7 Ways to Sell your Digital Products Online

Products are items that can be sold and exchanged for value. It’s a visible outcome that emerges once entrepreneurs identify an obvious need. Upon the recognition of a demand, entrepreneurs supply a marketable good or service in exchange for-profit or social good. These products could either be in physical or digital form.

Physical items can be converted into digital forms and vice versa. Although the latter happens rarely. For example, E-books when published in PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and Kindle versions can also be mass-produced in paper copies if the need arises.
What are Digital Products?

Digital products like the name imply refer to items solely for digital or online use. The reception of digital products in the market scene can be attributed to the revolution of technology which was marked by the digital era.

Coupled with the creation of digital products, we've also seen the emergence of e-commerce stores and certain social media platforms integrating the commerce feature to support the sales of either physical or digital products.

Physical products are the conventional kind and alternate forms of digital products. Unlike digital products, they can be seen, felt, and touched. As mentioned earlier, due to the evolution of technology, there has been a rising demand for packages that serve the online market demand.
Examples of Digital Products

Some common examples of digital products include

    Wifi, Airtime and Data packages,
    E-books
    Stock photos
    Software applications
    Website templates
    Graphics and Designs templates
    Courses and Guides
    Cryptocurrency
    Podcasts, Videos and Content
    Downloadable Music
    Mobile apps
    Tutorials
    Coaching and Consulting Services
    Freelancing services

Just like physical products are designed to proffer solutions and value, digital products are also fashioned the same way. The only difference is that they are structured to make the user's virtual experience seamless.

See, for example, every contemporary firm and agency needs to document its processes and workflows and thus would immediately see the need for a word processing program – Microsoft and Google packages. These products fall under the digital product category.
Why Should you Create Digital Products?

As an entrepreneur, company, corporation or startup, you can create digital products. Worldwide, major agencies have carved a marketing funnel for digital products. If your business revolves around physical products only, it’s expedient that you begin to identify how you can launch out digital products to expand, diversify and establish your brand authority.

Businesses like Coca-Cola aside from its physical product lines such as Coke, Fanta, Sprite and others are rapidly launching digital products to engage their consumer which imparts positively on brands' sustainability and revenue generation.

Digital Products offer the following advantages when compared to physical products:

    Low cost of production and management
    Easy to manage and distribute
    Viable to market
    Easy accessibility and availability
    Easy to sell
    Long Shelf-life
    Automated process
    Ability to gather feedback from customers

How to Create Digital Products

The way you create digital products corresponds with the processes involved in the creation of physical products.

First, you have to generate ideas for the need you are proposing a value for; define the length, breadth, width, and depth of your product; design a prototype or mock product to ascertain feasibility, carry out iterations, analyze risks, curate development strategies, build all necessary features of the product before the initial launch; create the original design; launch the product and proceed to the final stage – MARKETING, the art of selling your product.
How to Sell your Digital Products Online

With marketing, your efforts throughout the creation stage will be commended. Simply say, marketing is the avenue to gather a reasonable output from your thorough inputs i.e., the product launched out to the market.

However, the result achieved from your marketing is dependent on the viability of your product and most importantly the kind of marketing strategies employed.

Marketing is a non-negotiable and essential element for product success. Marketing is a long-lived activity and has evolved in time since the era of Print and Television media which has depleted over time and has since been replaced with novel methods tagged as ‘digital marketing.

So back to the heart of this article – 7 ways to sell your Digital Products Online. The word ‘sell’ is synonymous with ‘marketing’. Every profitable and sustainable business model has a marketing plan. See this biological illustration of how humans require oxygen to survive, similarly every business, to survive needs a formidable marketing strategy to operate. Some Fortune-500 companies like Coca-Cola, Apple, Nike, and Facebook have experienced success leveraging the tremendous benefits of marketing i.e., storytelling, social media marketing and advertising.

As compared to traditional marketing, online marketing is a smart way of achieving your business success metrics and it can be a cost-effective way for achieving your consumer retention and sales target.

It’s also important to note that a large percentage of consumers and buyers have a presence online and tend to look for products online before making a conclusive decision to buy. Also, digital marketing techniques such as social media, content, and email marketing are outrightly one of the most relevant and reliable types of marketing in recent times.

Now that we have come to terms with this fact - that marketing, and to be more specific, online marketing is a non-negotiable business investment. Then it’s ideal to become aware of proficient ways to sell your digital products online.
1. Build an online store

After creating your digital product, it’s necessary to showcase it on an open stand accessible to prospects. This case is similar to physical stores where consumers step in to pick their desired products and make purchases. As a digital product creator, once your product creation process is finalized, another mountain you have to overcome is finding a convenient online store to exhibit your product.

