Marketing plan for a homemade art auction website

E-Commerce Marketing Plan

This marketing plan has been developed for a unique business model that facilitates transactions between people who would like to buy and sell homemade art. Although the website functions much like EBay, the online auction giant, it is targeted at a far narrower niche. Given that the target market represents such a narrow niche, the marketing strategy to promote this site must be creative as well as utilize the latest in E-commerce technologies and design. This marketing plan will frame this service in terms of its 4Ps and then use this framework to develop the marketing proposal. It was found that a tribal marketing approach to promoting the site would be the best fit for the company based on its unique circumstances.

Product

In this case the product is actually a service. The website facilitates transactions between individuals who wish to sell or buy art or related products. Although the website does not have the full functionality of a site such as EBay, the website targets a unique niche that has limited competition that specializes in this area. The website charges a small listing fee as well as a small percentage of sales.

Place

The service is offered only online through the website. The competitive landscape for auction site is relatively flooded with various competitors. However, competitors who specialize in art are generally targeted towards a high end market niche. Although a few sites target the lower end, these sites are underdeveloped and an opportunity exists for a well-designed market entrant.

Promotion

Promoting the site is the most difficult factor included in this analysis. Much of the promotion of the website will need to be built into the site itself. The site will need to be designed in a way in which in it is optimized for search engines (SEO). This will allow it to appear among the top responses in any web search. This entails as many reciprocal links be built into the site as possible in order for the site to gain traction in the search rankings.

However the most interesting way to actively promote this website was identified to be with the assistance of a marketing model known as tribal marketing. Tribal marketing is an approach that organizes target markets into various groups or tribes. These tribes can represent various different types of group associations. For example, one group could be people who work together while another group could represent all the members who communicate on various websites. Therefore, members of a local art club might represent one tribe and an online network of people who love hand painted porcelain could represent another tribe.

Using this model the website can target different tribes through social media as well as direct email marketing. Once the tribal leader is identified, this individual should be offered incentives to join the new website. For example, the tribal leader might be offered free space online to host their individual online store in connection to the auction site. The idea is that once the tribal leader becomes a loyal customer then they will spread their experience to the rest of the tribe and the marketing promotion can spread in a viral manner and grow exponentially.

One example of the tribes that should be identified and target might be followers of a specific blog which covers art related discussions. The blogger could be approached with a special offer to help promote the new site. They could also be offered a financial incentive to spread the word amongst their followers through an affiliate program. Another tribe that is useful under this model would be non-profit organizations. The website could target these organizations and offer free services to host their auctions. This would serve as a strategic partnership since the non-profit organization would help promote the website through their members. Many other examples such as these exist and the website should target as many tribes as feasible possible by first rating the tribes potential and then reaching out to the tribal members with a special promotion. Using this strategy the website could exponentially grow traffic with a minimal marketing budget.