In terms of digital product marketing, it would be best if you often had creative ideas for promoting a product, but nothing original comes to mind. Sometimes, it's promoting a digital product, sometimes a physical product, or even a coaching program or consulting offer.
With so much competition on the internet, it only makes sense to look for innovative digital product ideas that work.
In this article, we will discuss the ten best ideas for digital product promotion. These tips can be applied even if you are on a small budget but still want to draw massive attention to your offer.
Digital Product Marketing Defined
Before we get started, let’s explain what the term “digital products” means. A digital product or a digital good is an intangible good that can be sold online. Digital products are downloadable to the buyer’s computer or mobile device.
Here are some examples of digital products: ebooks, whitepapers, software, apps, WordPress plugins, website templates and themes, Excel or other program add-ons, digital prints, designs, images, photography, training material, video courses, films, videos to help someone meditate, music, fairy tales and any content in an MP3 format. These are just some examples…
Essentially, anything that can be packaged into a PDF, MP3, video format, or any other type of downloadable file is a digital product.
A digital product can be purchased once or in the form of a subscription or paid membership. In this case, the content is hidden behind a paywall and accessible to members only. You may see newspapers use that business model to promote premium content when you visit their website.
Promoting A Digital Product
So many of our clients come to us for digital product marketing because they have a product or service that they want to sell online.
They have a physical product, digital product, membership site, coaching offer, or other service they want to sell. After all, that's why we're in business.
Sometimes, it's a physical product sold on Amazon or Shopify. Other times, it's a digital course sold on Kajabi or Teachable. For the sake of our conversation, the technology or platform is pretty much irrelevant at this point.
You Need Sales Material...
(Forgive me if you've already got sales material up. You'd be surprised how many people we talk to who want to promote a product online but don't have anywhere people can buy it!)
So, the thing about promoting products online is there are a million different ways to do it. One commonality is that you need some sales material to get a conversion... Somebody is buying your stuff.
If you're selling a physical product, you're selling through an eCommerce listing on a Shopify store or an Amazon storefront. If you're selling a digital product, you need some sales material that paints the picture of what they're buying and what it'll do for them. You can use a video sales letter, a webinar, and an automated webinar, or you can do it entirely through email marketing campaigns and marketing automation.
The point is that you need to have a sales pipeline before you start promoting it.
A Quick Test For Digital Product Marketing
If we're looking at promoting a digital product, we'll put them into two different buckets.
- If the offer is $1000 or more, meaning it is more of a complex sale, we'll sell it from a webinar. So, the webinar gives a great chance to generate leads, bond with that prospect on the webinar, and ultimately make a pitch at the end. That's the beauty of webinars; you can do them live or as an automated webinar. How often you want to be sitting in front of your computer delivering this presentation is up to you. Most of our clients opt for automated webinars.
- If your product is under $1000, we recommend a video sales letter or a multi-video launch sequence... Something that isn't necessarily an event. It's sales material that can be consumed at any time, all the time. You want to make sure that the sales sequence merits that price point. If you're selling a $37 eBook, a video sales letter might be the way to go. If you're selling a $997 digital course that somebody logs into and gets a module a week, you might need a multi-video launch sequence to justify that $997 price point.
Promoting A Physical Product or eCommerce Store - A Quick Test
If you're selling a physical product, you at least need to have the listing on an eCommerce website with a sales page for each product in your pipeline.
It can be as simple as a Shopify store with sales pages for each item, including:
- A GREAT picture of the product
- A product description
- Product name
- Pricing information
- Add to cart or buy now button
- Products reviews
- Bundling options or product choices (think colors, quantities, sizes, etc.)
Finally, Getting Started With Promoting A Product
Once we reach the digital promotion stage, you can do digital product marketing in hundreds of ways. Here are some we like and recommend for our clients.
Content Marketing
Content is king. And more blogging is synonymous with "content marketing." The word blogging just isn't excellent anymore, I don't think.
Content marketing involves blogging and posting regular content on your website and social media. That content attracts an audience from search engines or social sites, gaining you traffic and exposure and ultimately helping you promote your product to the world.
Paid Advertising
You can go the paid route and create Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, Pinterest ads, Twitter ads, LinkedIn ads, and plenty of other places to advertise.