Every online store must be built with the consumer in mind. Your e-commerce or online store must be user-friendly, contain genuine product descriptions and reviews, contain guides and FAQs on products for optimized use, order details, payment options, chatbot features, e-mail conversions, discount and coupon codes, and filters among others. This is usually to ensure that your consumers have a good reception enough to click the ’buy’ or ‘purchase’ option.

You can either build your online store or launch your products on free or paid e-commerce sites. There are varying underlying options to consider when thinking of an e-commerce platform. You should consider the ‘features’ i.e., what features do you term necessary for your product's success? 'Fit and suitability' i.e. Are the platform favourable for your product line? For example, Amazon is more suitable to host digital products like e-books while e-commerce sites like Shopify offer more success to other kinds of digital products. Consider 'Mobile view' as well i.e., is the user interface and experience friendly? Some examples of e-commerce sites include:

    WooCommerce
    BigCommerce
    Shopify

2. Social Media Marketing

Social media accounts for more than 50% of the revenue of sales across major industries and passes as a great strategy to optimize sales for any digital product.

All you have to do is to identify your target audience which must have been done in the product creation phase, choose the best platform where your consumer can be found, and start selling. Social media platforms include WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok among others.

Then, you can create awareness for your product, create engagement, generate sales, and increase reach. Most social media platforms empathize with the needs of entrepreneurs, businesses and creators and have deemed it fit to secure ways to build in features that enable creators to sell products.

Some businesses even launch campaigns on social media to improve brand awareness and perception which after afterwhile increases sales.

3. Email Marketing

Ideally, social media marketing is a significant way of gaining leads, however, email marketing works better for nurturing leads, consumer retention and building trust. Most marketers posit that email marketing is the most effective marketing channel.

As individuals, we have an inner circle consisting of a few of our close and most trusted family and friends. This analogy also applies to email marketing. As you start out, it’s crucial to perform thorough research on your audience, highlight specific templates and models to run on the platform, build a community, share your peculiar stories, share your success, failures and report them to your audience in a way that improves their perception of your brand.

Once this is done, your consumer will look forward to letters from you, make instant purchases once you launch out your products and could even serve as your foremost source of referrals.

What do you need to get started with email marketing? Build an email list – this can be achieved via steps 1 and 2, the source for an email service provider, create or choose from existing templates depending on your campaigns, design a calendar, outline your goals, and start pushing email copies.
4. Digital Advertising

Since most interactions happen online, digital or online advertising is a good marketing shot. Advertising simply means the ability to showcase a product to a target group of people. The most common keyword for this kind of marketing is called ‘Ads’. It’s simply an inorganic type of marketing that allows your target audience to find or access your business or product online, and increase brand awareness. Some brands run Ads surveys on YouTube to improve their delivery as a brand. Common examples of places to advertise include Google Ads, Facebook Ads and YouTube Ads.
5. Influencer marketing

Through influencer marketing, you can have an increase in sales if gotten right. When you scroll through social media, individuals mostly celebrities and creators with a large number of followings, engagements, and subscribers display and shout for certain kinds of brands with the hope that a percentage of their followers are lured to the products due to their interest and trust in the influencer in question.

This can be regarded as a quick scheme marketing technique, although it could come at an expensive rate. Through influencer marketing, you can promote your product, gain awareness that converts, and improve sales and retention. Big brands today still leverage this kind of marketing e.g., Cristiano Ronaldo is a top Nike influencer with a 462.9Million following.
6. Content marketing

According to Neil Patel, the world’s renowned content marketer, Content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is relevant to them on a consistent basis.  Every business has a goal for its content marketing pursuit. For the sake of this article, our goal is – ‘SALES’.

To make sales, take advantage of content that appeals to your prospects and audience. See ‘content marketing’ as a catalyst that accelerates your consumers’ prompt decision to buy.

7. Search Engine Optimization

Summarily, webmasters pursue SEO for the sake of web traffic. The essence of web traffic is to attract web visits and increase sales. Once you launch your site, optimizing it for SEO is a good investment for your business and digital product. You rank better, you get more visits and there’s a likely tendency to generate sales.

To get started, you have to prioritise putting the best SEO practices in place for your site. Some include: engaging in keyword research for your product, optimizing your product images, titles and description, and writing helpful guides that apply to your products among others.
Conclusion

As a digital product creator, selling online shouldn’t be a hassle once you become conversant with the highlighted steps. In addition, for business owners, if you haven't yet discovered the need for a digital product - it's important to start seeing how your business can create value in digital forms.