How To Market A Product Successfully
Are you looking for a way to help grow your store’s sales quickly? Then, consider learning the various ways of marketing your goods and services online.
Investigating these diverse online marketing concepts would help you understand your target audience and efficiently market your goods and services to them.
Whether you are convinced or not, these marketing tips listed in this article would help change your mentality and boost your business online.
How to Market a Product
If you have a new product or service that you are looking to promote, try out one of these six ideas for your business brand.
» Know Your Audience
You cannot efficiently market your products without knowing and understanding the target audience.
Dedicating time towards this course, would not only help you choose the audience and marketing strategies that are right for your business but also, help you to discover if the chosen marketplace is clogged or not.
Equipped with the audience behavior patterns and their social media platforms, you will be able to distinguish yourself from your competitors in a manner that your audience would easily identify your offerings.
» Start with Niche Marketing
When starting an online store, it is important for you to emphasis on creating a brand around a singular niche.
Through such brand, you would be able to easily identify and target potential clienteles and associates to work with.
Not just your marketing, but your positioning and branding will benefit from such a strategic move.
Going further to become an expert in this type of marketing would help you choose and apply the right marketing strategies for the target audience.
For instance, instead of starting off as a multipupose fashion store, you might brand yourself as a women’s clothing store.
As your women’s clothing store grows, you can start branching into other similar categories like men’s clothing, jewelries, hair accessories, etc.
With time and continuous experimenting, you get to know the needs of your customers which will pave room for even more expansion.
Ultimately, brand metrics like your business name will grow more dependable over time within your chosen niche.
» Build Strong Customer Relationships
Building a strong customer relationship starts with treating all of your customers fairly.
It involves putting an effort to see all your customers leave your store with a good mood by resolving their problems or issues.
Offering a refund, a small gift or discount can help a long way to make your customers happy.
Happy customers tend to spend more and equally spread some good word about your store to their friends.
» Elicit an Emotional Response
Emotional responses from the customers are essential in selling one’s products online.
There are various ways of eliciting an emotional response from your customers, which may include flash sales and limited time offers that would encourage the customers to buy as soon as possible.
Images on your website can also elicit an emotional response from your customers.
Therefore, you must ensure that you choose the right images and colors that would move for your target group to make a buy.
Through your contents and actions, show your customers that you care about the same things they do.
Use the strong emotional bond that you have built with them to your benefit.
Find out the thoughts that appeal to your customers, and work towards producing an emotive content that draws their attention towards your business.
» Personalize the Experience
Personalization is all about producing a feeling of individuality for your customers; making them eager or fascinated with every information you send to them.
There are different ways of personalizing the shopping experience of your customers.
You can start with making strategic emphasis on a set of products viewed by your customers as seen in their browsing history and, with the use of welcome back messages and emails with their real names included in them.
Generally, by personalizing the experience for your customer, they will be more likely and happy to make a purchase.
Personalization in marketing is the way onward in creating a better relationship with your target customers.
» Creating Gift Guides
Gift guides exist for every type of industry, person, and holiday you can think of.
It is a usual habit for most businesses to create gift guides during the holiday or celebration season but then again creating them months prior to the holiday gives your content (gift guides) a chance to begin ranking in search engines.
You could also recommend products within your store to your various customers, adding buy links to them to help monetize your content.
Listing the featured product that you want to sell and then including a number of other related gifts that fit the theme of the gift guide would help make your gift guide unique.
Make sure you have something exciting in store for special occasions and holidays. For example, you can create special packaging for limited-edition offerings. The packages will still bear your unique identity as a brand but with modifications in the color scheme, pattern, and font or typeface, to reflect the occasion, season, or reason for the products.
Brainstorm the copy or messaging that goes with the packaging, and build an overall packaging design that appeals to your target audience.
How to Sell a Product
After advertising your products to the target audience, the next step is to sell your marketed products.
Below are the various ways in which you can sell your marketed products at a fast and monetized rate.
» Guest Blogging
Gain more exposure for your business by generating and posting content on other sites.
Sharing treasured, proficient content within your niche makes you an authority to a targeted audience.
Writing contents or articles for other blogs is one of the many numerous ways of selling and promoting your products and business online.
