How To Promote a Product: 15 Highly Effective Ways & Expert Recommendations

Imagine that a person gets a revolutionary product idea. They invest their time, money and effort to turn this product into a reality. Yep, they’re ready to change the world!

And then they fail to get any sales.

What went wrong?

This person didn’t know how to promote their product. Their business lacked a promotional strategy.

Not having a strong promotional and marketing strategy is what dooms many products before the world gets to know about them. According to Statista, ecommerce sales are predicted to hit 5.7 trillion by the end of 2022. So, if you own an ecommerce business, it’s high time that you start brainstorming multiple ways to promote a product.

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Why Is Product Promotion Important?

Product promotion contributes to brand awareness, recall, credibility, and sales. A product without a promotion strategy is like a car without wheels – it’s not going to move. When a business selling similar products to yours is in the market, having a promotional strategy is what will help in differentiating and selling your products.

Promoting your product also lets you collect important customer insights and analyze them to craft better strategies in the future. Through these insights you can get information regarding market trends, customer inclinations and their consumption patterns.

The biggest advantage of promoting your product in today’s digital world is the use of online platforms. Online platforms allow you to be more visible on the internet, ultimately resulting in better visibility in front of your target market.

While it’s important to know why product promotion is important, it is also very crucial to know how to promote a product and being consistent enough to do it successfully.

15 Effective Ways To Promote a Product

Product marketing varies from product to product and it’s hard to generalize a single method that will ensure great results across the board. A deep knowledge of your own product, your target audience, and the marketplace are necessary to determine the right methods for your business.

The 15 ways that we’re discussing below will be mainly focused on how to promote a product for ecommerce businesses. And we will also feature some tried and tested promotion techniques and campaigns shared by different online business owners.

1. Use Entry Pop-ups to Grab Attention

The best time to grab your visitors’ attention is as soon as they open your website. That’s what entry pop-ups allow you to do. With an entry pop-up you can promote a new product and increase its visibility right from the start.

You can highlight a new product or use opt-in forms for subscriptions. Using entry pop-ups to announce special discounts is also quite effective. When visitors see a discount as soon as they enter your website, they are likelier to make use of it.

Source: GlassesUSA

For example, as soon as you enter the GlassesUSA website, you are prompted with this one-time 65% off offer for your first purchase.

Even if your visitor doesn’t take action on an entry pop-up, it establishes product recall, making entry pop-ups worth it in your promotional strategy.

2. Retarget Visitors With Exit Offers

Retargeting customers after they’ve explored your website and right when they’re about to leave is also one of the best ways to promote a product or an offer. Using an on-site exit offer to retarget a customer who didn’t make a purchase can lead to last-minute changes in purchase decisions and impulse buying.

Unlike with entry pop-ups, visitors will only be prompted with exit offers if they’re leaving the website without any purchases. Exit offers vary from business to business. You can present visitors with time-bound discount coupons and hosting promo codes, email subscription forms, and even free proposals and trials.

For example, in the image below, PixelScrapper is offering a free kit as an exit offer to give its visitors one last chance to try their services out before they leave the website, if they sign up for the newsletter.

Source: PixelScrapper

3. Offer Answers on Q&A Sites

There are tons of forums and Q&A websites on the internet where people can ask questions and get answers from other community members. The most prominent Q&A platforms are Quora and Reddit.

From questions on how to advertise a product to how to start an online business, you can ask and answer all types of questions on these platforms. Many people use these platforms to build their online identity in their respective niches and to subtly promote their products and businesses as well.

As an ecommerce store owner, you can also offer reliable answers in the form of solutions to the people asking. Once you’ve established a reputation for being trustworthy, you can also do soft promotions of your product within your answers. If done right, you can get a lot of traffic for your website which ultimately results in more sales.

Source: Quora

As shown above, the response provides a detailed and helpful answer to the question relating to the best ecommerce websites. But it is clear that among some top ecommerce website names, the respondent also subtly mentions another ecommerce website that she wants to promote.

