If your Facebook Marketplace listings aren't getting views or aren't
selling, then this video is for you.
In it, we're going to break down three real-world examples of items in the
exercise space, home furniture, and tech space so you can clearly see how
you could quickly improve your Facebook Marketplace listings to increase
your chances of selling your items.
And in case you haven't seen my prior Facebook Marketplace video, be sure
to check that out after you watch this video for three more examples
of how to improve your listing.
Hey I'm Will, and if you're new here, I hope that you'll consider subscribing
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Every week, I teach you something new in sales, digital marketing,
and entrepreneurship, to take you from zero to self-starter.
As usual, check out these timestamps to help you navigate throughout this video.
But without further ado, let's jump into these three examples.
The first thing to go over is what even makes a good Facebook Marketplace listing.
If you see my prior videos on Facebook Marketplace, you know that I'm a big
champion of making sure that your listing is positioned for success.
The first thing you'll need for success is a keyword optimized title.
This is where you want to include things like the brand or the model of
the thing you're selling, the color, the condition or anything relevant
that will catch the potential buyers eye as they are skimming through all
of the Facebook Marketplace results.
Aside from the title, you also need to list your desired price.
I'm a big champion of making sure that you offer a fair price with relation
to what people can find for that item, either on Facebook Marketplace
or some other online marketplace.
Typically I price things competitively a little bit lower
than the average in the market.
That way I know that my item will more likely sell a little
faster than everybody else's.
Aside from just title and pricing, you need to have some high quality photos.
It needs to be super clear for your potential buyer what exactly
they're going to be buying when they check out your listing.
An easy tip to make your pictures pop is to hit that auto wand function
if you're on iOS or to just use the one click touch up features of
different photo editing softwares.
Other things to include in your listing is writing in benefits towards your buyer.
Too many people talk about the specific features that the item that they're
selling has, but they don't write about it from the lens of the buyer.
For example, if you're selling a grill, you might include a line along the lines
of, enjoy the summer sun while grilling some steaks on this fantastic Weber grill.
The other three things I'm a big proponent of sharing in your listing
is the percentage savings that somebody stands to save by buying your item as
opposed to something new, as well as your preferred payment method, whether
that's Venmo, cash, et cetera, and the preferred pickup days and times.
Now that we've done a quick review of what makes an effective Facebook
Marketplace listing, let's shift gears to pull up three examples and
break down specifically how we might make these examples more compelling
and more likely to sell on Facebook.
Our first listing example is going to be for a Myx Fitness Bike.
In case you don't know what these are, they're essentially knockoff
Peloton bikes that are sold a little bit cheaper than a Peloton.
If you're interested in my marketing lessons that you can learn from Peloton,
check out my recent video on that.
But aside from that, let's go over this description of this listing and
see what we could potentially improve.
So here we can see that the listing title is Myx Fitness Bike.
It is properly listed in sporting goods, under cardio equipment.
And we have the like-new condition selected as well as
the brand, which is Myx fitness.
And if we read the description, it says, "the bike is only three
and a half weeks old, I really liked the bike and the classes.
The only issue is limited alternative and rock music, which
has been an issue for my fiance.
So we decided to purchase a different bike."
I bet you, that's a Peloton.
"It's very quiet, sturdy, and I've gotten great workouts.
I won't be sad at all if we end up keeping it.
We live on a third floor apartment with no elevator and the bike weighs 150
pounds, includes a heart rate monitor and all the tools the bike came with."
If you're a subscriber to my channel, you know, the importance of these
three acronyms WIIFM, PIE and ANA.
WIIFM is what's in it for me, PIE is, is it personal, insightful or emotional,
and ANA is understanding your audience, their needs and having a clear ask.
Knowing these three acronyms is a great way to think about these
listings and how we could improve them.
So the first thing I noticed is that this entire listing is written from the
lens of the seller and not the buyer.
In other words, it's talking about the backstory behind this bike,
but not about the benefits that the potential buyer could have
by buying this bike off of them.
Honestly, the story of the item is important, but what's more important
is the future story of this item if you were to be the person that
bought this item from the seller.
Other things to notice is how it's difficult to skim this listing.
It's a big block of text, which makes me much more likely to
just ignore the text altogether and move on to the next listing.
