Thanks. Just joined this forum.. I need some marketing ideas for my website which is a mini olx for car & car parts in UK. just 3 months old. If anyone have ideas please share
Salam,
There are hundreds of thousands of marketing ways/ideas out there for your website. I am trying to reply you please see my answer below I am sure it will help you or atleast give you some ideas to start your own way: -
Acquiring users for free, don't we all want to do it. I think a lot about this topic and will share a few strategies below. The strategies you apply on products with network effects (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) are different from the strategies for product without network effects (e.g. Kayak, Fab). There's only so much that can be included here so I'll be linking to more detailed articles for further information.
Be the first to get onto a new user acquisition platform: There is a window when a new channel launches when users are still gullible enough to be harvested. Yelp did it with SEO, Zynga did it with Facebook. The same tactics don't work when both the users and the channel get more sophisticated later on. A detailed analysis of this cycle at: False positives and the cycle of free user acquisition platforms
Steal: There are a lot of niche classifieds and ecommerce sites that compete with Craigslist. Quite a few of them started off by posting listings on Craigslist and directing the traffic to their site.
Piggyback on an existing network: Piggyback on a thriving network as long as your platform is contextual and complementary to that network.
StumbleUpon benefited a lot from being one of the first plug-ins on the Firefox browser. It was a natural complement to a browser which is essentially used to find information. It was one level of abstraction above Google's "I'm feeling Lucky" if i could put it that way.
Content marketing is amazing free marketing: Blog away like the guys at Buffer and Mint, and not about your product, just anything that your target market would want and that would make them want to explore the product.
SEO at scale: Ensure that whenever users create content, the permalinks are search-engine friendly. This is a great way to get users to market your product. Quora does this amazingly.
Widgets: Be shareable and embeddable: Facebook sharing was great but users have, over time, become desensitized to what gets shared on Facebook. Instead, ensure that what gets created on your platform can get shared where your savvy users want to share it, namely on blogs and niche forums. YouTube got traction because MySpace users (musicians) needed a way to share videos and Youtube offered them a solution.
Fake it till you make it: When users come initially to your platform and there's nothing there, they see little value in using it. Platform usage requires investment; you set up a profile, you browse around... it takes time. Users won't invest if they don't see activity. Well, if there isn't any activity, create some. Reddit did it. Paypal did it. A lot of marketplaces do it. Once you create some activity, more users start coming over.
Create tools of self-expression which are really easy to use: No matter what your platform does, users should be able to create something there which they would want to spread. A user may not want to spread the word about your platform but would definitely want to spread the word about what she created on it. E.g. Youtube grows everytime a video goes viral because users personally invest in marketing it. This is marketing that scales with adoption and super-effective. Kickstarter and Change.org allow users to spread their cause to the whole world. Users are vested in marketing it. Forget gamification, forget viral design... there is no bigger incentive for users than the ability to spread their creations, beliefs and causes in a manner that wasn't possible before.
Target a micro-market: Facebook's early users were at Harvard, Yelp's early users were the tech-savvy crowd of San Francisco, Quora and LinkedIn's early users were the VCs and startups of Silicon Valley. Find a micro-market which contains your early adopters.
Design your product to align growth and engagement: E.g. when I post this answer on Quora, it allows me to broadcast it to my network. Posting the ansewr helps with engagement, the simultaneous broadcast helps grow Quora.
Provide a service for producers that enables them to interact with their consumers: This is so obvious, it's often ignored. Your producers already have consumers. There, that's the solution to getting in more users for free.Loyaltystartups like Shopkick also do something similar. Get the producers, get their consumers on the network, cross-promote other producers to these consumers. RInse. Repeat.
If you're building for user-generated content, ensure that users create good content and are appropriately motivated: Usually, only about 1-10% of your community actively contribute content. To keep creating value, you need to ensure you cater to their motivations.
Create organic virality, a product that spreads every time it's used:
SurveyMonkey, EventBrite, MailChimp, and the original HotMail, are products that just have to be spread to be used. But even if your product doesn't fall in this category, you can create features that show this property.
For organic virality, ensure that there is a non-monetary incentive for users to spread the word.
Focus on superconnectors: Remember, Branchout gained rapid adoption the day Michael Arrington downloaded the app. He had a large following on Facebook.
Build an invite list before you launch: Nothing is as good as having a Launchrock-powered user base raring to hit your product on day 1.
Be exclusive but be smart about it: Try starting with an invite-only beta. However, this is not a one size fits all as what worked for gmail didn't work for google wave.
Apologies for such a long answer. There was no way I could have put everything on this subject within this space. Also, I don't know the specifics of exactly what you are doing or I could offer pointed feedback. But I hope this is helpful.
