How to Effectively Market Your Digital Products

If you are a business owner at the helm of your company’s branding and marketing strategies, you may feel as if your digital products (like your app, software products, and company website) are sending you full tilt into uncharted business territory.

The Internet and its little ones, digital branding and digital marketing, have made the traditional marketing methods you’re used to obsolete. If you run a remote business, it’s all the truer for you.

While consumers will never grow out of the need for brand promise and product value, what has changed is at what point in the sales and marketing process your customer is open to influence about your company, and at what points (and with which digital products) you can interact with them to close the deal.

As you know, the better share of marketing resources used to lie in brand awareness and marketing at the front end of the transaction. After the purchase was over, the relationship building was complete. But you can throw that all away now.

That old “sales funnel” your colleagues and competitors talk about? It’s now obsolete. Today, your marked audience is using your web and app products to consider and evaluate your brand; but it doesn’t end there.

They’ll use them to buy things from you, enjoy them, advocate for them, and bond with them – so really, your branding and marketing never ceases. It’s a 24/7 process – and it absolutely must be done in the modern marketing era in order to compete.

Land ho! Marketing in the digital age is a brand new game, but we’ll tell you how to approach it.

In theory, no matter if you have a single digital product, or 10 of them, a brand and subsequent brand strategy is an extremely important element to your entire business. If you think about what branding actually is, it’s first, a value proposition that’s been established, combined with a set of customer promises, and finished with an expectation of overall experience based on your company’s messaging, marketing, communication, and service through your digital products. It’s what makes your company stand out from everyone else.

Failing to deliver on these promises (what the brand stands for) can lead to your brand’s ultimate demise.

For some remote companies, deciding on color scheme and a logo are as far as marketing and branding goes. Kudos, because the logo is the visual marker for the brand. It’s commendable but there’s much, much more to do to really succeed.

To make your company visible – and to have your digital products stand out from the competition, take the following steps:

First, Know Your Customers – Really, Really Well

Your target audience and the digital footprint they leave behind is extremely important to the genesis and ongoing success of your brand. Utilizing a multi-channel approach (on Google, through email, and social media, for example), your target demographic will search for certain keywords, on certain devices, and at certain times.

If you can capture this information through your website, app, and other digital assets, it can help you understand your target audience and how you should market your brand’s value proposition better in the future.

Knowing your customers and their purchasing and interest behavior is also very helpful for the improvement of your digital products. Receiving key data on what your customers think about your digital products, and the competition they engage with, can help you make a better product that clearly differentiates itself from the competition.

Create a Seamless, Engaging User Experience to Cut through the Competition

With that said, another key factor is how your brand identity stands out in a crowded, multi-platform experience. GE is a great example of a company that needed to reinvent itself – and it did so through digital, multi-channel marketing. By posting GE “Masterclasses” on YouTube, bright articles and white papers on its website (complete with fun GIFs), GE is able to give its users an experience they won’t find anywhere else.

To be like GE, Work on creating a smooth, logical user experience (UX) throughout your entire digital products suite (web apps, mobile app icons, tab favicons, etc.). Facebook is a great example of success in UX – their blue F, and their “thumps up” icon work great alongside or in isolation of the actual Facebook logo – perfect for a multi-platform approach.

Focus on Your Messaging – and Put it to Use in Your Marketing

Messaging is a key part of your branding process. Your company must develop key messages to support your product’s value – and you must enable customers to “get” that value in just a few seconds by looking at your app or website home page.

Digital media, in its consumption, various formats, and interactivity, has given digital brands exciting opportunities to show, sell, and deliver their products online. Features like video content, sharing content via social media, and app or web demos can allow you to show off your products and/or services like never before.

Manchester City’s marketing and branding team have done a great job at creating flashy, intriguing, and effective messaging on their premier league website, social media platforms, and email newsletters. It’s clear to the fans that they’re number one to Man City; by using social channels to keep fans informed beyond the first team, including information about youth teams and the women’s side, and recently unleashing a #CITYMOSAIC social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter, they’re signifying through their messaging, 365 days a year, that their fan makeup is large, diverse, and at the very heart of their organization.

This sounds great – but what kind of budget do I need to brand effectively?

Even if you sell your products across the United States or the globe, you can market and brand yourself effectively if you follow the steps above. By spending your hard earned marketing budget on the right target audience, the effective use of messaging, and well-positioned, flawless and harmonious digital products, you can market to your niche audience for a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods.

Have questions? Let us know! For more information on how to succeed in a remote environment, read our NoBorder post on Communicating Effectively with your Remote Team and Clients.