Aside from that, the seller could also benefit from including the savings that
you could have from retail if you were to buy this bike, as well as how many rides
were actually put onto this bike within that three and a half week time period.
The seller could also do without that line on, "I won't be
sad if we end up keeping it."
I understand what they're trying to do here.
But it's not really that compelling in this listing because if that
were truly the case, then why would you even be listing this bike?
Okay.
So now that we've gone over what could be improved here, let's come
up with a quick listing description that could potentially be more
effective than this initial listing.
So the first thing I do is I changed the title to something along the
lines of, Myx Fitness Bike-like-new condition-includes heart rate monitor.
The reason why I do this is just because it is much more
descriptive than the current title.
Once we've dealt with a title, we can start breaking down the description.
I would probably include lines like, "Looking for a great at-home workout?
This Myx Fitness bike is for you.
And it's perfect for those looking for budget conscious Peloton alternatives."
The reason why I include this line here is so that we can optimize for the
keyword phrase Peloton as well in case somebody is looking for that, as well as
just trying to position this bike more from the lens of the potential buyer, as
opposed to just from the seller's lens.
Another line I'd include is, "Save 12% off retail and three to five weeks of
waiting for your next spin workout.
Only three and a half weeks old, seven lifetime rides on it.
It's pretty much new.
11 months of warranty remaining on it, includes polar heart rate monitor.
Pickup only.
Third floor apartment, any day of the week.
Venmo only."
Something I want you to notice is as we made our way further down into
the listing, we included all of those answers to commonly asked questions that
a potential buyer would have for us.
Aside from the overall improved listing, there are two other things I would
potentially do to improve this listing.
The first thing is I would potentially revamp the picture so
that it provides a little bit more variety than what's been provided.
The other thing I do is I potentially record a short video detailing
the Myx library experience.
It would just be potentially some of the classes and things like that, just
so that people could get a feel for what Myx feels like if they were to
compare it to something like Peloton.
Before we head into example number two, if you're finding this video helpful, hit
that like button below to let me know.
And let's jump into example number two.
So in our second example, we're going to break down a bookshelf listing and see how
we could potentially make it a little bit more marketable in Facebook Marketplace.
Let's go ahead and take a look at this listing.
Here we have a listing called, Bookshelf for sale.
It is listed in home goods, within bookcases, which
is a great categorization.
We also are clearly using the condition and color, which is also great.
So here we have, it's like new condition and it's brown in color.
And then the description itself says, "lightly used bookshelf for
sale, dimensions: 121 inches base.
Each shelf is 81 inches.
Height 180 inches.
Width 11 inches.
So overall I'd say they've done a good job of using some basic tags, as well
as making it clear to the potential buyer, what the dimensions are of the
bookshelf in case they want to make sure it fits into their apartment or home.
That said there are a couple of things we could do to improve this listing.
The first thing we could do is we could provide a few more pictures.
In this situation, the single picture is not really giving me a complete
sense of how this bookshelf would rest in a room or the different angles in
which one might look at this bookshop.
It might also be helpful to include a picture of how many books it can hold.
That way you could actually understand how many books does 81
inches of shelving actually support.
We could also improve this listing by saying exactly how old this
bookshelf is just that we have a better understanding of how long
this bookshelf has been around for.
With these things in mind, let's go ahead and try to rewrite this listing.
For this one, I title it, "Unique Brown Bookshelf, like-new
condition, living room furniture."
The reason why I do this, instead of just saying bookshelfs for sale, I want
to include some more keywords that could potentially come up if somebody were,
for example, to just be looking for brown bookshelves or something like that.
From here, we might go ahead and start running a description like,
"Looking for great bookshelf to add to your living room?
This Brown Bookshelf holds more than 50 books enough for the bulk of your library.
Bought new two years ago, for $350, meaning you save a hundred dollars.
It's a real wood shelf, dimentions are 121 by 11 by 180 inches.
Shelf length is 81 inches, which carries around 20 books each.
Pickup only any day of the week after 5:00 PM and Venmo only."
So by just taking a couple minutes to improve our listing here,
we've made it much more clear what the savings are versus buying a
bookshelf new here, as well as how many books this bookshelf can hold.
And some other key things that weren't in the original listing.
