How to promote a product online: the complete guide!
So, you've created a digital product but don't know what to do next? Don't worry because on this post you will learn how to promote your product on the Internet!
What will we see in this post
One of the biggest challenges for those who work with digital marketing is to promote a product online.
This happens because it’s not enough for your product [or the product to which you are Affiliated] to be good. To increase your conversion rate, you’ll need to know the best strategies to advertise it and make it attractive to your audience.
We’ve written this post to help people who want to work with online sales but who still don’t know how to promote products. Check it out!
Sales Page
Your sales page is often the first contact your lead has with your product. That’s why you must ensure that her user experience is the best one possible.
For that, you need to make it very clear what it is that you are selling.
For example, some users still find it difficult to understand that the digital product is made available over the Internet and it’s up to you to inform them about the online delivery on your sales page.
And how can you do that?
Providing accurate information
A good sales page is the one that answers all your client’s questions and handles her objections.
In the case of online courses, for example, the user will only feel secure to make the purchase if she understands all the advantages she will have when buying that product.
In order to do so, your description should have not only the theme you will address but also a number of modules and what is covered in each one; what readings or additional materials the lead will be entitled to; if that course has interactive features such as quizzes, chat with teachers, among others.
Make sure your sales page has these payment conditions:
- PayPal or credit card?
- Is it possible to pay in installments and, if so, how many installments?
- With interest or no interest?
Soon, there will be news concerning our payment methods!
Understanding your audience
More important than the format you’ve chosen for your product is to speak the same language of your persona.
The persona is a semi-fictitious representation of your ideal client. Created from a thorough analysis of your business plus market research.
We’ve talked about the persona several times here on the blog, including on the post The Digital Entrepreneur’s Glossary, which explains the meaning of this and other terms that are common in Producers and Affiliates day to day.
In truth, your mission is to write texts that generate empathy in those who are reading it, arousing their interest in your offer.
Take some time to get to know your audience, what problems they normally face and how you and your product can help them.
Betting on Copywriting techniques
Copywriting is the art of convincing your lead to make an action within your site, such as purchasing the product you are advertising.
A good copy is the one that convinces the audience to click on your offer, whether arousing their curiosity, reporting something intuitive, breaking a pattern, using controversy, displaying a problem or creating a solution. As explained in the post How to make your first sale as an Affiliate.
The post 6 sales techniques for beginners also shows copywriting techniques that can be applied by Producers and Affiliates, even people who are just starting in the digital market now.
In short: the language of your sales page should be in tune with your offer and to your persona’s interests.
The same goes for other pages you may have such as a website, blog or Fan page.
Choosing attractive images
Just like the copy, visual identity is crucial to the performance of your sales page.
What few entrepreneurs know is that the choice of images is not based only on aesthetic criteria.
A good image should be functional, able to convey the main message of your ad or page as if it were a complement to your text.
In the case of the market of digital products, it is also important that the image makes the product real for users.
If the product you are selling is an online course, how about using the image of someone reading on the tablet?
This way you point out two qualities of your product: easy access, and the fact that the buyer is able to access that product whenever she wants.
Inviting your lead to action
Call-to-Action (CTA) is the name we give to the main action of the page. This action will vary according to your purpose.
In the case of rich materials, you can subscribe to get content offers via email. For other products, the Call-to-Action button leads to your checkout page, where the lead will complete the purchase.
Whether your goal is conversion or leads capture, your CTA should be well-positioned, so that the visitor understands right away what her primary action on that page is.
Making your sale policies clear
Nothing is more frustrating than buying a product and feeling aggrieved in some way.
To ensure that your user makes a well-informed purchase, your sales page must have:
- Privacy Policy and Terms of Use:
A document that explains how the information collected in your website will be used.
- Disclaimer:
It aims to clarify that the results promised by the Producer can be influenced by several factors.
- Contact:
A direct channel between the buyer and the Producer in the case the former has questions about the product.
Social Media
In addition to your sales page, social networking sites are great allies when promoting your digital product.
Despite the variety of existing social networking sites, not all of them will be a good fit for your product.
It is up to you to decide which ones are more suitable for your strategy through a careful study of your business and your persona.
Below we talk a little more about the most common ones.
Even though it exists since 2003, LinkedIn is still under used by entrepreneurs to promote their products.
