The digital product market has grown exponentially in the past decade, with a skyrocketing growth witnessed in the past two years. And there are obvious reasons for this spur in digital product consumption.
People are becoming more digitally conscious and spending a large amount of their time on digital platforms, be it social media while browsing, eCommerce stores for purchases, online software while working from home, or OTT platforms for entertainment.
No wonder startups, product companies, SMBs, and even individuals are coming up with new and supercharged digital products to sell to the digitally available customers and clutch benefits from the whooping market.
Understanding The Meaning Of Digital Products
Before delving into selling digital products, it is crucial for any marketer to understand what a digital product is.
In layman’s terms, a digital product can be defined as a product that doesn’t have a tangible asset yet can be sold in the market. These can be anything from a software product, photographs, and online courses, to eBooks, audios/videos, SaaS products, and much more.
The main USP of selling digital products is that you don’t need to build individual products for each sale. You need to invest in product development once and can sell licenses or services of the same product to customers.
The product or development cost, efforts, and other investment is just a one-time thing. Once you have the digital product ready, you can start selling it online across different platforms and channels.
But this is what acts as the tricky part. Most product owners end up focusing more on enhancing and improving the product that they don’t find the time to sell it successfully. That’s when the responsibility of selling the digital product falls on a marketer’s shoulders.
But selling a digital product requires expertise that only seasoned marketers possess. So, how do you promote and sell digital products?
Here are some proven ways to do the same.
Proven Ways To Sell Digital Products
When it comes to digital products, there is a lot said and written about the types of products, how to build them, or even how to launch new products. But not many talk about selling digital products.
Unlike physical products, digital products do not have a physical existence. You need to sell something intangible, which poses a big challenge. This is where this write-up will come in. It will not just help in selling the digital products but also effectively increase the returns on investment.
Define Your Niche Market
The first thing that any marketer should do while trying to sell a digital product is to research the market and define the niche. Each product has a particular offering that would delight a particular type of market.
Identifying and defining the niche market will also enable marketers to find out the channels where they should ideally target the customer.
For example, a SaaS product for teachers would more likely be applicable to education groups. Even when starting any online ad campaign, the target can be easily defined as educational websites or teaching sites, etc.
Instead of marketing to a generic audience, a niche audience is more likely to resonate with the product and the messaging sent across by the marketers. Once you have defined your niche market, it becomes easier for you to tone your messaging and hit where the iron is hot.
Have Buyer Personas
The buyer persona is a representative character of what your ideal customer would look and be like. For example, if you are trying to sell online courses for higher education, your buyer persona could be graduates or working professionals in a specific field.
In order to build buyer personas, you need to identify and mark different features like their age group, gender, education qualifications, area of residency, current position, etc. Once you have these basic features jotted down, you can enlist more specific features like challenges, pain points, behavior, buying pattern, goals, motivation, etc.
Once you have it all listed down, you can create your own buyer personas for the particular product.
An in-depth understanding of the buyer personas will enable you to know what exactly is required to sell to them and if they are ready for the product or not. You know their motivation, challenges, and pain points.
Know what stage they are in the buying journey and modify your marketing message accordingly. Not just that, having buyer personas will also help in creating excitement and buzz around the product with the required market.
Get Validation Through Prototype
An effectively successful strategy when it comes to selling digital products is to start with a minimum viable product or a product prototype. Take any successful app, Airbnb for example.
It started with a very simple version of the website, which just focused on the core offering. Once the idea got validated, they started with building better versions, implementing feedback, and adding more features.
This MVP development approach not only helps in launching the product faster with required validation but also helps reduce costs. You are able to build the first version of the product at a much lower cost and can easily reserve a bit more for marketing and selling efforts.
Launching a prototype and enhancing or adding features by incorporating the feedback is also essential as it gives the users an assurance that their feedback is important and is being incorporated.
Leverage Social Media
Social media is one of the most powerful tools for marketing today, especially after the pandemic. Everyone is seeking solace in social media, be it for entertainment, being social, gaining information, or simply passing time.
This could be a great opportunity for marketers to sell their digital products. They can analyze the browsing patterns of the users and show the products on different social media platforms for repeat marketing.
Be it through captivating pictures and videos on Instagram or using social media advertising on Facebook or running Linkedin ads on the professional networking site, know where your target audience is and target them there.
Start Selling A Digital Product
In the age of the digital revolution, selling a digital product could be just the thing you need to become a unicorn.
If you have a unique product idea that is capable of solving an everyday issue, this is the time to get product development services to turn it into a product and start selling it.
Even if it’s not a software, application, SaaS product, or other types of a web application, you can still sell it by marketing its USP to a target audience.
All you gotta do is define a niche market, build your buyer persona, and find the right channel to market it.
About the Author!
Tanya Kumari leads the Digital Marketing & Content for Classic Informatics, a global web development company. She is an avid reader, music lover and a technology enthusiast who likes to be up to date with all the latest advancements happening in the techno world. When she is not working on her latest article on tech dynamics, you can find her by the coffee machine, briefing co-workers on the perks of living a healthy lifestyle and how to achieve it.
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