10 Creative Ways To Promote Your Product And Boost Sales
Product promotion is an integral aspect of advertising that decides the fate of your product, whether it’ll be a success or a failure.
Amongst various promotional strategies, online product marketing should be a priority for you because 78 percent of the people conduct product research online before making a purchase.
Therefore, it’s crucial that you get accustomed to promoting your product on different online avenues where your potential customers show up frequently.
Best Tips For Online Product Promotion
Listed below are ten product marketing tips that’ll help you highlight your products at the right place at the right time to render maximum impact on the prospects.
1. Build An Army Of Referrals
Referral marketing is apt for product promotion because it has a direct impact on sales. The statistics reveal that 82 percent of consumers seek referrals from peers before making a purchase.
Therefore, setting up a referral program is recommended wherein you’ll reward both the referrer and the referral.
Consider the Cloudways referral program, for example. Whenever you invite someone to Cloudways hosting platform, you receive a $20 credit if the invitee spends $20 after signing up using your referral link. The invitee is also eligible to receive $15 free hosting credit.
2. Promote On Facebook
Facebook gives you so many options to promote your product. Communicate with your followers via Business Page, Messenger, and Facebook Group.
You can also run paid campaigns to target potential buyers by creating an audience based on demographics, interests, and shopping behavior.
With the introduction of Facebook Shops, it has become easier for small businesses to set up a single online store for both Facebook and Instagram. You can run ads or post content to drive traffic to the store.
Customers have an open communication channel with the store operator via Messenger, Instagram Direct, and WhatsApp.
3. Target Buyers On Pinterest
Did you know that 83 percent of the weekly Pinterest users made a purchase based on brands’ content they saw on Pinterest?
Although not a large social media platform such as Facebook or Instagram, when it’s about conversions, Pinterest stands at par with them. It is a channel that you must include in your product promotion mix.
97 percent of searches on Pinterest are unbranded. This means that the users behind these searches are still in the awareness stage.
You can target and engage with them in this initial stage by either supplementing their knowledge related to the search or directly promoting your product.
4. Sell More With Instagram Shopping
More than a billion people use Instagram to create, share, and interact with other users on the platform every month. Businesses have an option to engage with these users and do some creative product promotion by creating a storefront.
You can also promote your star product on your posts and stories. This will help your users find them using the Search & Explore feature of the platform.
In fact, every month, 130 million users click on shopping posts to learn more about the products. If your post is attractive, then it may attract the right eyeballs and get you the traction you need.
5. Nurture Your Email Subscribers
You can use email marketing to drive sales and promote your products because you’re communicating with the people who’re either existing customers or have consciously subscribed to your newsletter.
If you already have a list of subscribers, you can create an email sequence for product promotion. For example, if you are coming up with a new range of women handbags, you can target subscribers who are women in the 24-50 years age range.
Create an email sequence comprising of messages that are related to the launch details, product features, discounts and offers, and more. During the process, keep an eye on the metrics to analyze the success rate of your campaign.
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6. Set Up An Affiliate Program
Affiliate marketing lets you reach your target audience with the help of associates (affiliate marketers) who are willing to promote your product in exchange for commissions.
It’s an effective promotional model because you’ve to pay a commission only when you make a sale or generate a potential lead.
You can set up an affiliate management and tracking system to manage your associates from a centralized dashboard.
Right from sending emails to tracking performance to releasing payments, you can manage the end-to-end process with the software.
You can also avail services of a third-party entity – such as Commission Junction and ShareASale – that brings advertisers and publishers on the same platform.
7. Invest In Content Marketing
77 percent of marketers say their company has a content marketing strategy. They also say that generating more quality leads is the top priority for them.
It means that the content you create has a direct correlation with targeted traffic as it helps in diversifying your reach and boosting SEO efforts.
Content marketing is an effective approach for product promotion because it lets you target visitors at various stages of the buyers’ journey from awareness to interest.
You can publish blog posts, upload videos, send emails, post on social media, run paid ads, to engage visitors.
Content marketing also ensures alignment of the marketing, sales, and service teams. The marketing team nurtures the lead until it becomes an opportunity for the sales team. Once the prospect turns into a customer, the service team ensures hassle-free onboarding and retention.
8. Spread Your Message Through Press Releases
If you want to gain quick and credible publicity, distributing press releases (PRs) should be on your list. However, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Most of the renowned publishing houses and journalists are bombarded with thousands of PRs every day. You need to adopt an approach to grab their attention or find an alternate way.
Instead of chasing journalists, you can avail PR distribution services that’ll handle everything, right from writing a press release for product promotion to ensuring it gets published on acclaimed publications.
9. Run A Contest
Running contests is one of the best ways to promote your products, whether new or existing ones. It engages your audience, can extend your reach exponentially, and brings in qualified leads.
For example, imagine you recently launched a new range of Bluetooth speakers. To promote this product, you can run a giveaway contest on Instagram wherein you’ll reward three lucky winners with the speakers.
You can ask users to record videos of them dancing on songs that are being played on the speaker, share these as Instagram posts and stories, tag two friends, and use your brand hashtag. You can reward users whose posts or stories receive maximum engagement.
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10. Collaborate With Influencers
Influencer marketing is growing at a breakneck pace. The industry has grown from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $9.7 billion in 2020. The ascent proves that influencer marketing is producing desired results for the marketers. Hence, they’re partnering with influencers for product promotion and brand awareness.