But if the 106 million monthly active users over the world are not enough to convince you to invest in this social network, take a look at the text we wrote about Linkedin Marketing, then you’ll definitely find other reasons to include LinkedIn in your promotion strategy from now on.
Due to its limited number of characters, Twitter is a great space to share links to your blog.
If you are an Affiliate, you can share the link to the sales page where your product is hosted.
You can also display different types of ads on Twitter, such as Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends.
All of them are identified with the icon “promoted” and may appear to the user when she accesses or when she logs out of the account.
Instagram is one of the biggest social networking sites in the world, with over 600 million monthly active users. Out of this total, 77.8 million users are from the United States.
The short videos, stories, photos, and carousel images are great to talk about the world of your niche and educate your audience about your product or service.
To advertise on Instagram you need to use Instagram Ads, and just like in other social networking sites, you can suggest different CTAs for your user such as: subscribe to your page, like your profile or buy your product.
Facebook is the social networking site with the largest number of active users in the world (there are about 1.8 billion people interacting monthly!).
When used the right way it can attract thousands of leads to get to know your product, both organically, as well as through paid advertisements.
To attract the user organically, you will need to provide quality content to your lead before introducing your product.
It’s ideal that the posts of your Fan page/profile are divided as follows:
- 80% relevant content: content directed to the top of the funnel that will educate the lead about a particular topic.
- 20% ads: about your product/solution.
Imagine you are a digital Producer who sells an aerobics course. You can make an infographic available on the benefits of physical activity in the prevention of heart disease or an e-book with specific recipes for pre-workout.
These are just a few examples of content that you can deliver to keep your audience engaged with your page.
Another strategy that can help you become an authority in your niche is to take part in discussions on Facebook groups to understand what the key questions of your audience are.
The groups and communities bring together people with common interests, so they are excellent channels to promote your digital products to a targeted audience.
Advertising on Facebook
The major gap in the organic strategy on Facebook is that the content you share on your page does not feature on all your followers’ timeline.
To be more accurate, about 2% of your posts are viewed that way. This number is constantly changing (In 2012, for example, the organic range of Facebook was 16%) and is influenced by multiple factors, including the relevance of that content to the user.
To get to those leads, and mainly, to attract new followers, you need to use the tools on Facebook Ads.
Recently, we’ve given a blow-by-blow description of how to announce on Facebook. If you haven’t read this post yet, you can do it now by clicking here.
Rich materials
Unlike blog posts, which are more objective and simpler to consume, rich materials are complete contents and, in most cases, a perennial one.
They can help you sell your product, once they establish your level of authority on a given subject.
Among rich materials, the ebook is one of the most popular, since it can be read at any time of day, from any mobile device.
Whereas video lessons and screencasts are good options for tutorials because they feature audiovisual resources that make it easier for the viewer to understand.
We know that to produce these rich materials is not an easy task.
That’s why we have compiled some simple tips that can help you create content that is able to arouse the interest of your target audience.
1- To speak with authority you need to understand the subject
If you don’t want your text to be generic, first of all, you need to master what you’re talking about.
And I’m not talking about a quick search on the Internet, but of knowledge, you just acquire with market experience.
A Producer who is considered an authority on games can’t talk about fashion and beauty, and vice versa.
Your persona will only provide you with any information if she realizes that content really adds value to her life or is useful to solve a problem she’s facing.
2- Research before producing rich materials
Even if you already have previous knowledge about the subject, skipping the research step is not an option!
After all, in today’s world, where technological innovations pop up at all times, you need to be updated so that your content does not become disposable.
During your research, you can also find visual and text references that can help you make your product even richer and more attractive to your lead. Plus you can find out materials that have already been published on the subject, thus proposing a different approach.
3- Know your target audience
When creating a rich material your goal is to help someone solve a problem, right? And here, once again, comes up the figure of the persona.
From the moment you set the qualified audience for your page, you can direct your communication to people who are really interested in your products.
Your persona will outline what kind of information your rich material must contain, which language you should use, what images generate higher engagement, among other factors.
Email marketing
Email marketing is still the best tool to keep your audience engaged.
Doubt it?
Recent data from Hubspot, a company specialized in the marketing automation segment, shows that entrepreneurs who use email marketing to nurture their leads generate 50% more qualified leads to sales than those using other communication channels.
The same study shows that the number of email users will grow to 3 billion until 2020.
If these two reasons were not enough, email marketing is also the kind of ad campaign with the best cost benefit.
