Growth Marketing for Marketplaces & PropTech (2026)

Marketplaces have quietly become the dominant structure of online commerce — Mirakl estimates marketplaces now account for roughly 67% of global e-commerce, up from 40% a decade earlier, and marketplace models are growing about 4x faster than the rest of e-commerce. But marketing a two-sided business is fundamentally different from marketing a product, because you have to grow two audiences with two different economics at once.

The chicken-and-egg problem is a marketing problem

Every marketplace faces the liquidity question: buyers won't come without supply, and suppliers won't come without buyers. The strategic answer, well-documented by NfX, is to win the harder side first — usually supply — and concentrate it in a niche or geography until it reaches a tipping point, after which the easier side follows far more cheaply.

For marketers, the practical implication is that you run two distinct acquisition programs:

• Supply-side acquisition — recruiting sellers, hosts, providers, or listings, often a B2B-style motion with longer cycles and higher-touch onboarding.
• Demand-side acquisition — winning buyers, typically a higher-volume, performance-driven motion.

These have separate CAC, separate messaging, and separate channels, and the balance between them shifts as the marketplace matures. Treating them as one funnel is the classic mistake.

Trust and safety is now a front-line concern

As marketplaces scale, fraud and counterfeits become a marketing liability, not just an operations one. Experian found 37% of UK consumers have experienced a scam on an online marketplace, with fake or counterfeit products the most common (34%) and Gen Z most exposed (58%). Trust signals — verification, guarantees, reviews, buyer protection — are increasingly part of the value proposition and the conversion story. This is also where take rate is justified: managed marketplaces that vet and guarantee transactions can command rates from low single digits up to the mid-30s of GMV.

PropTech: funding is back, but selective

PropTech has emerged from its multi-year reset with momentum. Funding rebounded to roughly $16.7 billion globally in 2025, a 68% year-over-year jump, and the market is forecast to grow from about $47 billion in 2025 toward $209 billion by 2035. But the capital is concentrating in AI embedded into core workflows — leasing, maintenance, underwriting — which means the marketing winner is the one that proves measurable ROI, not the one that markets "AI" loudest.

The unifying theme across both: lead with retention and lifetime value, because in a marketplace, repeat liquidity and in PropTech, sticky workflow adoption are what make the unit economics work. That's why this pairs so closely with retention and lifecycle marketing and rigorous measurement and attribution.

Running dual-sided acquisition, trust-led conversion, and ROI-proof messaging for marketplaces and PropTech companies is exactly what our paid media and customer acquisition and retention teams do.

Sources

• https://www.mirakl.com/blog/mirakl-powered-marketplaces-grow-34-outpace-industry-by-4x-2025-index-report
• https://www.nfx.com/post/19-marketplace-tactics-for-overcoming-the-chicken-or-egg-problem
• https://www.experianplc.com/newsroom/press-releases/2025/almost-two-fifths-of-brits-have-experienced-scams-on-online-mark
• https://a16z.com/the-marketplace-glossary/
• https://www.multifamilydive.com/news/proptech-investment-venture-capital-funding/809517/
• https://www.precedenceresearch.com/proptech-market