With paid advertising, you pay for every person who visits your website or hits your sales page. The revenue you generate should offset the ad costs.
So if you generate $100 of revenue and it costs $50 to get that sale, you just put $50 in your bank account (or in your pocket). So 1000 sales are where businesses, empires, product extensions, and global phenomena are built.
Promoting the product effectively is the key, though.
What Our DFY Clients Do
What we do with many clients is a little bit of both.
Digital Product Marketing: Paid Advertising
We always start with a paid route, managing their traffic and generating leads for them. In short, we work prospects through a sales funnel.
We always start with Facebook and Instagram traffic. Furthermore, we always kick Google ads off early because Facebook is a bit wonky regarding what it enables advertisers to do, and some of the data it recently removed made its advertising so effective.
Almost 50% of our ad spend goes back to Google through Google ads.
That's always where we start. We always start with paid traffic.
Promoting A Product With Content Marketing And Organic Content
If you are promoting a product and don't necessarily have an ad budget yet, or you don't have the money to put into advertising now, then the content marketing route is where you want to go.
You want to build your platform. You want to grow your audience through the content that you publish.
That content can be:
- Videos like this one.
- Blog posts (also like this one)
- Quora answers
- Medium.com articles
- ... Or any other kind of article-sharing sites that you can be an expert in
Everything should be designed to drive traffic to your website, product listings, and business.
You're Always "Paying" Something
Ultimately, whether you pay for your digital promotion in time or money, you still pay for the product promotion.
I loved search engine optimization back in the day. I was good at it, and then Google decided to slap all of our listings. Overnight, multiple five-figure-a-month websites were halted, suddenly producing zero revenue.
I can't be mad, though—I let that happen. I let Google do that to my business because I wasn't looking elsewhere. I had no other traffic generation strategy. I was 100% relying on the search engines, and we failed.
So, about six years ago, I started getting into paid traffic.
Facebook Ads Aren't The End All Be All
Now that Facebook ads have become more saturated, it's harder to do without content... It's not impossible, just more difficult.
Ads are still highly effective, don't get me wrong. They're just more effective when paired with a great content marketing strategy. That's one of the reasons I always tell clients to do both: to make sure to have the ads up AND record some video for blog posts.
Take the time to dial in your content to do content marketing the right way. This will reduce your ad costs long-term because you'll be building a platform.
- Write blog posts promoting your products.
- Start a podcast talking about things your prospects are interested in.
- Syndicate that material, the video or the audio, to whatever platforms you want to indicate that content to because that will grow your audience over the long term. You won't necessarily be as reliant on paid or search traffic when you have both.
Have A Good Mix Of Marketing
When promoting a product, you want to ensure that you have a good mix of free organic and paid strategies.
In the early days, paid will often offset organic, but you want to have both so you can grow your brand and your following. If you don't and Google (Facebook, LinkedIn, or whoever) pulls the rug out from under you, the tour business won't be shut down.
How-To: Digital Product Marketing
Now, let’s look at how to effectively promote a digital product to customers and create buzz for your business.
Here are the most creative digital product ideas for marketing and selling online successfully.
1. Marketplaces for digital goods
One of the easiest ways to get a new digital product in front of the eyes of your customers is to sell it in a marketplace. You choose different places depending on what your product is about.
For example, if you’re selling WordPress plugins, a marketplace like Codecanyon would be where your audience goes for window shopping. You may want to go to GraphicRiver or DesignCrowd if you're selling digital or graphic designs.
Do you sell ebooks? Try Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and E-Junkie. Idemy or Skillshare might be the right place to promote your digital products. if you're creating training videos
2. Affiliate programs
So, you want to find customers for your business. Why not have others do the heavy lifting for you?
With an affiliate program, you can attract marketers, bloggers, and small business owners who find your products complementary to what they already offer and are willing to promote your products to their audience for a commission.
Promote your affiliate product on ShareASale or ClickBank to attract potential partners. You can also create a simple referral program with ReferralCandy or install the AffiliateWP plugin on your WordPress website.
3. Live video
Using live video to reach more customers is popular right now. You can start doing live videos to educate your audience and simultaneously promote your products on social media.
Live video is straightforward and costs nothing. Right now, the best platforms to go live are Instagram and Facebook.