Now that we've talked about exercise bikes, as well as home furniture,
let's wrap things up by talking about some technology by looking at how we
might improve a listing for a laptop.
In this example, we have an HP Pavilion laptop with a core i7 processor, and
the description reads as follows.
"8th generation Intel i7-8550U processor, 512 GB SSD, 16GB SD
Ram DDR4, Nvidia GeForce 940MX.
It's listed with an electronics and laptops, which is great.
And they use like-new condition as well as, they list the brand of HP.
You'll notice as we go through these pictures as well, that they
include the original box in this listing, as well as just a breakdown
of some of the other features that weren't listed in the description.
So in thinking about ways we can improve this, one of the first
things we could do is share how much we spent on this laptop retail.
This way, we just have a better sense of how we are pricing this listing when we
are putting it up on Facebook Marketplace.
Aside from just talking about the retail price of the laptop, we might want to talk
about the condition a little bit more.
I understand that it's listed as like-new, but it would be
relevant to include anything.
If there's any nicks or dings that have happened over the use of this laptop.
Because this is an electronics purchase, it's important to know how
old it is, whether or not you're going to be including all of the relevant
power cables as well as if the laptop will be coming to you wiped or if
the hard drive will need a hard reset when you are purchasing from them.
So with these considerations in mind, let's go ahead and rewrite this listing
to make it much more compelling.
For this one, I'm going to title it, "HP Pavilion laptop core i7 processor
,like-new, 512 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM."
Again, you'll notice here that what I'm doing with the title is I'm being
as specific as I can and getting as many opportunities to keyword
optimize it for the search results.
From here for the description I wrote, "Whether you're a student looking
for the perfect laptop for school or just a great performing gaming
laptop, this laptop might be for you.
Excellent condition, no dents or scratches on any of it.
Comes with power cable and the original box.
Laptop specs: 8th generation Intel i7-8550U processor, 512 GB SSD.
Already factory reset, 16 GB Ram DDR4, Nvidia GeForce 940 MX
graphics card, DVD optical drive.
Bought new three years ago for $1,100, meaning that you save 45%.
Pickup only any day of the week after 3:00 PM.
Venmo only."
So hopefully by looking at this improved listing, what you can tell is that
I've answered way more questions that any potential buyers would have for
my Facebook Marketplace listing here.
And I've also made it really clear what condition the laptop will be when we
arrange for a meetup in the case where I am truly interested in buying this laptop.
Something that I also think is great to include in the improved listing is just
the retail savings because if you were to tell somebody you're about to save
45% off a laptop, it would make somebody more likely to perk up their ears.
Aside from this improved listing, the two other areas that I could potentially
improve this listing would be by including some more compelling pictures.
These pictures that were taken are not necessarily bad, but they also
could be brightened up or just given a little bit more contrast
and made to pop a little bit more.
Because this is a higher end purchase, having some really great pictures can
be a great way to help your listing stand out from the rest of the pack.
Another thing that could potentially be helpful would be to run a
speed test on this reset laptop.
That way somebody could just get a general sense of how fast
they can expect this to be.
There are two things to remember from today's video.
The first thing is that sales is all about positioning and the same
goes for Facebook Marketplace.
It's ultimately how you position your listings versus all of your competitors
that will make the difference between you selling today and you selling
two weeks from now or not at all.
The second thing to remember is that you should always aim to be better
than average on Facebook Marketplace.
As you can tell from the examples today, there are a ton of average listings
and it only takes one or two minutes to really improve your listing to make
it stand out from the rest of the pack.
When you take that extra one or two minutes to improve your listing, it makes
a huge difference in the amount of time it takes for you to sell your items.
Now, it's your turn.
Tell me in the comments below, what are you trying to sell
on Facebook Marketplace?
I love hearing from you guys and I try to read and respond to every single comment.
If you got value out of this video, I greatly appreciate it if you hit that
like button below and if you haven't already, consider subscribing to get
more sales, digital marketing, and entrepreneurship content every single week
to take you from zero to self-starter.
Lastly, if you're looking for more Facebook Marketplace tips and tricks,
be sure to snag my jumpstart kit and the link in the video description below.
In my next video, I'm going to be going over five sales lessons you
can learn from Facebook Marketplace.
While you wait for that video though, check out these videos
that YouTube thinks you might like.