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The demand for E-commerce is rising dramatically in the current times and with the rising demand. Contenders are joining in making the market reach its saturation point. For any ecommerce website business, creating and launching an online business is definitely a daunting task that requires significant efforts both in terms of research and development. However, marketplaces exist to make the lives of e-commerce business owners easier and allow them to focus on their business, its strengths, and the opportunities that can be availed. Today, custom web development agencies offer different development opportunities to help your online e-commerce business get off the ground, and looking at them for the sake of is really not a bad idea. You can also get help from marketplaces to boost your online business. A marketplace is an online reseller of your products that may also host it for you. Multiple online marketplaces are also highly visible to online users which many of us already know about. To name the giants, Amazon and eBay are the two most famous ones. Also Read: How To Start An E-commerce Business? Let us see now some of the prominent advantages of using an online marketplace to publicize your product:

Helps You Gain Visibility in the Non-traditional Audience

One of the main reasons for hosting your products on an online marketplace is to gain visibility among the not-so-traditional audience that also affects the traffic on your website, positively. Along with the interested audience, there will be targets that were not too interested in your product but might help the overall ecommerce website industry as they may purchase the product later on from you or some other online resource.

Easy Liquidity of Slow-moving Goods

Another reason why online sellers host their products on several marketplaces is to quickly liquidate slow-moving goods. Since online marketplaces have a huge and diverse traffic of online shoppers on them, therefore a product that might not be a running product on your eCommerce website can become a cash cow on this other marketplace that you choose to host your product on.

To Pinpoint Search Engine Optimization Efforts on a Smaller Line of Products

Search engine optimization is among the best practices for achieving a good influx of interested traffic on your website design. Custom web design agencies make it a point to offer reliable and affordable search engine optimization services to their clients so that their business may shine and this can also be a reason for you to choose a marketplace for your products. One of your products is enjoying the limelight in the marketplace through its dedicated search engine efforts. You can focus on a smaller line of products that you may have launched not too long ago and opt to converge all your efforts in the search engine optimization of this product to achieve better visibility.

Customer’s Trust on Marketplaces

Popular marketplaces become popular after spending a significant time in the industry and they have invested momentous efforts to gain the position they are at. Customers also trust these popular sources to shop due to their strong brand heritage and industry presence. Business owners choose to list their products on such marketplaces not only because of the large customer base that they can get but because of the credibility too that these marketplaces brings to their products.

They Offer Innovation

An online marketplace is a huge collection of products listed under various categories. This automatically makes them very big, both as an entity and in terms of online traffic as well. To keep their game on the top level, they keep inventing themselves, by introducing newer product ranges and by instilling newer technologies they make the entire user browsing experience fulfilling for online customers. Now that we know how a marketplace can help your product and you as a business owner. Let us look into some effective tips for choosing a viable marketplace for your product offerings:

How to Choose a Marketplace For Your Product?

There are several things that a business owner must consider before finalizing the decision. It’s always easy to choose an established marketplace but with that, you are also offering yourself up to the mercy of the competition that bigger marketplaces have. Irrespective of the size, a marketplace that is well adapted to your product type can help in increasing sales dramatically.

According to Categories

Marketplaces categorize different products into well-placed product categories. These categories are created to help customers in finding the product of their interest with ease. These categories help filter down the products in front of the customers and foster better visibility.

According to the Costs Involved

Normally, whenever you choose to list your product on a marketplace there is a minimum monthly subscription involved that enables you to host your product. For smaller ecommerce businesses, a higher hosting cost means increasing the burden and risk.

Ease of Payment and Security

Popular marketplaces offer multiple payment options to online customers along with data security. This is exactly why people prefer to buy from places like Amazon and eBay instead of an e-commerce website that is fairly new in the market. For a business owner where to sell online makes it easier to compare multiple online marketplaces to finalize one to host their products. So now that we know how to evaluate a marketplace for our product hosting. Let us have a look at how to sell on marketplaces with increased efficiency:

How to Sell on Marketplaces?

So you know now why you should sell through a marketplace, but we are not done yet. How to sell is a question that is still unanswered. Let’s learn now:

What Products to Sell?

If you are thinking about your best sellers, you are absolutely wrong. The idea of selling on marketplaces is to bring traffic from popular resources to your website. If you put your best selling product on the marketplace for sale you are actually offering your prized possession to someone else, and no sane person does it. Keep them to you only so that the loyalty of your customers remains intact with you only, and put a less-selling product on a marketplace so that its sales boost and can also bring traffic to your website due to the increased visibility that it will receive on the marketplace.

What Information Should You Put There?

Make sure to put every relevant information about your product on the marketplace without missing out on even one point. Since it’s an external resource, missing information means missing out on a probable lead. That being said, do not attempt to copy and paste information from one resource to another. Doing this may cause an error in your search engine optimization efforts and may result in a marketplace content duplicate which the search engine as well as the marketplace won’t like. I hope you enjoyed reading the article and hope it is informational for you. Marketplace selling isn’t only to dip your toes in the ecommerce waters. It can serve as a great strategy for smaller ecommerce businesses to gain visibility and sales hikes at the same time. Please leave a comment below if you like the article or if you have any questions popping up in your mind.