4. Write Guest Posts

Apart from having your own website’s blog, you can also reach out to other businesses and bloggers and partner with them for guest posts. Guest blogging is one of the best ways to promote a product to new audiences.

If your business is new, you can create partnerships with bloggers relevant to your niche who already have an established reader base. This way, when you contribute to their blog, you will be writing to an audience interested in what you’re offering. You can also use AI writing tools to help you create high-quality content for your guest post fast and in bulk.

Source: Cloudways Blog

To promote a new product through guest blogging, choose blogs which have a sound reputation in the industry, high engagements and relevant audiences. Write on topics that are unique and offer value to the readers, rather than pushing your product right away. The key to do promotions through guest posts is by being subtle.

5. Introductory Offers

Using introductory offers is also a great way to promote a new product or service. Instead of announcing your product, you can promote it in the market as part of an introductory deal. These introductory offers can be put forward in several different ways like:

• Low-price bundles and packages
• Price discounts
• Free vouchers and coupons with product purchase
• Buy one get one free offers
• Free gifts on referrals
• Joint promotions with other brands

Source: McDonald’s 

These offers are a great way to penetrate the market and get people to engage with your product. What’s important here is to make sure that you communicate the fact that these promotions won’t last forever and create an urgency to buy.

6. GMB Promotions

Google My Business serves as a great online platform to promote your product. You can use Google My Business to create different types of posts provided you have a GMB account. The two main post types are What’s New and Offers.

If your product is new, it will best fit in the What’s New posts section. You can upload pictures of your product for people to see and click on. However, keep in mind that posts expire after 7 days so you’ll have to repost once they’re gone.

If you’re offering time-bound discounts on your products then you can use the Offers posts section to promote your product. There, you will upload pictures along with the prices and details so that people can look at your product and buy it.

Source: GoogleMyBusiness

In both cases, make sure that you upload good pictures along with a convincing CTA so your promotion works effectively.

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7. Email Marketing

Did you know that global email users are expected to grow to 4.48 billion by 2024? Email marketing offers a great way to get your product information across and also generate a list of subscribers that you can send emails out to, in the future.

Most new ecommerce and small businesses are investing in advanced email hosting services to keep their subscribers on the edge about what’s coming next. You can send out weekly newsletter created using email newsletter software, promotional offers, product launch emails, announcements and a lot of other informative content to your customers using emails.

Wondering how to promote a new product through emails? Here are a few tips:

• Create campaign segments for your emails
• Keep your focus on the product’s benefits rather than the features
• Use the header to highlight your offer
• Put at least one CTA in your email
• Keep updating your email list

Source: Template.net

8. Practice Cross-selling and Upselling

Cross-selling and upselling are effective, subtle ways to increase ecommerce sales and the overall value of your orders.

• Cross-selling is when you ask customers to buy a complementary item with their primary purchase. You can cross-sell on your ecommerce website by showing related items on the cart or check-out pages. Cross-selling works exactly like impulse buying at a POS terminal and it can increase sales by up to 20%.
• Upselling drives a customer to buy a similar product that is more higher end. There are various upselling techniques that you can use. The most effective one is to upsell on your product pages before the customer makes a buying decision.

The key to successful cross-selling and upselling is to understand your audience and know what they want. Once you know their needs, you can then offer them the right products and upgrades.

9. Use Social Media Marketing

When it comes to the question of how to market a product online, social media marketing is the best answer. The social media marketing spectrum consists of popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and many more.

Source: Ipsy

Did you know that Facebook alone has around 8 million active advertisers? Now imagine the immense, collective reach of these social media platforms.

Social media marketing is the best way to promote a new product or service without any costs. Here are some great ways to use social channels for product promotions:

• Creating a brand page
• Announcing new products, offers and discounts
• Getting feedback from customers
• Answering customer queries
• Uploading pictorial and video tutorials of your product
• Linking landing pages and blog posts

Most social media platforms now offer a space where people can buy and sell as well. Facebook for example, has the Facebook Marketplace where users can put up their products for sale to local and global audiences. Similarly, Instagram Shop features products along with their price tags which you can buy directly from the brand’s page and checkout.

