If you want to promote your businesses through an online marketplace website then craigslist might be the right choice for your brand.
Finding the right marketplace for your business isn’t that much easy. Once you’ve found the marketplace for your business you’ll not be able to get so much from it if you’re not able to use the marketplace effectively.
This blog will help you in using the craigslist marketplace in an effective manner. Let’s explore more about what craigslist marketing is all about!
What is Craigslist Marketing?
Craigslist was founded by Craig Newmark in 1995 as an email distribution list of friends, featuring local events in San Francisco. Later in 1996, it became a web-based service expanding itself into other classified categories.
It gets more than 20 billion monthly page views and an estimated 10 million unique visitors per day. This website gets traffic from more than 70 countries around the world. It also acquires more than 700 local craigslist subdomains. Craigslist is one of the classified advertisement websites. It has different devoted sections for
- Community,
- Discussion forms.
- Gigs,
- Housing,
- Jobs,
- Personals,
- Products
- Resumes,
- Sales,
- Services
It connects buyers and sellers in more than 300 classified communities. You can do whatever you want on this single marketplace and the most fascinating part is posting ads and promoting your business on this platform is free.
Many brands are leveraging craigslist marketing for promoting their products and services as they post ads according to the location and categories and so strict against spamming.
Marketing on craigslist is a piece of cake if you’re following just simple tips in marketing;
Tips For Using Craigslist Marketing Effectively
Marketing tips give you an edge over the competition and help you in the successful execution of any marketing strategy. Here are some important tips for getting results from marketing on craigslist, you can make use of these tips while posting any ads on Craigslist;
- Research your competitors and observe closely what your competitors are saying, selling and for how much. Include all the features your competitors are providing and make your description and everything unique. Don’t leave out any features, not mentioning them will reflect like your products and services don’t have those features.
- Headlines are great for grabbing attention and improving click-through rates. Make it simple, catchy, precise, beautiful, and interesting and you can also phrase it like a question.
- Perform keyword research and include them in your ad copy. Adding keywords will bring your posting higher than others. Distribute keywords uniformly into your title, ad copy and images as well. Craigslist first prefer recent ads and then looks for keywords. But you can see keywords are still the top priority. So, make use of them wisely.
- People love pictures more than text. It is a famous saying that “a picture speaks a thousand words.” Add pictures that are relevant to your products and services. People are more likely to click on ads that contain pictures beside their titles and scroll through the ads without any pictures. Adding pictures will increase the effectiveness of your ads and if it is high quality then it’s “Wow”.
- If you’re targeting local audiences then adding pictures from the city will increase the effectiveness of the ads. People are emotionally attached to their city so much, mentioning the city through the pictures will grab their attention and connect them with your brand on an emotional level.
- You should provide your contact information in the postings as people will not prefer to contact you through Craigslist’s reply email address. So give them an alternative by providing a phone number or other email address that you use only for business purposes.
- Link to your website or any social media platform to move the conversation a step further. Don’t directly link to your product page or sales pages, as you might get flagged as spam by Craigslist’s automated system.
- Add testimonials in the postings. There are no options for adding testimonials separately but you can add them as pictures. Testimonials take the conversations one more step in forwarding direction, as they’re a great trust builder. They increase credibility, so increase conversion rates as well.
- Identify the classified category of your niche and post in the relevant section. Posting in the irrelevant section won’t do any good for your business. Find out in which category your audience is lying and post in that section.
- Make storytelling a part of your writing style. Storytelling helps in making consumers remember the information easily as people make so much sense of the narrative. You can learn some basic aspects of storytelling from the blog “Storytelling”.
- Keep text formatting simple and paragraphs short around three sentences. Describe yourself through clear sentences and minimized industry jargon.
- Post often on craigslist but don’t post the same ad in the same category and place within 48 hours if you don’t want to get flagged as spam.
- Don’t forget to delete the previous ad posting if you want to post the same ad after 48 hours. Deleting the earlier ad will save you from being marked as spam.
- Make sure to post the ads at times when your target audience is online and available. Don’t post too early or too late. Post the ad according to the time and exact moments.
- Build a list of ads to put varied ads on Craigslist. At least build 10-20 swipe files so that you don’t need to build ads at the time of posting. You can post them consecutively. Once you’re finished with the list, you can start over from the beginning. It’ll also save your posting from being marked as spam and flagged for removal.
- Keep deleting the old ads, it’ll make your postings recent. It’ll also save you from being marked as a spammer, and people will feel like you’ve just posted and your posting is urgent.
- Track your ads, measure results, test another ad, and repeat the same process again and again. Craigslist provide its own tracking service named Craigslist Ad Tracker. The free version of this tool is enough for you to track your ads.
- Measuring the results will help you in understanding the things that you did wrong along with the things that you did right.
- You can’t achieve greatness in just a single attempt, so keep testing with different ad formats. You can make use of A/B testing and choose the best-performing format out of them. It’s a process that you’ve to pass. Slowly keep refining your ads. You’ll master the process if you keep refining your wrongs. Determine KPIs like website clicks, impressions, and engagement levels, and on the basis of these KPIs, you can compare among the testing ads.
I am sure we’ve talked about every single aspect of ad posting on Craigslist Marketplace. If you’ll keep in mind all the mentioned tips while posting your ads then you’ll make the most out of your posting on Craigslist.
Let’s wrap up the blog here!
Wrapping Up
Craigslist is an effective source of traffic and leads at little or no cost somewhat for every type of business. It’s found in a survey that somewhat 60 million Americans use Craigslist every month and we’ve already mentioned that Craigslist is used by users from more than 70 countries. Including Craigslist in your marketing campaigns can be so much beneficial for your business growth.
You can see that it’s one of the highly visited websites but google is still the #1 in terms of traffic and everything. So, don’t rely solely on craigslist for the growth of your business, but leverage SEO and other google backed platforms such as Business Profile on Google Maps.
You can check out more about SEO on the following blog written by me “SEO”. You can also contact the DigiAvtar Team for getting professional advice regarding the SEO of your marketing platforms.
Use Craigslist wisely to increase website traffic and conversions. Post ads according to the methods and best practices mentioned above as tips.
Market your business through Craigslist Marketing following the mentioned tips to get the most out of it.
You can share the tips and experiences you’ve had with Craigslist Marketing so far in the comment section below, we’d love to hear your thoughts.
If you want more food for your thoughts, then you can give us a try on our blog!