You’ve probably noticed that the use of virtual reality (VR) has nearly tripled in just one year. Everyone wants to incorporate it into their business strategy. Virtual reality is the new must-have piece of content that is now considered a sustainable content solution. And while every brand is rushing to reveal its VR experience, some are investing their time and efforts in creating solid strategies that will ensure a better return on investment. Despite what others think about virtual reality, it’s important to carefully figure out if your visual content strategy really needs VR in the first place. According to Content Marketing Institute, 71% of consumers think a brand that uses VR is forward-thinking. One thing is for sure, these forward-thinking brands stand out and gain more customer attention. Creating a content marketing strategy for virtual reality requires a deeper understanding of engagement through interactivity.

6 Must-Haves for Creating Content Marketing Strategy for VR

      1. Consider Your Existing Audience First

How do your ideal customers consume your content? Determine the medium – webinar, Q&A, live videos, or vlogs. Regardless of the type of medium or the content schedule you have created. You can continue with that strategy by implementing VR technology. If you focus on video marketing, you can start creating VR content on Facebook Spaces. Mobile app companies can infuse virtual reality content for use with an iPhone, Samsung, or Google VR headset. Let’s take the example of Stubhub, they allow their customers to see a 360-degree VR view from their actual seats, on every ticket purchase. By incorporating VR, Stubhub.com is now able to offer a great customer experience and help customers better navigate to a purchase. The brand is intelligently solving your customers' problems by tweaking their existing content to enable VR abilities.

      2. Create a Unique Experience

Let’s accept it, virtual reality is not about the content, it’s all about offering the best user experience. Your content marketing strategy should be devised in a way that gives customers an in-depth view of your product offerings.   Take Shopify – the ecommerce giant, as an example. The ecommerce platform is about to release its latest thread studio, which is basically a VR app that will take customers into a virtual studio to view products. Once the customer has chosen his favorite color and design, he sent to Shopify’s print-on-demand provider. From here, customers can bring their virtual vision to life. In the future, brick-and-mortar stores will be replaced by virtual stores that allow consumers to walk through and browse without being physically present at the store.

      3. Keep Long Distance Customers in Mind

VR will make it simpler to craft content for long distance buyer pool. As VR will transform the home buying process, it will also help realtors take their widely located potential buyers through a completely virtual tour of their property. Now customers from all around the world can see a home inside and out just like they are visiting physically. Real estate businesses will be able to allow their clients the ability to make custom changes to the home by using the VR app, offering a more interactive user experience and giving clients an immersive view of what it would be like to live in the home.

      4. Give Customers an Immersive View of Products

Showing consumers a visual of what household items, furniture, and other products will look like is an important way to encourage them to make a purchase decision. Take home improvement giant Lowe’s Innovation Labs as an example. The brand has already added a VR element that is truly based on the concept of home customization. The home improvement design and visualization VR tool Holoroom takes homeowners through a model home and provides a look at what the home would look like with home improvement products. They provide their customers with an immersive, intuitive experience in the home of their dreams.

      5. Offer an Emotional Journey

You can take your customers on an emotional journey through your virtual reality content. Here, emotional refers to, what your target customers are most passionate about and craft content that meets those areas. For instance, if you are writing a travel blog, probably your main goal is to promote the vacation packages you have mentioned in the blog. You can provide customers a one-of-a-kind experience by taking them to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, or atop the Eye of London through the impressiveness of virtual reality. Honor Everywhere offers a virtual reality experience to military veterans and allows them to visit the war memorials and enjoy the experience using VR headsets.

      6. Encourage User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is gradually becoming a staple in content marketing. The main objective of content marketing is to create communities, user-generated VR content is a new concept that will drive further development in VR hardware. In the future, consumers will be able to equip themselves with 360-degree cameras to create their own finest VR experiences. Tools like Facebook Spaces, YouTube, Periscope, and Insta360 allow people to shoot advanced content via their phones. And brands can easily integrate user-generated VR videos onto their website. Digital marketing agencies looking to make VR a significant part of their digital marketing efforts should prepare themselves. It’s never too early to come up with a compelling UGC campaign idea, as in the coming years, the demand for user-generated VR content will continue to grow.

Okay! What’s Next?

Should your 2018 content strategy include virtual reality? For many brands, the answer is a big NO. 2017 is the year when businesses at least start acknowledging its presence and start implementing it in their businesses. In addition, the innovation of VR marketing strategies proves it is going to be a major player in the future of content marketing. Content creators should start A/B testing with virtual reality technology. You can start with individual posts or landing pages, and gauge the user response. And create your 2018 content marketing strategy accordingly. Trust me, there is no ideal time than present to start thinking of innovative ways to make VR beneficial for your brand.