4. Podcasting
When thinking about how to promote a digital product, some entrepreneurs default to their podcasts to create new streams of income. When you know who your audience is, you likely get a lot of new digital product ideas that you want to make and sell.
Creating a podcast for a specific niche is a very effective marketing vehicle to expand your audience and get your message across. Every podcast episode is a chance to educate listeners and sell them on your offer.
5. Product Hunt
Product Hunt is a paradise for digital product businesses. It’s where you “Discover your next favorite thing” if you’re passionate about technology.
So, if you’re promoting products like mobile apps, cloud apps, or any SaaS products, you’d want to explore the opportunity of being hunted on ProductHunt. The product creator is called the “Maker,” and the person who discovers and promotes the new digital product is called the “Hunter.” Anyone can be a hunter, even the product maker, but you’d usually want somebody else to talk about you.
Even ebooks have seen success on Product Hunt. The BAMF Bible is a good example.
6. Crowdfunding
Want to know how to promote a digital product and get paid to create it? With crowdfunding.
It works by posting your project ideas on a crowdfunding website. Then, people who resonate with your vision can support you in turning your idea into reality. You raise money to complete your project, and when you’re done, you ship the end product to your supporters. Crowdfunding platforms can be effective for promoting digital and physical products alike.
To get digital promotion ideas, visit Kickstarter and Indiegogo. They are both crowdfunding platforms for creative projects.
7. Co-marketing
An effective way to hack growth and generate sales for a new product fast is to create a co-marketing campaign. Co-marketing allows two businesses to work together on promotional efforts. Usually, the most popular brand will soft-promote the other brand.
Now, let’s assume that you are new to the online space and you want to leverage the existing audience of another company or personal brand. When you establish a co-marketing agreement, you can promote your new digital product to a targeted audience.
How will your co-marketing partner be compensated? Payment will come through sales revenue (if you have created the product together) or the commission if they act as affiliates.
8. Free samples
Many Amazon businesses wonder how to promote a digital product in their pre-launch phase and settle on free samples and freebies.
When you offer free product samples, you have many benefits. One is that you can get real user testimonials. Another advantage is that your offer might go viral, and more people express interest in your upcoming launch. A third benefit is getting feedback and improving your product before selling it.
How do you go about offering free samples to promote your new product? There are many different ways, each with its benefits. You can run a contest on Facebook. This will target the audience that already follows you, and if they share it, their friends may also see it. You can publish your offer in forums, encouraging readers to visit your website to receive the product. You could also give your products to an online publisher, and they can run a contest to give away the product to their readers.
9. Landing pages
Promoting a digital product without having a landing page is hard to do. When preparing for a launch, you don’t need a full-featured website. However, a landing page is crucial to successful product promotion.
Use Facebook Ads to advertise using Facebook Custom Audiences and install the Facebook Pixel first so you can re-market to people who click on your ads. Also, give people the option to sign up for your newsletter and get notified of special offers you may have.
If you’re promoting a training product, you can use sales webinars to generate demand. In this case, you must create a landing page for webinar registration, prepare a script with a call to action, and advertise on Facebook to gather registrations.
Here's a book that will help you understand how to convert your prospects into sales following a proven, automated sales funnel formula geared for conversion.
10. Blogger reviews
One of the top ideas for promoting your digital product effectively is having trusted people write about your brand. People look for reviews before they buy, so it is a good idea to reach out to bloggers, give them free access to your product, and ask them to write an honest review.
This will help you build interest with their audience, driving sales until you can create your buzz.
Smart Digital Promotion Ideas for Promoting a Product
So, there you have it! A list of the top 10 ideas for promoting a digital product. They are free or inexpensive, simple to implement, and guaranteed to boost your promo efforts.
Products don’t sell themselves. It would be best to stimulate demand, and the most innovative way to promote a new product while on a small budget is to tap into the audience of another successful brand. We listed some creative ways to do that; remember that you always need to reward the other party by offering a reciprocal service or a percentage of the revenue.
We Can Help!
To discuss promoting your product, book an Action Plan call here. Alternatively, click the button below, and you'll be directed there.
We'll talk with you on the phone, walk through your offer, product, website, promotions, and other details, and give you an action plan to get you started.