If you need more users – whether buyers or sellers (or both) – to flock to your website, take a look at the 10 ways we’ve outlined to get you there.
Classified ad websites are undoubtedly one of the most significant business discoveries of the century. They present a seamless platform for connecting buyers and sellers from different industries for communication and transactions.
Some of the best-known classified ads websites, like Craigslist, have been known to derive more than 95% of their revenue from traffic (rather than their charges on transactions). These numbers are usually over 0.5 billion dollars. Therefore, having steady traffic on your classified ad website is the most surefire way to ensure its success, be it established or a new one just starting out.
The most glaring problem is an ever-increasing number of classified ad marketplaces vying for the same pool of users. This is why we’ve explored ten foolproof strategies to help you get ahead of your competition. They’ll help you attract the right users with better user engagement, increased trust, and positive publicity.
So, how do you gain an edge over your competition and attract more buyers and sellers to your classified ads website?
Content Table:
- Optimizing Your Websites User Experience
- Putting Up Your Website on Google My Business
- Cold Calling and Cold Emailing
- Follow-Up Contacting
- Giving Offers, Discounts, and Giveaways
- Using Newsletters
- Social Media Prospecting
- Sponsoring Events
- Implementing Targeted Marketing Campaigns
- Advertisements
1. Optimizing Your Website’s User Experience
The experience that buyers and sellers derive from your classified ads website will play a substantial role in attracting them and getting them to stay. Here are a few pointers for ensuring that your website offers a surreal user experience:
- Have Seamless Registration and Login Processes
Signing up and logging in to your website should be straightforward, asking only for the most necessary details, like their email addresses and passwords. You can even implement logging in via social media. You should avoid forcing users to sign up and log in using unnecessarily lengthy forms.
- Craft Captivating Ad Listings
You can ensure that your website has engaging ad listings by setting standards and guidelines for the ad listings that sellers create. You can include visual features, including 360-degree product image viewing and video embedding.
- Have simple Navigation and Search
Your website should make it easy for buyers and sellers to move between categories and subcategories. Your services and products should be located conveniently and have a robust search function. The function should provide advanced search filters, auto-completion of searches, and accurate search results.
- Provide Full Mobile Support
Your website should be supportive of mobile devices to capture the vast pool of mobile users. Its design should also be fully responsive and fluid so that your pages and sections can adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes and resolutions. You should also consider working with mobile applications for added user convenience.
How to Get Full Website Optimization Easily (Our Options for You)
Although you want excellent ad listings, navigation, and mobile support, you might still be worried about how to get it done easily – worry no more. We’ve lined out some options to help you get all these and many more features that enhance your website.
If you’re starting a new website or have an old one you’d like to revamp, consider working with Classified Listing Pro. This exceptional theme has all you need – and more – for all kinds of directories. It has premade pages and elements in a few demos, including Hotel and Apartment, Restaurants Directory, Classified Ads Listing, Real Estate Directory, Local Business Directory, and Local Business Directory.
A Classified Listing Pro Plugins and Theme Bundle is also available with prepackaged plugins and addons, plus themes. We also offer other excellent classified ads WordPress theme options in Classima and Listygo Directory WordPress theme. If you want a mobile app option, you can go with Classima App, a superb React Native application for Android and iOS devices.
On the other hand, if you are still deciding whether to use a new theme, you can take a look at our awesome Classified Listing Pro plugin for classified ad sites and business directories. The Classified Listing Store and Membership addon facilitates the creation of a store within your classified ad website.
2. Putting Up Your Website on Google My Business
Google My Business is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools you can use. Once you list your website there, your reputation, online visibility, and customer acquisition will improve rapidly. Your site can appear on organic Google search results and be easily accessible to potential customers. As your users interact with your website and share feedback, reviews, and ratings will improve the credibility and reputation of your business.
With Google My Business, you will receive invaluable insight into user behavior on different listings. You will find it easier to understand market trends and user preferences so that you can tailor your decisions based on factual market data. An added advantage is the boosting of your local SEO via targeted traffic to your website, thus, higher conversion rates.
3. Cold Calling and Cold Emailing
Cold calling and cold emailing entail reaching out to potential clients who are yet to have any contact with your website. Despite seeming outdated, these are excellent methods of adding users to your site. Cold calls and emails initiate direct outreach, which gets businesses to see the value of working with your website and allows you to assuage their reservations. They also form a basis for a strong business relationship.
