tool we’ve created at BAMF Media.
\n\"\"
\nImagine joining a marketplace, then getting a personalized message from the CEO on another platform with a simple thank-you message. The chances of you becoming a more active member increase dramatically.
\nAnother way to decrease churn of new members is to remarket them in the funnel. This means encouraging people to take the next relevant action whether it’s finishing setting up their profile or selecting the seller to buy from. Always remember, it’s 10X cheaper to encourage a current member to take action, then acquiring a new one.<\/p>\n

9. Implement Proper Tracking for Attribution<\/h2>\n

Before you expand cities, know that you need an excellent tracking and attribution process in place. I’m talking everything from proper UTM tagging, Google Analytics dashboards, SQL database, and Tableau set up. If you don’t have proper attribution to scale, then your traction channels will turn into a mess. You need an expert handle on multi-attribution funnels.
\nDid they see a Facebook ad, then a piece of content, then a Google Ad before they converted?<\/em>
\nYou need to know the answers to these questions.
\nIf you can’t afford expensive software like Tableau, then use tools like Google Data Studio<\/a> to showcase your acquisition data to your team. Here’s an example of a Google AdWords report:
\n\"\"
\nWhen I was the head of growth for the marketplace, UpOut, we had a strong attribution process in place which allowed us to scale from zero to five cities fast. If\u00a0you have excellent processes for one city, it’ll likely scale across the next fifty.
\nThat means any improvement has a 10X factor to the overall growth of the company. That’s part of the fun in marketplace marketing.
\nAre you ready to scale your marketplace with a few of these growth hacks?<\/em>]]><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Want to create the next Uber?
\nHow about the next Airbnb?
\nIf you’re in love with online marketplaces, then you’re in luck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":18623,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ub_ctt_via":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[539,3254,112,114,3381],"tags":[],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/How-to-Scale-a-10-Million-Dollar-SaaS-Company-with-Patrick-Campbell-Co-Founder-of-ProfitWell-7.png","author_info":{"display_name":"Houston Golden","author_link":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/author\/josh\/"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bamf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}