With the right tactic, guest blogging can be an effective way to drive traffic and promote the lifestyle around your products.In some cases, the more you blog, the more traffic your website gets.
It just involves placing a link to your website or product within the written article or content.
You could also place retargeted ads that would remarket your products to whoever visits your website and does not purchase any of your products.
In choosing a blog to write content for, it is advisable to choose one that has related and corresponding niches to that of your brand.
Corresponding niches may be one with a parallel audience or target group but sells different products such as a computer store collaborating with a software store.
When done successfully, guest blogging drives search engine traffic, attracts customers, and captures the attention of the media and high profile bloggers who could write and comment about you.
One of the most important points to consider is that you should not sell your products in your articles. While that’s the ultimate goal, no website will take guest content that’s promotional or solely beneficial to them.
» Reuse Customer Generated Content
Adding customer photos to your website, reposting these photos on your business social media platforms and tagging them are one of the few ways of reusing your customer content.
This allows new visitors or customers that are visiting your website to see how the received products look like.
With this, new customers can be convinced that your products are up to standard and would be more bound to purchase them.
This also keeps the cost spent on product photography low as images and reviews of the products gotten from the customers can be used to show off easily.
» Figure Out what Type of Content You Should be creating
You could easily use blogs, articles, eBooks, infographics, social media, videos, or audio messages as content opportunities to help market your products.
Choosing a content strategy that is engaging, brand enriching and produces results should be your ultimate goal.
By investigating and discovering the type of content that gains the most attention, you can then start to improve on them to create a better experience that is of more value to your audienc.
This increases the probability of your contents getting shared and sales increasing exponentially.
Moreover, with the right tools and apps such as Sharethrough or the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer, you could produce headlines for your contents that would give you high clicks.
» Create YouTube Videos
With a wide platform like the YouTube channel, that has an average of over 1.8 billion monthly users, you could market your conten to 23% of the world population.
You do not need to create a popular video to get amazing results on YouTube.
You can still promote your products with interesting or helpful videos. Many people may already be looking for your products or brand on YouTube.
By creating your own channel, with your own videos, you can control the story. Through the YouTube channel, you can provide value to your customers, increase your brand worth and make sales.
When starting, it is important for you to upload videos regularly in order to establish a presence among your viewers and gather enough audience for your brand before decreasing the number of videos uploaded to your channel.
For example, if you sell cooking utensils and ingredients you could create and upload videos about cooking.
If you sell sports accessories, you could upload sports videos.
If you sell training equipment such as dumbbells, you could upload training exercises videos where your equipment are being made use.
» Be an Industry Expert
In order to be able to put you and your products in front of your competitors and audience, you need to ensure that your knowledge about the industry is of a high standard.
By conveying such knowledge in your blog posts, articles, videos, and webinars, you would able to elevate your brand above others and still effectively market your product across many other channels or groups.
You do not necessarily need to know the numbers and drifts at the back of your head.
With a team of industry experts supporting you, they can easily carry out researches and lead focus groups that will benefit your business.
» Product Reviews
One of the best ways to easily promote and sell a new product or service is to let your customers speak for you by sharing reviews.
It is a normal habit for customers to check the reviews of products in order to ascertain its quality and originality.
Therefore, if you are looking for a way to attract more buys and customers to your product, you should consider using apps such as Shopify and Yotpo that help computerize your product reviews.
The apps will ask the customers to leave a comment or review about the product after purchase.
You could also combine these reviews with other customer-generated content such as their pictures in order to ease them into purchasing your products.
How to Promote Your Business
This is the next stage to proceed to after establishing your products properly in your business.
When it comes to promoting a new product or service, it can be quite hard to figure out where to get started, and which methods of promotion will give you the best results.
The truth is that, there are many ways to promote your business, and what works may depend on your uniqueness.
Here are six ways to promote a new service or product for your business.
» Create an Affiliate Program
A type of marketing whereby a business recompenses a person who promotes their product for every new customer or visitor brought in by the person’s own marketing efforts.
It is also a marketing arrangement by which an online seller gives a certain reward to an external website or individual for the traffic generated through referrals.
With an affiliate program, you will be able to advertise your products online and still gain many other benefits such as:
- improved sales,
- bigger traffic to your site,
- prolonged reach of your business brand,
- better search engine optimization, and
- the creation of a basis for a viral marketing strategy.
