How To Market a Digital Product In 9 Ways: 2024 Ultimate Guide
Great marketing rewards your product creation efforts. You can have the best product but if you have a crappy marketing strategy, you’ll miss out on lots of sales opportunities and eventually lose money.
Marketing a product involves creating and selling your product to customers. It includes determining your target audience, creating an appealing message, and using the right platforms to sell to them.
In this article, we’ll share 9 effective ways to market your product whether an existing product or a new one.
Let’s get started.
9 practical ways to market your product
Here are 9 practical strategies to market your product and get more sales.
- Leverage email marketing
- Utilize user-generated content
- Use paid ads
- Leverage affiliate marketing
- Offer discounts
- Pre-order promotion
- Tell a product story
- Collaborate with influencers
- Maximize all media channels
1. Leverage email marketing
Email is an effective communication channel between you and your audience. This makes it the ideal channel to market a product and encourage repeat purchases. It is also a good way to engage existing customers who have not purchased in a while.
As a beginner, it is important to build an email list to market your product. This means you need to generate leads every day to grow your email list. A good way to do that is by using lead magnets.
A lead magnet is a valuable product you give away for free in exchange for an email address.
You’ll find more in-depth explanations in our post on Lead Magnets and how to use them to grow your business.
Utilize email marketing to promote your products by launching marketing campaigns to various segments of your lists introducing your products and offers.
Based on the segmentation of your email list, you can target the right people with the right content thereby increasing your chances of conversion. Email marketing is one of the most effective methods of marketing. It generates $36 for every $1 spent and that is one of the reasons it is implemented by 82% of global digital marketers.
This Eufy email ad shows the Eufy Anker 757 product in different scenarios in gif form which sparks ideas of how customers can put the battery to use. It also offers a $200 off promo code when clicking the ad.
LEARN: How to Write Great Emails to Sell Out Your Products
2. Utilize user-generated content (UGC)
User-generated content is original content created by customers to show satisfaction with your product or service.
UGCs are very important in marketing, as they are used to influence engagement and increase conversions. Also, they are used on social media and other media channels to show credibility.
The competition for customers’ attention has become fiercer than usual. Hence, brands have to use all methods possible to be seen online.
As a result, buyers only interact with brands they feel connected to through authentic content. Over 90% of people read reviews online before making a purchasing decision.
And there is no content more authentic than a UGC from satisfied customers. It is proof that your product/service is satisfying and authentic.
Here’s an example of user-generated content from a Selar merchant.
Generally, people trust other people, and UGC is your best shot at convincing people to try your product.
3. Use paid ads
Paid advertising is one of the easiest ways to get potential customers to know your brand and products.
Through paid ads, you can specifically target audiences to market to instead of waiting for them to find you organically.
One of the keys to a successful paid campaign is targeting the right audience with the right message. Before you run ads, choose the platform, such as Google Ads or Instagram, and then define your customer based on various criteria ranging from;
- Location
- Interests
- Demographics
- Behavior
- Previous purchases, etc.
Afterward, write a compelling copy for your product to give your audience a brief description of your product and what your offerings are. Then, set an ad budget such as $500. Once payment is completer, your ad becomes active on selected channels until your budget is maximized.
For many businesses, paid ads bring the highest ROI. A data report of digital marketing trends shows that paid advertising returns $2 for every $1 spent, leading to a 200% ROI rate.
When using paid ads for the first time, start with a small campaign to test which types of message and content formats work best for your customers. Then use retargeting when a customer organically interacts with your brand without purchasing. Paid ads display personalized messages based on the products they checked.
4. Leverage affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is simply promoting another person’s product and earning a commission for it. Affiliates, on the other hand, are people who promote others’ products and earn a commission from them.
Affiliate marketing has great potential for significant revenue generation. It is a cost-effective strategy that allows you to pay only for performance and make lots of revenue for yourself.
To succeed in using affiliate marketing for your product, consider the platform you use. An ideal Affiliate marketing platform allows you to automate the payment for your affiliates. So you get your profit and the affiliate gets their commission.
This is why Selar’s affiliate network is your best option. You can easily host your products on Selar, then apply for your products to be listed on the Selar Affiliate network.
Next, you set up the commission you want to pay, whether 20%, 40%, or 50% of the original price of the product.
With this, thousands of Selar Affiliates can promote your products and automatically get paid when they make a sale.
You don’t have to do anything. Selar handles all the tedious tasks while you confirm your money in your account whenever a sale is made.
Learn more about the Selar affiliate network to promote your product.
Here’s an example of a merchant utilizing affiliate marketing to sell his products and boost income.
5. Offer discounts
Like every other marketing strategy, offering discounts on a new product is a great way to build awareness and market it.
It works as an incentive to encourage more customer actions such as purchases, sign-ups, and so much more. It also increases the rate at which people refer your brand to family and friends.
One of the best times to offer a discount is during the holidays. There is an increase in traffic, as most people are online shopping for holiday gifts.
