nasscom Community

What is the Best Strategy to Start a Service-Focused Online Marketplace

4 Mins read

In this post-pandemic period, most businesses have entered into the ecommerce industry as it is the only way to survive. Now you can find numerous ecommerce websites in the market and there is a tough and serious competition among businesses. To beat the competition one needs to have an excelling marketing strategy that will support him to confront competitors.

In recent days, we can find more types of online marketplace platforms. One such type is the service marketplace platform. Running an online service marketplace is quite a challenging one. To overcome all challenges you need to have the best strategy. Let us get to know more about service marketplace platforms and ways to build them effectively.

What is a service marketplace platform?

A service marketplace is a website or an application that is exclusively built to get and provide services. By utilizing this platform, any individual or freelancers or companies and offer their services to others in the platform and will be paid for their services through the platform.

Remote working is made possible with the help of service marketplace website and people can sit at their home and can take orders from companies and can deliver their service through the platform. Few examples of online service marketplaces are Fiverr, Upwork, and Thumbtack.

Marketing strategies that will help in promoting your service marketplace platform.

More attention is needed when you plan to promote your online service marketplace. You will get more responses only when your platform is quite familiar among your target audience. You need to drive traffic to your website and then should work on the leads for better conversion. Let us check out the key aspects that will support us in increasing the revenue.

SEO strategy 

Around 60% of buyers have the habit of surfing the net to know about the product they want to buy. 87% of people who surf the net visit the first 3 listed sites in the search and finish their deal. So it is very essential to make your site visible on top of the search pages. SEO is the only solution to make your brand visible in all search engines. Build your service marketplace website that is completely search engine optimized and start getting more traffic to your website.

Know your customers 

The world is so big and buyers are all over the world. Without understanding who your target audience is, there is no point of investing your money in promoting your brand. First segment your audience group and analyze and know where they will be available. 67% of buyers will be actively present on all social media platforms. Check on which platform your buyers will be highly present. Then focus on promoting your brand on that particular platform.

Landing page optimization 

Landing page will create the first impression when a visitor visits your service marketplace. So your landing page should be more user-friendly and should contain easy navigation that will facilitate users to identify the service they want and they can easily buy or sell services through the marketplace platform. For this your landing page should be well optimized that will provide a seamless customer experience and will get you more orders and revenue. Make your landing page to be more interactive and increase customer engagement that will result in better conversion rate.

Effective payment processes 

An order is completed only when the user proceeds with the payment process. 45% of service marketplace faces cart abandonment mainly because of poor payment processing system. Some platforms will have unfamiliar payment gateways that will make users hesitate in using them as they fear about their data security. To make buyers comfortable your service marketplace should be integrated with familiar and leading payment gateways and should provide multiple payment options to users. This will obviously increase your conversion rate and will reduce cart abandonment.

Order fulfillment and delivery

Getting orders can be gained through proper brand promotions and many other marketing aspects but to retain your customers you need to ensure a perfect order fulfillment and delivery of service. The service providers should be monitored on their service and should get ratings and reviews for their service. Customers may require same day service delivery or custom-delivery of service. Your service marketplace platform should be able to provide multiple delivery options that will facilitate users to get their services on-time.

Emerge new technologies

Always keep your online service marketplace updated and get to know what are the latest and trending technologies that will enhance user experiences. You need to implement all those technologies in your platform and make sure your customers get better platform experience and will make them stay with your service marketplace website for a long time. Latest technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms will help you to understand your customers’ buying behavior and will let you revamp your platform according to their requirements and demands.

Easy personalization

No user will like to see the same layout and theme in an online service marketplace; they will stop visiting your platform at one point of time as they get bored to see the same features and modules. According to the change of users’ mind you need to renovate your service marketplace frequently and this will attract more audience to your platform and ultimately increase the order value and revenue. Make sure you revise the content of the service descriptions that will create interest in the minds of visitors and will create a demand to buy the service from your platform.

Get testimonials and referrals

Referral marketing is one of the best marketing techniques that will create a separate customer base for your service marketplace platform. People will always believe their friends or neighbors and will give priority to brands that they refer to. Deliver best service and gain customers’ goodwill. This will help you to get more referral businesses. Also you can set an attractive referral commission slab and can make customers earn while referring their friends to our marketplace platform.

 Conclusion

An effective online service marketplace platform can be easily identified by its features and functionalities. Many leading service marketplace software have attained a separate place in the digital market mainly because of their unique features. Give more importance to the modules you build in your service marketplace and attract more audience by following all the above mentioned marketing strategies in your service marketplace platform and become a leading in this ecommerce industry.