The only cost observed in this program is the cost taken to settle the referrals who purchased from your store and the commission paid to the affiliates for bringing in the referrals.
» Invest in Retargeting Ads
The use of retargeting ads is a way of targeting individuals or users who have shown interest in your business or store.
It involves placing discounts or limited time offers in these ads to lure them back to your site in order to make a purchase.
If you plan your product marketing well enough, you can publicize to people who have viewed or added a product to the cart but left your website. As such, the messaging is highly personalized.
» Be Active. Everywhere
It requires extra dedication from you to be active in your messaging, social media platforms and building up strong relationships with your customers.
You are not going to make that big sale with just your first post or message.
Nevertheless, if you stick with this as a daily routine, and you are consistent and actively online, eventually, you will see results from your hard work.
To help ease this task, you could automate some of your posts and repost someone else’s content with credit.
Apart from using the social media to ensure that people know that your business brand exists, you could also make use of guest posting, blog content, and niche specific interviews to put your business brand out there.
It is therefore always useful to interrelate with your customers to see what your customers are saying about you on social media platforms.
If you are fronting any criticisms, or customer queries, respond to them on time and continue to work on building a real and long-lasting connection with your customers.
» Build an Online Community
An online community is a forum where several brands come to build and market their names and products without having to finance huge money into paid campaigns.
It is a place where people or customers who love your business brand come together to discuss the experiences your business brand has given them in a helpful environment.
Not only do your customers benefit from this community but also do you as you get to view or listen to how your customers view your product and in the process, expertly adjust your business brand, product, or service, to improve on it.
Building an online community is a great way of promoting both your old products and the upcoming ones too.
Just simply engage you and your community with questions about your products and business brand, discover the biggest supporters of your business brands, reach out to them by offering a free test product, and gather sufficient feedback about these products from them.
» Create Great Assets
Great assets such as graphs, infographics, thumbnails and more can keep onlookers engaged for longer when they visit your website.
Aside from this, great assets can make your business brand look more proficient and reliable.
Ascertain whom your audience is or what they are comprised of, look at how they interrelate with contents, especially what forms of content they prefer.
Then you would be able to create great assets that would suit your business brands and market your products through the favorite forms of content your audiences enjoy using the information you just gathered.
» Targeted Ads
If you do not promote a product, especially a new one, they probably will not gain much attention.
Another way of promoting your business online after successfully establishing a strong customer foundation is continuous marketing to the audience.
Facebook is predominantly useful in briefly targeting your audience, as Facebook’s striking data assembly can allow your business to target a certain group of audience by gender, age, location, interest, and more.
With the list of your customers’ emails uploaded to Facebook or other platforms, you could create ads targeting them with information about new products added.
When running such ads, it is important to avoid revealing products that would have been bought by that particular customer in the past.
To avoid losing your old customers in the process, you would not want to over souk them by sending them ads with special promotions frequently.
However, you could seldom send ads to your customers that contain special promotion or special discount code like BZSFT25 that would only work upon activation by them only.
By using targeted ads, you will be able to develop an efficient campaign and market your marketing resources more effectively.
You will also be able to yield high returns upon investment because of the amazing results that these targeted ads would bring at a low cost.
This is unsurprising as you will be spending less money and time on customers who are not interested in or do not care about what you have to offer.
Effective Marketing Tips
Below are a few tips to help give your marketing strategy or style a boost.
» Monetize Contests and Giveaways
For this, you will need to bring out some dough for a prize, but the number of participants and new potential leads you get will be well worth the price.
Contests and giveaways could be a source of revenue and new visitors for your website whether or not you are a blogger.
They are also an easy and affordable way of getting your brand in front of many people.
By giving away your product, you can make sure your contest or giveaways get to the right kind of people: potential customers and buyers.
Therefore, to avoid failure in your giveaways, there are a few key mistakes to avoid when running a contest to promote your business.
One of them would include making sure that the platform, timing, messaging, and the phases people have to take to enter your contest are well thought about and decided upon.
Choosing the right platform for the giveaways and contests would be the first issue to be decided upon when venturing into this aspect.