Source: HTSDecor

If social media marketing is done right, your pages will have a loyal customer following and people will also share your content on their profiles. This will lead to higher user generated content which itself is an amazing promotion technique.

10. Incorporate Influencer Marketing

Thinking about how to market a new product? Try out influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is a relatively new concept in the product promotion world but one that is growing fast. In influencer marketing, you pick out influencers in your niche like vloggers and Instagrammers, and ask them to talk about your product.

Through influencer marketing you can spread your product’s word of mouth to relevant audiences very easily. You can get them to generate a hashtag to promote your product as well. This will also put your product on trending if enough people use it in their posts and shares.

Here are some ways through which influencers can help with your product promotion:

• Product unboxing videos
• Product experience videos
• Online contests and giveaways
• Promo codes

Make sure to pick the right influencers who have the most relevant audiences and decent number of followers on Instagram, TikTok or any other platform. For example, Vessi, a brand famous for its stylish waterproof sneakers, partnered with TikTok influencer Kris Collins, who has a following of more than 25 million people, on the platform.

Source: TikTok

11. Introduce a Loyalty Program

When it comes to brand relationships, 71% consumers believe that loyalty programs form a very meaningful part of them. Loyalty programs offer special benefits to subscribers and they can be free or paid. For most paid loyalty programs, you have to pay a membership fee to unlock several discounts and exclusive offers for you.

Unpaid loyalty programs work with points. So for every purchase made on your website, you will earn points. Loyalty program users can save these points until they have enough to buy something valuable.

Source: Shopify Blog

Loyalty programs are an effective way to promote your ecommerce business and products because they offer an incentive for your customers to return to your online store.

12. SMS Signup Coupons

If you had asked somebody about how to promote a product a few years ago, SMS marketing would’ve been one of the top ways. Although old, SMS marketing is still a good way to send out news about your products to your customers. When a customer visits your website, you can use a pop-up asking them to sign up for SMS alerts and offer them a 10% discount on their first order.

Source: TextRequest

With this technique you will be able to get their numbers for future promotions, while providing them an incentive to make a purchase using the discount they got.

13. Write a Blog

Blogs offer an absolutely free way to promote products by writing about them. With the right keywords, you can rank in the top Google searches and get a lot of traffic on your blog.

By writing a blog for your product, you get into the details of its features, benefits and technicalities. You can also use the blog to link your product’s landing page, and subtly place CTAs all over the article to direct traffic to your product pages.

High quality images are a core aspect of product writing. Utilize product retouching services so your product images look more appealing.

14. Use Amazon Editorial Recommendations

If you’re a seller on Amazon who’s wondering how to promote a new product on the platform, don’t miss out on Amazon Editorial Recommendations. Amazon Editorial Recommendations is a section on your search results page that shows product-related articles written by third-party influencers and bloggers.

With this method, you can route shoppers to your products by initially helping them with their research and then providing them detailed reviews of those products by third-party influencers.

Source: Amazon

However, this technique can only be used by established sellers to boost their sales even further. There’s a minimum criteria set by Amazon for sellers to be eligible for Editorial Recommendations, which includes the following terms:

• Minimum 100 reviews with at least a 4-star rating
• $30,000 monthly sales worth
• Should be within the top 20% of Best Seller Ranking in its respective category
• Its listings shouldn’t have any medical claims
• Shouldn’t be related to drugs, sex or religion
• Has good amount of inventory in stock

15. Host a Virtual Event

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual events have become increasingly popular. They’re a great way to gather people from your industry in one spot and talk about their products.

You can use the platform of a virtual event to promote a new product or service in front of relevant audiences from your industry. Hosting a virtual event on your page will also bring in a lot more traffic from other businesses to your page which will ultimately result in higher reach and engagement.