You just need to have an email list, composed of people who have signed up for it on your website or sales page; and a good email marketing service, which will take care of the operational part for you.
Unlike your personal email account, email marketing tools like MailChimp or iContact, enable registering and sending mass messages, in addition to providing reports with data such as open rate and time spent on email, which will help you improve your sales strategy.
Sending emails to the right people
More important than creating attractive emails and subscribing to an efficient email marketing tool, is sending the email to people who have already shown interest in your product.
So we recommend that you only get in touch with users who have signed up on your site, or made a sale. Because it’s easier for them to identify what that content is all about.
On no account should you use paid lists, even if your goal is to attract visibility for your brand.
Emails sent to purchased lists, in addition to not converting, still configure as SPAM, which means that it might never be clicked.
Some practices can help you efficiently and sustainably grow your base. We’ve talked about each one of them on the post How to properly use email marketing.
Segmenting your audience
So, you’ve followed our tips and created a mailing list just with users from your website. The next step is: create new lists, segmenting your leads according to the stage they are in your sales funnel.
This segmentation is important because it’s not always that the email you’ve created will be relevant for all your base.
Relax, I’ll explain!
The audience in the top of the funnel is at the knowledge stage. I mean that they often haven’t even identified a problem and they’ve signed up to your email list to learn more about the subject.
Leads in the middle of the funnel are at the deliberation stage, which means they already have identified a problem and are searching for possible solutions.
Whereas leads who are in the bottom of the funnel have been engaged with your content for some time and this is the perfect time to show them that your product is the best solution. Use cases and testimonials, for example.
Product: How to grow organic food at home.
Top of the funnel content: Longevity: 8 tips to live longer (here you can add “organic food” in one of the topics).
Middle of the funnel content: 10 advantages of eating organic food.
Bottom of the funnel content: How a regular housewife turned her life around with organic food (in this kind of email you can present a case of one of your clients and offer your product as a solution to your lead).
Blog and website
It is recommended that you create a communication channel with your audience, to boost your organic strategy.
Unlike your sales page, which is focused on conversion, websites and blogs are spaces designed for the nutrition of leads. There you can share relevant content with your base, and build your authority on that theme.
Imagine that you sell an online course about Yoga and meditation, and writes a blog focused on having a healthy, more zen lifestyle.
It is likely that some users access your page after a Google search.
Of course, that to appear in the first organic search results you’ll need to master SEO techniques and meet the quality standards of each search engine.
In the case of Google, there are more than 200 factors considered for ranking.
The good news is that one of the factors evaluated by the search engines is the relevance of your content to the user.
That is, the more quality content you produce, the faster it will appear on the first page, in searches related to your niche.
That’s why the blog or the website are fundamental tools to nurture leads, fulfilling a role as important as social networking sites.
Regarding the content, the 80/20 rule that we’ve mentioned on the Facebook topic also applies to blogs and the websites: your production should be 80% concerning top of the funnel and 20% related to middle and bottom of the funnel.
Remember that your sales page already talks about your product and focus on creating a lasting relationship with your lead and also help him identify a problem.
Paid advertising
Getting to the first places of organic search requires time and hard and continuous SEO work, plus constant adjustment of your content to keep your page updated, and therefore relevant.
This can and must be done, but until you reach the status of authority in your niche, you need to have visibility for your product. Going for paid advertising will save you time while you work on your organic strategy.
Currently, there are several networks where you can advertise your product, the most well-known of them is, without a doubt, Google Adwords.
To have access to the functionality dashboard from Adwords you only need to have an active Gmail account.
From the moment you choose paid advertising, you will need to invest in how your ads look, including creating images and text, which engage with your potential consumers and are inviting to the click.
But maybe, the most important part of creating an ad is targeting: reaching the audience that will be more likely to buy your product, according to your personas’ research.
In this case, you will be happy to know that there are a number of filters to segment your audience based on your location, gender, age, type of device, among others.
You can combine more than one option to create an even more assertive audience for your product and avoid empty traffic.
Here on the blog, we’ve written several posts on how to create ads, both for Facebook as for Adwords. We’ve also talked about remarketing, which is another practice advertisers use to reach people who have searched for their product but that, for some reason, have not completed the purchase.
Good luck your business!
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve noticed that there are several ways to advertise your product online. It’s up to you to choose the strategies that can bring the best results for your enterprise.
Feel free to come back to this content whenever you need!
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