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Have you ever wondered why some marketplaces have better traction than others? If so, let’s dive into some hands-on tips for improving content quality on your marketplace app or website.
Marketplace success is built on three pillars: Trust, content quality, and user experience. This blog post will focus on content quality, explaining the concept in detail and sharing ways to achieve it through content moderation.
What is content quality?
There are as many definitions of content quality as there are marketplaces. Depending on your niche, your users will perceive different types of content as good or bad quality.
Say you run a buy-and-sell website or app for vintage cars; an ad for a new car will be perceived as a bad-quality listing and vice versa.
1. Make it relevant
Content must be relevant to be perceived as high quality. This means that listings should be relevant to the person visiting your marketplace and match their expectations. If your business sells second-hand vehicles, users will probably not be pleased to find newly manufactured cars or toy trucks when doing their initial searches.
A recent survey revealed that the one thing most likely to turn off your users is irrelevant content.
Here is what you do
- Keep it tidy – Ensure only products or services relevant to your audience are available on your site or app.
- Remove irrelevant information – Keep it sweet and easy for your audience. For example, an ad for an iPhone doesn’t need a photo of the person listing it or their dog. This happens more than you think.
2. Add descriptions
All listings need sufficient information for a user to quickly assess the offering and decide whether to move forward with the transaction, keep browsing through the ads, or leave the site and look elsewhere. It’s not always as easy. You need clear guidelines and processes for posting and moderation, or you’ll end up with really poor-quality ads, which leads to an overall perception of lousy quality on your site.
Here is what you do
- Titles – Keep titles concise and descriptive and emphasize unique features that define the items listed.
- Description – The description gives the reader the information to decide if the product or service is relevant to them. This depends on the listing, but the brand, model, how old it is, and the condition are general information you want to include.
- Delivery information – where and how can the purchase be picked up, or does the seller offer delivery?
3. Make it appealing
Does it spark joy? Humans are not rational. We’re naturally turned off if we see typos and poor photos. Even though we know that doesn’t equal a lousy product.
Airbnb is a classic example; when the founders went out to the hosts and took professional photos of the apartments to secure the quality, the website took off for real. From that example, some simple steps can do wonders for your conversion rate.
Here is what you do
- Photos – Only accept well-lit photos with good resolution. You don’t need to apologize for refusing photos that looked like they were taken 20 years ago.
- More photos – Set a minimum of 2 photos required if you feel the product category requires that.
- Spelling – Make sure typos and bad grammar are corrected.
Why content quality is crucial for marketplace success
Now you know what good quality content is. Let’s take a step back and examine why it’s crucial for the success of your marketplace.
1. Changes in attention span
You’ve probably heard that online users’ attention spans nowadays are shorter than that of a goldfish. Even though the origin of this statement is debated among experts, there’s little doubt that consumers are getting more impatient when searching for products and services online. Some researchers claim that we’re becoming more efficient when extracting and processing information.
This means that we’re judging the quality of a new site much faster than only a few years ago, and there’s not much time to prove that your marketplace is worth spending time on.
2. Increased competition
With increasing choices, there’s no reason for anyone to accept irrelevant or bad-quality content. This raises the bar for marketplace owners when designing their sites; once your potential customers have turned away from your content, they’re not very likely to give it another chance.
And why should they? There’s always another site or app to turn to if your dream home, vintage bag, or perfect date doesn’t appear within a few clicks.
3. Your brand is more important than ever
With more players on the market, many marketplaces are working hard to find their niche and build a strong brand with which their core segment can identify. But is your service living up to the brand promise? If your marketplace promises to provide vintage clothes to demanding design-brand collectors, all the listings should be of high-quality vintage pieces, and you can’t allow any low-price jumper from last year to slip through.
How to ensure content quality
There are several measures to be taken to ensure content quality. You can force or educate the content poster to fill out specific fields the way you want by, e.g., only allowing specific formats or implementing tooltips.
However, no matter how well you do this, there will always be better and worse content posted, and therefore you’ll need to supplement by moderating the incoming listings. Choose the content moderation method that’s most appropriate for you.
But regardless if you choose pre- or post-moderation, manual or automation, you must set up processes for how it should be tackled once it appears. Because believe us, sooner or later, you will have low-quality postings appear on your marketplace.
All things mentioned here are part of the content moderation offering from Besedo. You shouldn’t get up an hour early every morning to review uploaded content to your website; outsource and automate that task to someone else.
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