Here are a few ways to host a virtual event:

• Facebook Live sessions
• Live Q&A regarding the product
• Bringing in industry experts and influencers to discuss your product
• Hosting a live webinar

Product Promotion Ways Used By Experts & Their Results

In this section we will learn how to market a product effectively by looking at examples from industry experts that we spoke to. These methods are tried, tested and result-driven and they’ll surely help you in promoting your products more effectively.

1. Buy One Save On Another Campaigns and Reward Points

 Miranda Yan – Founder at VINPIT

“As a SaaS company, we have tried many product promotion campaigns, but two of them have shown great sales & enhanced customer base. 

1. Buy one save on another:

The Buy one save on another campaign was all about encouraging the customers to keep engaging them with us for their purchases. With the module, we offered certain discounts on the next shopping based on the current purchase. Thus, customers were getting benefited by having a discount coupon for their next shopping which was very transparent as it can be clubbed with other shopping vouchers & was also applicable with all products of different categories. 

The discount coupon works on the final bill of that cart so it was easier for the customer to anticipate their bills which allowed us to gain a sense of trust in them. Also, the result was evident with the sales growth of 8% overall for the next month.

2. Reward points:

Reward points were something that generally credit card or debit card companies offer but we tweaked it according to our need into our next campaign. We offered the customer to gain some percentage of rewards points on the total bill amount. We made it flat rather than offering different points on different products which will make it messy for the customers. 

We also allowed these points either to use for shopping or can be redeemed as cash-back or any form of other vendors vouchers as well. Now, this gets us benefited from the customer base with the sale growth of 1.5%  as well from the other vendor partners while having their vouchers on our platform.”

November:

December:

January:

These 3 screenshots show our revenue growth from Nov 1, 2020 to Jan 31, 2021, when we started trying to implement the “buy one save on another” strategy. The average growth rate is around 8%.

This screenshot shows later when we implemented the reward point policies.

Compounded with the growth rate of around 8%, the average revenue growth rate is around 9.7%, with the reward point accounting for around 1.5%-1.7%.

2. Run Dynamic Remarketing Ads

Rohan Kadam – BikingKnowHow

“I implemented these steps on my client’s website landing pages and I used paid search to drive traffic. It worked wonders for me.

• Using countdown clock on my landing page (caused an 11% increase in conversions)

• Using exit pop-ups. (I used “Hello Bar” to do this)

• Running dynamic remarketing ads (it got me a 23% increase in conversions)

Running dynamic remarketing ads has been most effective for me because firstly, setting them up is very easy on the Google Ads platform. Secondly, through dynamic remarketing ads, I could target my audience (shopping cart abandoners) with highly personalized messages (ads had images of products that customers added into their shopping cart but did not end up buying).”

3. Dedicated Facebook Group Community

Jonathan Saeidian – Founder and CEO of Brenton Way

“Just recently we have helped an ecommerce office brand increase social engagement and website traffic through organic community building. The strategy was to identify the target market, which in this case is the millennial to Gen-Z demographic. We then crafted content and built relationships with influencers that resonate with this demographic to increase brand recognition.

As a result of this campaign, the brand gained a 450% increase in social engagement and a 15% increase in website traffic.”

4. Holiday Seasons, Vlogger Connections and Video Channels

Chelsea Cohen – Co-Founder of SoStocked

“A great way to promote eCommerce products is to take advantage of holiday seasons. You can start early before the holidays start and create a holiday catalog that showcases your best products for the season. This lets people see products that they’re searching for as well as find more products.

 Another great way to promote a product is to connect with a blogger or vlogger. You can send them a free product and see if they’d be willing to promote your product on their blogs or vlogs. This is sort of like getting a professional review and helps you reach larger audiences.

 An ecommerce business can start its own blog or video channel which helps build a larger customer base. SEO practices can be taken to help your content reach more people. If more people find your site through content, then you’ll have a higher chance of people checking out your products.”

Conclusion

Having a solid plan on how to promote a product will help you determine how well your product sells when it’s launched. You can use one or any combination of the ways mentioned above to promote your product, and get sales. You can also use artificial intelligence tools for ecommerce to promote your product in a more personalized manner.