Creating your first product whether digital or physical as an entrepreneur can make you feel a sense of accomplishment.
When you’re just getting started it can be scary; especially if you have fears that sales will not be good.
No one wants to spend their hard work and time creating a great product, only to have it flop. This is why it’s important to focus more attention toward your marketing strategy.
Let’s say you’re creating your first product or want to create a product for your business in the future. Keep these marketing techniques in mind to have a successful launch to establish a dependable source of income.
Find Out Where Your Ideal Customer Hangs Out
The first thing you want to do before you start marketing is to come up with a strategy. This sounds more complex than it really is. Essentially, you should have already determined who your ideal customer was when you started creating the product.
Now, find out where they spend their time to get your product in front of them and secure a sale. Profile your ideal customer and determine their age, interests and hobbies, income level, and so on.
Soon enough, you’ll start to build a list of places they frequent whether in person or online. Many people use social media a lot so that would be a good place to consider marketing your product. You can also submit guest posts on websites your ideal customer visits, host local events, etc.
Start With Your Email List
With a product launch, there’s no better place to start marketing than with your email list.
As you try to identify certain habits and preferences of your target customer, many of your target customers and loyal followers will already be signed up to your email list.
All the time you spent building your email list will pay off when you’re ready to launch a product. You can create a sequence of emails to go out to promote your product. You can even send out a Q/A for people who may be interested but have questions.
I personally like to offer giveaways and discounts exclusively to my list to hype up my promotion.
Use Facebook Ads
Facebook ads is an increasingly popular way to grow your business and sell your products and services. Most people are on Facebook today. Facebook has already done the hard work and research to learn about users to benefit advertisers.
Facebook knows which users are interested in certain topics, and who generally buys certain products. It’s definitely a mix of scary and genius when you think about it. However, it really helps when it comes to successfully marketing a product to others.
With Facebook ads, you can customize what your ad looks like and determine how you’d like to track conversions. You can also target people based on demographics, geo-graphics, lifestyle and even the pages they follow.
A popular practice when setting up your ads is to run several ads with a specific target audience so you can split test them. That way, you’ll know which ads are most successful in terms of conversions and which ones you should pause and get rid of.
Facebook ads require an investment up front, but it’s totally worth it and you can spend whatever you feel comfortable spending.
Leverage Other People’s Audience with an Affiliate Program
Need a little help promoting your product? Your reach is often limited to your audience and email list alone and while ads are a great way to market, you may have a budget that limits how much you can spend on advertising.
So what should you do when you’ve already reached your audience and don’t have much to spend on additional advertising?
You can create an affiliate program so others can help promote and market your product and share some of the revenue.
Affiliate programs work best when you have a digital product and they basically allow people to sign up as ‘affiliates’ to promote your product to their audience.
What do they get in return? Usually, they make a commission off each sale they make. The amount they receive is up to you, but most people offer a compelling rate like 30-40% of each sale which motivates affiliates to share information about their products.
Affiliates market products primarily online since they are given unique links that people must click on in order to get credit for a sale. Affiliates can promote via social media, blog posts, tutorials, and even to their own email list as well. Overall, it’s a great way for you to get some promotion without having to pay for it upfront. You just have to pay out each affiliates’ earnings after a sale is made.
Overall, you should get more sales with an affiliate program if you’ve been struggling to convert your own audience.
Host a Webinar
Hosting a webinar is another great way to market your new product to attract customers. If your product helps solve a common issue, you can organize a free webinar that addresses the issue or pain point that many people are dealing with.
You can promote your webinar via Facebook ads and your email list to get signups. Then, you can go through each of the slides during the presentation and offer a Q and A session and a special gift for people who stick around until the end.
If you’re using a webinar to promote a new product, you want people to stick around until the end after receiving the free content because ideally, you’d make a pitch for your paid product so people who are interested in learning more can buy it.
Sometimes, it helps to offer a temporary discount on your product only for people who attended the webinar to create a sense of exclusivity and urgency.
Summary: Use Multiple Resources Both Paid and Unpaid
Marketing can be very multi-faceted, but that means you have options so it can be seen as a good thing. When you are launching your first product, don’t just stick to one method of marketing and include multiple techniques in your overall strategy.
Even if your budget isn’t huge, you can still do things like try out paid Facebook ads, use the email list you’ve already built, and offer a free webinar to successfully market your first product.
