How to Use PR to Grow Your Online Marketplace Business

Strategy 1. PR & Social Media Are Blending Quickly

When social media platforms began their increased popularity, not many advertising opportunities were available. Now, Facebook and many other social platforms have a built out advertising platform that allows even deeper advertising strategies than what you might find in Google. In fact, I think Facebook may know more about is than Google, at least the data they know about our habits and interests are more valuable. We recently worked with a local jewelry store that was having a family member buy out the business and needed to quickly liquidate their assets to lower the cost of the purchase price. We jumped at the idea to blend this PR news story with a social media selling strategy. By utilizing Facebook's custom audiences and lookalike audience advertising, we were able to take 10 years of customer data and create a very targeted campaign to reach out to previous customers. We use language in the ads that was not used anywhere else. With tracking metrics, we were able to track back close to $50,000 worth of in store sales and over $100,000 in online ecommerce sales. We were surprised how well this campaign worked, as it run for 3 months and had a total advertising cost of about $4,500. The long term value that this campaign helped create is still being realized as we see return customers every day!


Strategy 2. PR Research Drives Ecommerce Data

Most e-commerce platforms that someone might be working within, whether it's WordPress or Squarespace, have SEO functionality built into them. You will be able to implement title tags, and tag your images. But by simply adding in SEO elements, you won't necessarily gain traffic from the implementation. The missing piece is strategy. Sitting down with your team and figuring out how people are searching for the products that you sell is extremely important. Often times people search for products and what they do or what they can solve, rather than what they actually are. That is an important set of keywords to address when you look at creating a keyword optimization strategy for your eCommerce site.


Strategy 3. Focus on SEO & Paid Search

Marrying up your SEO strategy with your paid search strategy, can mean that you will save money over time and have a more informed eCommerce SEO strategy for your business. When you use Google AdWords or other Ad platforms, you are able to Target keywords and understand the search volume that happens for those keywords, but more importantly you are able to test different landing pages and user experiences to see what combination converts the best. Taking the data from Google AdWords and applying it to your SEO campaign, you now know the keywords that you should be targeting that drive the most qualified traffic, and the user experience that will drive the best conversion rate on your website. When we work with clients, one thing that we like to do, even if we are only working on an SEO campaign, is to put together a small ad campaign to test out these strategies.

1. Do you use PR in your promotions?

We leverage PR in marketing promotions for particular opportunities for our business. A successful PR campaign can lead to increased awareness amongst targeted customers for an online marketplace. If done well, these customers will discover your service, and decide to test it. When the marketplace services these customers well and the experience is positive, they can be developed into loyal users.

2. What PR practices turned out to be successful and what - not?

When March for our Lives was underway, Bus.com wanted to get involved to contribute to the event in a positive and transformative way. We elected to work with organizers from Parkland to provide transportation for students within those areas at cost.

We knew that mobilizing students was key to ensuring the movement was successful. In order to increase usage of our service, we reached out to specific news agencies that understood the importance of this movement to share our story. The result was working with Vice to create a story that highlighted transportation options for this event, which generated awareness of our service with those that could leverage it.

3. Any results which really surprised you?

Press is a challenging channel to understand. We've worked with various outlets (TechCrunch, Fortune, VentureBeat, etc) on different types of pitches. It's important to understand that press often does not lead to customer acquisition in the same way that advertising on Facebook may.

The PR we at Auto Accessories Garage use the most in our marketing and promotions is responding to and creating HARO queries. Responding to HARO queries has allowed us to receive mentions and backlinks from authoritative websites in the automotive and E-Commerce spaces. For example, we received a backlink in a Huffington Post article by responding to a query on tips for buying a new car. The backlinks we receive boost our website's domain authority which allows us to rank better in search engines for our targeted keywords and, thus, grow our organic traffic and revenue.

We have also used HARO to reach out for quotes on content assets we have created, like The Best Small Towns to Visit on a Road Trip. Because the sources for these stories are mentioned in the article, they have an incentive to link to these pieces and, in this way, our website receives more backlinks.

1. Do you use PR in your promotions?

Yes. We run an online marketplace for original artwork with pretty high price points when compared to other e-commerce industries. Due to the higher price points than people are typically used to when shopping online, our customers really need to trust us. That's why we focus on in-person speaking engagements, influencer marketing, media outreach and other PR strategies that focus on winning over trusted influencers to promote us because they like what we are doing.

2. What PR practices turned out to be successful and what - not?

In-person speaking engagements are probably the most succesful PR tactics for our business. When you speak in person you really get a chance to explain the value you provide and win people over. They are much more likely to visit our site and buy artwork if they have had an in-person experience with one of us.

Media outreach is also quite lucrative for us because it shows that we are credible and trustworthy.

Reaching out to social media influencers in the art and design world has not been very productive for us historically but we hope to change that as our business grows and our brand becomes more recognized.

3. Any results which really surprised you?

I'm always surprised by the power of putting yourself out there to speak for free at events. When I speak in public I don't try to sell my product or services to people. I just try to explain what we do and why it is valuable. The focus is on making a personal connection with the audience and convincing them to care about what you are doing. After speaking events I always meet a ton of people who are interested in either buying artwork, referring an artist to us or helping us in other ways. It's a really great way to build relationships, network and establish credibility.

1. Do you use PR in your promotions

Yes! PR has evolved into social media and online engagement. Not only should you reach out to writers and online influencers, but you need to create your own content and following on your own social media pages. You can tweet and chat with media and influencers directly from there as well.

2. What PR practices turned out to be successful and what not?

A successful PR practice is to create a dynamic segment idea and pitch it to news producers. Maybe it's graduation season and you have a product or service from a client that can offer advice for money-saving graduation parties, for example, or how best to prepare your graduate for the new road ahead. Create a cool, visual segment pitch and send it off to your favorite producer. Tell them you've not pitched the idea to anyone else yet.

I've used interesting holidays like national ice cream day, for example, to post online and tweet about a product. This can be shared multiple times.

Another great PR practice is to write the article yourself and "sell" the content. If you have 5 tips on XYZ, which happens to plug your product or service, you can offer this article for free to media to publish.

Contests are always successfully picked up if they are timely and relevant - for example, you work with a wedding dress designer and she wants to give away a dress to a financially-strapped bride-to-be.

What doesn't work - boring announcements that offer nothing to the reading public. No one cares about your company announcement. Sometimes appointments are covered since they have friends and colleagues that are interested but for the most part, your product launch is only interesting if you get right to the "what does it do for me today" pitch right away.