You can identify influencers in your niche with the help of a tool such as BuzzSumo. Instead of mega-influencers who have more than 1 million followers, tie-up with micro-influencers who have less than 500,000 followers.
The latter is perceived as a subject matter expert and has a greater influence on the audience. This is the reason why the demand for micro-influencers has risen by 300 percent in the past 3 years.
11. Explore Gift Guides
One of the most searched items on search engines like Google is gift ideas when it comes to products.
Be it a holiday gift or interesting birthday presents, people like to search for it on the web and gift something that is trendy and appealing.
A great way to promote your product is by getting it listed into such gift guides, especially the ones that rank high on Google.
There are gift guides for every kind of industry, holiday, or even type of person.
Reach out to the guides you like and give them a good reason why your product should be added, and how it could add value to their lists.
If they are convinced, they will add yours to the guide, and in no time you will start seeing an extra traffic landing on your site.
12. Live On Periscope
Even though Periscope is not a very old social media platform, it definitely has a lot of marketing potential.
It is a live streaming platform owned by Twitter, which is already being used by a lot of businesses for promoting their product and boosting sales.
Periscope offers a lot of ways for promotion like giving a good demo of your product, answering questions through its Q&A section, giving your audience a peek into your behind the scenes and how you run things, and so on.
13. Invest In SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is unarguably one of the most important ways of promoting a business or its product.
Unlike the older times, whenever people want to buy something today, their first approach is to look it up on Google.
The majority of traffic that business sites receive is through Google and other search engines, and it’s something you can’t afford to lose out on.
You need to optimize your site for SEO with a great keyword strategy, backlinks, etc. so that it ranks up high on search results when your potential audience is looking for relevant products to buy.
14. Check Out Uncrate
Uncrate is a well-known product curation site with a great following. Its users don’t just surf through products, but also buy the ones they like there.
If you can get your product featured on Uncrate, it could drive significant sales and give your product the much-needed promotion. However, to get it featured you will need it to be cool and unique.
Try giving an edge to your product and make it stand out from the similar products that exist in the market.
Contact the company or send your sample and tell them how it is unique and why it should be a part of their site.
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15. Try Blogger Outreach
The difficult part of every new business is building an audience that could eventually convert and boost your sales.
It is a great idea to start a blog but it could take some time to tap a large number of users, and you will have to find a way to make sure that you tap such readers through other ways in the meanwhile.
Blogger outreach is one such way where you can drive traffic through someone else’s audience and also build prestige around your brand and product.
Ask authoritative and influential bloggers to review or feature your product, and it could drive a lot of traffic and even boost sales.
16. Invest In Reddit Ads
Reddit Ads isn’t the most common thing amongst businesses but can be really effective if used properly.
For a fact, the least popular advertising networks can sometimes be the most fruitful ones due to low costs and lesser competition.
Create a sponsored post in subreddits that are related to your business, and use it to talk about your product and even offer discounts if you want.
The trick is to blend in your product amongst the other posts in the subreddit, and if you do it well, it could really help in promoting your product to a huge audience.
17. Show Off Your Product On Product Hunt
Product Hunt is a great platform where people love to find new products in the market.
Besides software and apps, even physical products feature on their site, and you should try getting your product featured too.
Usually, stores selling either a single or small set of novel items make it to the Product Hunt feature.
These are mostly customizable products, aesthetically unique products, or fresh takes on an already existing product category.
18. Pop It Up At Pop-Up Shops
Having an online business would mean that you are completely dependent on your online store for promoting your product and business.
However, there is a way for you to avail yourself of the benefits of a retail store without actually opening one.
There might be an unused space that would be happy for you to set up a shop for like a week or just a weekend perhaps.
With the help of this pop-up shop, you might be able to tap into a completely new set of audience that wasn’t even aware of your product.
Once they buy from you and become your customers, you can make sure that they remain so and even keep buying from you online.
It could also help you in featuring on local media, sell off old inventory, taking advantage of seasonal shopping, and even getting to know and interacting with your customers in person.
You can find such pop-up shop venues from realtors directly or via online databases like Pop Up Shops, Storefront, Bulletin, and more.
19. Give Special Introductory Offer
Instead of just announcing your new product, you can introduce it as a part of a special introductory offer. This offer can take many forms, including:
- Discounted pricing
- Joint promotion with complementary business
- Coupon or voucher with purchase
- Buy one get one free offer
- Double points for your loyalty program
- Free gift for every referral
Whatever promotion you use, it won’t last forever.
You will have to create a sense of excitement and urgency among your audience so that the people who like it quickly convert into customers.
20. Build A Google My Business Listing
Google My Business is a great platform for promoting new products, and if you don’t have an account on it yet, you should create one first.
Featuring your business on Google My Business gives it a professional appeal and an authentic image.
The platform allows you to post from your account, and you can use this feature to post about and promote your product as well.
Its posts expire in seven days, so you can also club the post along with an introductory offer with limited time so that potential customers quickly take action after learning about it.
Besides, you can even use its Q&A section to post some FAQs about your new product and educate your audience about it even better.
In Conclusion
Implement these strategies to diversify your market reach and bring your product into the limelight. In addition to these, you can also focus on producing user-generated content to boost sales real quick.
Ask customers to rate and review your business on Google, social media, eCommerce sites, and other places. Besides helping in product promotion, this strategy will also build your online reputation.