How to sell digital products successfully

How to go about creating a digital product in the first place?

The critical question is: What will you sell? Hopefully, the list of digital products we presented above gave you some inspiration, but you’ll need to dive deeper. Consider the following questions:

• What am I passionate about?
• What abilities do I possess?
• Is there anything I can do to solve existing problems?
• How can I put my skills to work for potential clients?

It’s great to have a brilliant concept, but you’ll need to go through brainstorming, research, and a validation process if you want it to sell. Here’s how to make the best digital material for selling:

1. Brainstorm

To begin, generate ideas and write them all down. Don’t be too harsh on yourself — you don’t have to come up with the best digital items on the first try. Bad ideas can lead to brilliant ideas and vice versa. Overthinking is a big no-no when it comes to brainstorming.

If you’re simply in it for the short term to cash in on a trend or earn a quick profit, a super quick brainstorming session may suffice, but your product probably won’t succeed for long.

2. Research

Market research can appear to be a daunting subject. It doesn’t have to be that way. It all boils down to taking the time to learn about existing items in your sector, as well as who your clients will be and what they’ll anticipate from your offering.

For example, if you’re an author, think about what your readers expect in terms of the substance of your book. How you present it and the price you charge are also important factors to consider. Any product is in the same boat.

Enter your concept into your preferred search engine. Consider keyword data, forums, and social media sites, as well as blog entries and existing items. Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook Groups, in particular, can be great places to find out what’s going on in a given specialty.

There’s a good possibility you’ll find something similar to what you’re looking to sell. Don’t be discouraged! Almost every idea boils down to execution; all you have to do now is figure out how to stand apart.

3. Validate

Before you devote too much work to your digital product idea, you should validate it and ensure it’s viable. The last thing you want to do is put a lot of time and money into a new endeavor without knowing if it will succeed.

While figuring out how to sell digital products, there are a few techniques to validate your idea:

• Keyword research: To determine how many people are searching for your topics, use a keyword tool. It will give you a sense of the size of each opportunity.

• Google Trends: Look for themes that are becoming more popular. Those opportunities will definitely continue to expand.

• Feedback: Make direct contact with your customers via email or social media. A poll or survey is a terrific approach to get feedback.

• Work your way up: Experimenting with a lesser version of a concept with space for expansion is sometimes the quickest approach to validate an idea. The goal is to put something out as soon as possible so that you can test your idea and grow from there.

4. Get to know your target audience

By identifying a specific “person” from these faceless audiences, you’ll be able to drive significantly better marketing results and more sales. Creating a customer persona (aka buyer persona) lets you do this. Your ideal customer persona holds all the information you need about your potential customers and helps you get your branding and messaging just right. It has details about their age, gender, what they do for a living, what they do in their free time, their goals, and more.

Below is an example of a customer persona for a flower delivery business. When you know your ideal customers this well, you can better tie your products to their needs and goals. You can also discover additional digital product ideas that might be relevant to them.

To create your customer persona, you can use the same format and write what you know about the people who would buy from you. Research is essential to gain a better understanding of your market and to learn more about your ideal customers. But how do you go about this research? Easy peasy. Just follow the steps from this persona creation tutorial.

Let’s say you have a nutrition-based business and one of your products is a digital meal planner. Through research, you find that your buyer persona is a 30-something American woman who’s interested in eating healthy and cooking her own food with fresh ingredients. She’s working a full-time job with an active lifestyle, so she prefers recipes of medium difficulty and that don’t require more than half-an-hour to make. She also likes food that both tastes and looks good. 

Now, ask yourself where you’re most likely to find people who match this profile. The answer is most likely to be Pinterest, which is a very visual platform, perfect for getting inspiration. Therefore, you’ll need a good presence on the platform to be able to market your meal planner to the target audience. 

Also, considering the traits of the buyer persona, make sure to customize the product’s landing page accordingly and pay attention to the product’s design as well. 

Just to give another quick example, if you’re a business that sells IT/SaaS stock imagery and you discover (among other things) that your ideal buyers are businesses that are heavily invested in content, you’ll probably have to use content (such as a blog) to bring them to your offering. 

You might also want to build visibility on their popular hangouts — by guest postings on popular blogs, for instance. Or you might decide that while you sell IT/SaaS stock imagery, you want to target the high-end web graphic design agencies or the most experienced designers they hire.

Here’s more on what you can do after you’ve segmented your market and identified your ideal persona.

5. Carve your niche

The market for digital products — just like the market for physical goods — has many segments. And your product can’t be a good fit for each.

For context, let’s say you create digital planners. Now, list the many different kinds of digital planners there can be. Here are a few examples:

• A minimalist digital planner
• A feminine digital planner
• A business digital planner
• OneNote digital planner
• A digital planner for iPads
• A planner for a Mac
• A digital planner for Windows

And we’re only getting started. 

Your digital planner may be right for only one or a select few of these segments, not for all.

After you have clarity, your goal is to become the go-to digital store for your type of digital planner. This is also your UVP (unique value proposition) — your single most important marketing message that speaks directly to your target customers.

Entrepreneur and author Steve Blank gives this helpful template for writing a UVP: To put all this in perspective, look at this UVP for a digital planner:

Notice this digital planner seller’s UVP:

“A must have for the online business owner.”

As you can see, this seller’s UVP is personalized for its customer persona (business owners). 

Also, the copy reinforces the many ways the product taps into its target customer’s desires around wanting to stay productive (even on the go) or making the most of their time. Because the market for the most profitable digital products is very competitive, you need to think about branding from the very start. See how your product compares to and differs from your competitors’ digital products, then translate that into a clear UVP and brand messaging. 

Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to go about doing this.