Online marketing is crucially important for any business. The internet provides a massive platform with an enormous potential audience. The challenge is finding a way of marketing your business or brand that will be able to cut through all the other white noise that is other websites. Unless your business is doing something exceptionally unique, it is inevitably going to be one of a number of businesses in the sector trying to attract people to their website.

There are many places that a business can advertise online, and a variety of techniques and mediums they can use for doing so. You have probably heard of Craigslist before, even if you aren’t aware that it offers tremendous marketing power to those who know how to use it.

What is Craigslist?

Most people have at least heard of Craigslist, it has been one of the biggest websites (in terms of traffic) in the world for many years. In essence, the website is a platform for posting digital classified ads. Adverts placed on the site are broken down into a number of different categories and users can browse these or search Craigslist by keywords.

What Can I Sell on Craigslist?

One of the great strengths of Craigslist and a major source of its marketing potential is the fact that it accepts listings for every kind of product or service you could imagine. In the past, the site has attracted controversy for the way that its ‘dating’ and ‘adult’ categories have been used to facilitate the exchange of sex for money. Because of this, the website has implemented some restrictions over the years but has remained as open as possible. Craigslist is a platform that can be used to market just about anything.

Who Will I Reach?

This is the key question and it is an important consideration when you are devising any marketing strategy. In order to effectively market a product, you need to know who you are going to market the product to. In particular, you need to decide whether you are trying to reach a local audience or a global one. A business which operates online and sells internationally will want their marketing to have a similarly global reach.

On the other hand, if you are advertising a brick and mortar business, with only a single location or a small group of locations, you don’t want to waste time and resources putting your marketing in front of people who can’t take advantage of it even if they want to.

Building Your Ad

Once you know what you are advertising, and you have defined exactly who it is that you want to market your product to, you are then ready to build your ad. An advert can be as simple as a text-based advert like a traditional classified ad, but Craigslist also allows you to take advantage of the digital platform and incorporate HTML into your designs.

Craigslist has a huge amount of potential as an advertising platform. Anyone looking for a marketing platform that offers a huge audience, and the ability to tailor who sees your advert in order to maximize conversion rates, look no further than Craiglist.