Even if after the contests has ended, you will still be able to continue marketing your products to the names made available in your email lists who excitedly subscribed to your channel in hope that they would win one of your prizes.
To avoid getting discouraged customers at the end of your contests or giveaways, you could send small gift cards or prizes to those who failed to win the big prize, telling them that they were runner-ups rather than losers.
In this way, everyone here is winner including you as get to generate extra sales (meaning more profits!).
» Create a Customer Loyalty Program
Customer Loyalty is when, due to positive experiences or gratification gotten when purchasing your product, a customer repeatedly purchases your products or collaborates with your business brand willingly.
To ensure the success of your business brand, it is of ultimate importance to seek the loyalty of your customers as loyal customers help grow a business faster than acquiring a new customer.
It, therefore, costs a business about 5 to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell to an existing one.
Furthermore, 82% of adults in the U.S say they are loyal to brands.
With this at the back of your mind and business plan, your business could possibly put in the effort to make sure you are doing what you can in order to keep your customers satisfied and crawling back to you.
Since we are aware that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to maintain an existing one, you could, therefore, focus on how to stimulate your loyal customers to bring in new ones.
In addition, this is where the importance of customer loyalty programs come in.
This program involves your business offering a reward or profits to customers constantly make purchases.
Some of these profits may include free products, discounts, rewards, vouchers, tokens, or offers and demos on products that are yet to be released.
In addition, automatically enrolling customers into this program will help you grow repeat acquisitions on your store, which helps boost your overall transactions.
Moreover, customers who have already bought from you are more likely to purchase from you again than new ones.
Therefore, welcoming your customers into your loyalty program and offering them a special discount code they can use for life would do your business brand some good.
So as not to lose your most profitable and loyal customers, it is also important that you occasionally market to them and send them emails that promote special VIP offers, boosting sales in the process.
» Special Offers and Freebies
Who does not like freebies and special offers? Certainly, your customers would be delighted if you are to have one.
Boost your sales and email lists by including a special offers or freebies section on your website.
These special offers may include a page where a list of the entire discount codes that you have now.
Discount codes tend to persuade customers into thinking that the deal for the day is worth spending money on.
What about freebies? Freebies are special giveaways that can be placed below the special offers page of your website.
Freebies also help to build your email/contact lists. For example, if you sell wall arts, you can do giveaways of wallpapers on your website.
With the different types of freebies and special offers made available, you could decide to combine a two or more of them to yield fascinating results.
Examples of such types of freebies include (BOGOF) buy one get one free offer, gift vouchers, student discounts, loyalty points or tokens, free delivery, gift cards, and pledges for higher priced items,
» Make a Mobile App
Mobile applications might be the right step to take if your product is something that your customers find appealing.
Mobile apps can also help market your product or create awareness by allowing your customers to have a real time feel of your products.
For example, if you sell furniture you can develop an app that can help visualize a piece of furniture within the living room of the potential buyer.
With the ability of an app to provide a look at a customer envisioning himself or herself owning the product, you could then skyrocket your sales easily.
» Influencer Blogging
Influencer blogging is one of the few marketing tips that can help drive traffic to your new online store.
You will first have to ensure that you have a blog subscription running on your online store so that people can easily sign up to receive updates.
It requires you to regularly create contents on your business blog, mentioning the various influencers in your niche.
These articles could talk about specialists in your niche, quotes from an influencer in your niche, or people with big followings or famous status.
You will then get free traffic from people, who share it to their own audiences, which you could easily monetize with your email marketing.
Always reember to send updates of your popular products with links attached them to your various audiences so as to get traffic on your web and blog pages.
» Partner with Influencers
The next step after acquiring influencers through blogging is to collaborate with them.
It just involves finding the right set of influencers, which may be a challenging task for someone new in the business.
In order to select the right influencers, you need to observe the type of shout outs they put on brand products, whether their comments are about them or the brand, and if their post is able to get high engagements.
You will also wan to find out if a particular brand regularly engages the service of the influencer. If the answer to this is positive, then, it is likely that the influencer is doing a great job.
In addition, some influencers charge exorbitant bills but generate few sales.
You will preferably want to work with an influencer who has at least 100k followers to his name to actually be able to get sales, as smaller audiences might not convert as well unless it is a mega-niche market.