We do believe that

• we live in the age of e-commerce
• we live in the age of subscription revenues
• we need to transform local advertorials and local advertisers into digital-first

Based on this conviction we built a marketplace (called “Smart Marketplace“) that allows publishers to build unlimited “vertical marketplaces” that consist of

• a homepage for each topic (e.g. “Smart Home”, “Garden & Wellness”, “Camping”, “BBQ”, etc.)
• 5-10 categories within each topic that can exclusively be sponsored by one advertiser (sales product 1)
• editorial content on the topic provided by the publisher or Smartico
• branded content for advertisers (sales product 2)
• local marketplace profiles of local and regional advertisers (sales product 3)

All local marketplace profiles can be upgraded with e-commerce-features, lavish image and video integrations and can be used as landing pages or virtual mini business cards by the advertiser under his own domain.

Smart Marketplaces is the best product to transform strong local relations to local advertisers into intuitive digital revenue by offering …

• short marketplace profiles for free or 99€ in self service for the advertisers
• extended marketplace profiles including e-commerce option and more for 400€+ in full service by Smartico in your name
• category sponsorings for 5-10 categories per topic for 1.000€+ in full service by Smartico in your name
• main sponsors for each topic at 3.000€+

Our winter and XMas markets in 2020 clearly showed that business model for around 20 German speaking newspapers making up to 25.000€ digital local revenues in 2 weeks or less of sales time in the middle of the 2nd big lock down in Germany.

Smart marketplaces can be a cornerstone in the platform strategy of local publishers as it …

• empowers local merchants to local ecommerce
• provides relevant (shopable) content for readers
• creates subscription revenues with advertisers
• strengthens the relation/partnership to the advertisers
• keeps readers on the page and goes beyond affiliate revenue

• creates tons of marketplace entry points (vertical niche marketplaces)
• creates tons of new sales products to upsell (incl. SEO hubs, universal landing pages, etc.)
• excites sales teams with an intuitive sales product
• focuses sales teams on 1 niche at a time

… can be easily tested at no financial risk thanks to the special revenue-based business model of Smartico!

Wanna know more? Please reach out any time!