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Are your customers from a single industry or is your inventory narrowly focused along a specific market? Single marketplace "niche-listing" may be your best choice to reach our customers.
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What is Niche-Listing?
Niche-listing is the marketing strategy of leveraging one marketplace that focuses on a target market, audience, and product mix.
This approach is an alternative to cross-listing—a marketing strategy in which sellers spread their listings across various platforms to increase general exposure.
Niche listing, on the other hand, allows savvy marketers to closely target a specific audience for a stronger return on their investment.
Instead of the shotgun-blast approach to marketing inherent in cross-listing, niche-listing approaches inventory marketing like that of a steadied rifle.
“Why would you limit your equipment listings to a single platform?”
Not “limit”—focus.
As before mentioned, niche listing is not “limiting" your return on investment—it is making a strong investment by “focusing" a limited ad budget where you will get the most return on investment.
If you have a narrow sales focus or industry you want to target, niche listing can be a winning strategy.
Let’s look at four advantages of niche listing.
1. Niche-Listing Appeals to Focused Buyers
Spreading your inventory across various marketplaces is indeed a great way to increase the broad exposure of your listings, but it’s not always exposure with the highest rate of return for your marketing dollar. Your items may be in the ballpark of what the average buyer is looking for, but the more extensive the options, the less consistent the buyer’s needs may be.
By opting to focus your listing efforts on a single niche marketplace, you are presenting your inventory to buyers who are only after the products you sell. Even if the traffic to your listings is lower than a cross-listing approach, this is niche traffic—focused and ready to buy your items.
“But how?”
2. Niche-Listing Allows You to Leverage a Marketplace’s Influence
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When you focus your inventory listings on one marketplace, such a site has likely already worked hard to gain the attention of your niche audience. They’ve invested in careful search engine optimization, advertising, content marketing, and in gaining a reputation with buyers of their niche product offering.
Instead of attempting to gain appeal from a broader, more generic audience, niche marketplaces have focused their efforts on a highly specific field of consumer interest and earned influence in this sphere. They’ve likely put in years of work for this reputation—including attendance at industry-specific conferences and trade shows as well as actively supporting industry events and activities.
So, what does this mean for you? You can leverage that influence. They’ve already done the work of setting out the nets for your niche buyer—all you have to do is pay the fare, climb aboard, and reel them in.
3. Niche-Listing Can Be Easier on Your Marketing Budget
When your budget isn’t as distributed across various platforms, your dollar simply goes further and makes more of a dent.
Even if you don’t feel like springing for niche ads, scaling your budget down to a single listing provider will inevitably result in serious savings.
Make sure to select a niche marketplace service that provides reliable, highly intuitive tracking tools. These will help guide strategic decisions and reveal your return on investment. Always look for tools that are easy to understand, track your inbound leads to each inventory item, and allow you to compare them to actual sales—not just inbound phone calls or emails.
Remember—the goal of niche listing is to achieve equal or greater sales with the same or lower budget—not to just make the phone ring or fill up your email box with leads that go nowhere.
4. Niche-Listing Simplifies Listing Management
Though it can be effective, one of the biggest headaches of cross-listing is the sheer plate-spinning involved in managing listings across multiple platforms, including—
- Adding new listings across various marketplaces
- Manually updating scattered listings
- Figuring out what to do if interest is split on a particular listing
- Gauging the return on investment for each marketplace
- Etc.
It can get messy.
Niche listing on a single marketplace, however, makes listing management fairly straightforward. You only need to manage one listing per item. There’s little chance of split interest or duplicated administrative needs. It’s also fairly simple to determine if a particular niche marketplace is earning its keep or if it's time to move on.
“But is niche-listing feasible for sellers? Wouldn’t I be limiting myself?”
For all of the reasons mentioned above and more, niche listing is not a theoretical approach to listing inventory online, but a legitimate marketing strategy with a proven track record among businesses small and large alike—just like you.
We wouldn’t be speaking about the effectiveness of niche listing if we hadn’t witnessed its success firsthand. Starting out as a niche marketplace ourselves, helping connect buyers and sellers of heavy equipment and commercial vehicles, many of our clients list their inventory exclusively through our intuitive platform and enjoy great success.
“I wouldn’t work with anybody else. I don’t advertise anywhere else.”
- Bryan Garner, iTAG Equipment
Make no mistake, niche-listing is not the only strategy for listing—for many, it’s a winning one.
Niche-Listing With My Little Salesman
To make things easier for sellers, a growing number of niche marketplaces are developing intuitive tools to make inventory, sales, and marketing management even easier. One such niche marketplace doing just this is your friends at MyLittleSalesman.com.
Simplify Your Listing and Deal Management
If you’re ready to focus your team’s marketplace efforts and simplify deal management, I invite you to learn more about how My Little Salesman can help your dealership thrive.
Experience My Little Salesman Today