4. Follow-Up Contacting
Follow-up contacting is an easy-to-ignore but invaluable method of converting more people into well-pleased users. Like cold emailing and calling, follow-up contacting shows potential clients that you are committed to providing value and are interested in fulfilling their needs. Since only some of the people who land on your site will convert, you can nurture such leads by keeping in touch, addressing concerns, and offering extra information that boosts conversion chances.
Once you’ve followed up on a potential customer, you keep your website on top of their memories and priorities. If they want to work with a website like yours, they will likely go with yours. They can also offer invaluable feedback for improving what you offer. During this type of contact, you can establish relationships for possible profitable avenues, such as affiliate marketing.
5. Giving Offers, Discounts, and Giveaways
If your sellers are willing to give discounts, offers, and giveaways, you can capitalize and use it to get buyers flooding your ad listings. If you have premium membership plans, you can also give potential sellers discounts on premium ad listings.
Special offers and discounts create a sense of urgency and get potential clients to want to take advantage of them. They are an excellent way of generating new leads and boosting user loyalty and retention. When you give your existing customers offers and discounts, they will likely grow in loyalty.
Although you can’t really depend on word-of-mouth as a stand-alone marketing strategy, it still adds to your conversions, sometimes significantly. People share positive experiences almost as often as they share negative ones.
6. Using Newsletters
Although newsletters are mostly used for giving a stream of established customers valuable and relevant content, they can be a reliable source of new users. Boosting customer engagement works wonders for a brand; however, newsletters can be excellent tools for driving up traffic and conversions to a website. The best way of doing this is by sending your leads newsletters with links to your blog posts, ad listings page, and other relevant pages. From there, they can explore what you offer and possibly convert to buyers or sellers.
Another way of using newsletters to drive traffic is by showcasing what your ad listing website offers and giving potential users tips on taking advantage of it. What’s more, you can encourage your users to share your newsletters when they receive them. If you also offer referral incentives, you will be sure to add to your user base.
7. Social Media Prospecting
Social media is a great place to start when searching for prospects, especially due to the extensive audience-targeting capabilities that most social platforms boast. You can partition your target audience based on their interests, behavior, and demographics. It enables you to focus on the audience that’s most likely to convert. Social media also does wonders for your brand visibility and awareness, which can raise your website’s traffic significantly.
As you engage prospects through content and comments, you can create and nurture relationships with potential users, paving the way for conversions. Through such interactions, you also gain invaluable insight into the interests, needs, preferences, and reservations of your customers. Once individuals express interest in signing up with your ad listing website, you can nurture them using contact or content and convert them.
8. Sponsoring Events
Brand exposure among a targeted audience is the most significant plus of sponsoring events. Choosing the right events to sponsor will generate interest in your ad listing website among the attendees. You get to engage a large, isolated, targeted audience of people with a genuine interest in your business.
Spreading your brand signage and logos can increase the awareness and exposure of your brand. As your brand builds its credibility and reputation through these events, you can be sure that more users will be more comfortable associating with and using your ad listing website. You can indirectly boost your user base through the media coverage these events will have.
9. Implementing Targeted Marketing Campaigns
With targeted marketing campaigns, you get to focus on boosting your popularity and conversions among a particular group of consumers. As you work with this group of a similar behavioral, demographic, geographic, or psychographic classification, the chances of spending less on marketing and converting more increase exponentially.
Targeted marketing campaigns give you excellent insights and analytics that help you refine your marketing strategies and messaging. You can focus your decisions on satisfying your precise targets, increasing their likelihood of becoming your users. With targeted marketing campaigns, you increase the relevance of your campaigns and maximize your return on investment.
10. Advertisements
When you place advertisements strategically, you can be sure that you will increase your brand’s visibility and traffic on your ad listing website. You will reach the people that are interested in your platform as buyers and sellers. As you engage in advertising, you can work with remarketing and retargeting practices so that even individuals who were only mildly interested in your platform are likelier – than not – to convert.
Like other online strategies, advertisements enable you to collect data and insights into what your targeted audience prefers. You can then use such information to enhance your strategies and optimize your ad listing website.
Final Thoughts
You can create an outstanding ad listing platform with smooth buyer-seller interaction by incorporating the ten ways we’ve outlined for you. What’s more, you will get to capture the attention of your prospective users as you foster trust among them. Always keep in mind that having a successful ad listing website depends on your ability to provide value to all your users in a user-friendly environment.