Take advantage of this surge by offering discounts on your products to market them and get more people to buy them.
For example, Selar offered a Black Friday deal of up to 40% for all its pro plans.
On the contrary, being the cheapest in the market doesn’t automatically grant you a lifetime of sales.
Excessive discounting can lead to a bad brand image, as people will only remember your brand because you offer discounts. It can also lead to a reduction in repeat sales and increased acquisition costs.
So, it’s important to offer discounts cautiously, at a reasonable amount, and for a short/specific period of time.
Learn: Should Digital Creators Offer Black Friday Discounts?
6. Pre-order promotion
This involves accepting orders for your product before launch. This marketing strategy helps you to build anticipation for your product and gives you insight into the demand for the product. It is a great way to raise funds needed to promote the product.
For example, Amba Eyang-Ajakaiye in her chapter of the Ultimate Digital Product Manual shared how she used pre-order promotion to market her ebook, and raise the funds needed to run ads for it.
She gave her audience a launch date and asked them to pay for advert space in the book since she intended to make the book free.
While this was ongoing, she shared with her audience what to expect from the book and how it’ll produce results for them. In less than 72 hrs, she raised enough money to run ads for the product and still have some as profit.
You too can replicate this strategy to market your product. Let your audience know of the product you are working on, and share with them excerpts from it and the benefits they’d enjoy when they receive it.
Afterward, give them a pre-order offer that makes them get your product at a lower price than after when you’ve launched.
A typical pre-order strategy lasts from two weeks to one month before your product launches. To enable you to measure the demand for your products.
Here’s how Chisom Nwokwu (tech queen) used pre-order promotion to market her first ebook.
7. Tell a product story
Effective storytelling is needed in marketing to explain a product’s why and how. It enables you to focus on selling the benefits of the product, not its features. Your story should explain to your customer how your product fits in their lives and helps them solve a problem.
This is a major mistake made by marketers as they tend to sell the product, instead of the experience that comes with using the product.
To create an engaging product story;
- Start with the “why” – Talk about why you created the product and the problems the product exists to solve.
- Speak in the language of your user – Understand their perspectives and craft your story in a way they will understand.
- Make it relatable – Emotion is a strong factor in marketing. let your story spark an emotion in your customers that causes them to identify with your brand.
- Make it engaging – A good story raises different reactions in people. Either it inspires them or motivates them to act.
8. Collaborate with influencers
Influencer marketing is another form of online marketing that enables you to market digital products by collaborating with influencers with a large media presence.
It has gone from being celebrity-focused to being creator-focused. Creators with large online presences are now called influencers, many of whom would never consider themselves influencers offline.
Over time, these influencers have built an engaging and enthusiastic audience, making them the best options for creators looking to reach out to a new audience and market their product.
They are called influencers because they can influence the buying decision of your customers. The customers care less about your brand and more about what their “influencer” thinks.
In 2021, Christiano Ronaldo had a controversy with Coca-cola. He sat down for his first pre-match press conference of the tournament before Portugal’s clash with Hungary and noticed that two bottles of Coca-Cola were in front of him.
He removed the soft drinks from the view of the cameras and replaced them with a water bottle, rolling his eyes while muttering with disgust “Coca-Cola”.
This singular act made Coca-Cola’s market value plummet by £2.8 billion, while the company released a statement saying that “everyone is entitled to their drink preferences.”
This incident shows the power of influencer marketing.
So, collaborate with ideal influencers to market your digital product, and don’t force business rules on them. Allow influencers to get creative with the type of content they create to promote your business. They have a better understanding of their audience.
9. Maximize all media channels
Marketing a product requires you to meet your customer on all media channels and maximize it for content marketing.
Emails, blog posts, forums, social media channels, YouTube, podcasts, etc. are all media channels where your can sell your products.
It can be overwhelming to manage all these channels at once if you are a solopreneur. So, start with the platform where your target audience is most active, and leverage cross-promotion to write about your product and its benefits.
You can also sell products directly from your social media pages and use ads to boost the reach of your content and get more people to buy from you.
Your social media presence affects the perception of your brand. Social commerce sales in the US are expected to reach nearly $46 billion in 2022.
Now more than ever, you should use your social media pages to showcase your products and expand your target market.
Great marketing = more sales
Marketing a product simply involves selling to a specific market and advertising it to customers to boost reach. However, to get the best results, choose the right marketing channels, create a marketing strategy, and use the methods shared in this article.
To recap, here’s how to market your digital product in 9 steps.
- Leverage email marketing
- Utilize user-generated content
- Use paid ads
- Leverage affiliate marketing
- Offer discounts
- Pre-order promotion
- Tell a product story
- Collaborate with influencers
- Maximize all media channels
Generally, learn how to market your digital products effectively to make more sales.
Use Selar to sell all your digital products conveniently and receive payments in 8 different currencies. Turn your knowledge into income and create a solid passive income.
