Would you like to improve your product promotion so you can win more sales? Creating a stellar product is just the first step. If you don’t also know how to market a product, your business will be dead in the water.
Here at OptinMonster, we know how complicated product promotion can be. But we’ve also achieved huge success. Our lead generation software is used on over 1.2 million websites, including huge names like Patreon, Harvard University, and Tripadvisor.
We’ve created a multi-channel marketing strategy that builds brand awareness and successfully sells our product. And we’ve continuously optimized our strategy in the 10 years since we launched our software.
In this article, I’m sharing what we’ve learned with you. These 14 product promotional strategies will help you market your product so you can reach your target audience and increase your revenue.
- What Is Product Promotion?
- How to Promote a Product: 14 Top Strategies
- 1. Promote Your Products With Email Marketing
- 2. Use Your Website to Grow Your Email List
- 3. Market Your Products on Social Media
- 4. Create Product Landing Pages
- 5. Start a Podcast
- 6. Host Live Webinars and Demos
- 7. Start Blogging for SEO
- 8. Create Video Content
- 9. Write Guest Blogs or Be a Guest on Podcasts
- 10. Run Paid Ads
- 11. Host a Contest
- 12. Offer Sales, Promotions, or Discounts
- 13. Create an Affiliate Program
- 14. Start a Referral Program
What Is Product Promotion?
Product promotion is an essential marketing strategy focused on informing potential customers about your product and persuading them to buy. Its primary goals are to:
- Increase awareness of your product
- Generate high-quality leads
- Present a strong value proposition
- Drive sales of your product
Effective product promotion showcases the benefits and features of your product to the right audience at the right time. It generates and nurtures leads by showing that the value of your product is greater than its price.
To succeed, you need to craft a message that resonates with consumers and highlights the unique benefits and solutions offered by your product. Then, you need to use multiple marketing channels to reach the right people with that message.
Whether you’re marketing a new product or revitalizing an existing one, a comprehensive promotion strategy helps you set the stage for sustained success.
How to Promote a Product: 14 Top Strategies
Next, we’re going to explore some of the best ways to promote a product. Our focus is on digital marketing strategies, as these apply to practically any product and industry.
Depending on the nature of your business, you may also consider in-person product promotion strategies such as trade shows, hands-on demo events, and free sample giveaways.
Let’s dig into our list of tips for how to market a product.
1. Promote Your Products With Email Marketing
We’re going to start with the digital marketing strategy that boasts the highest ROI: email marketing. Email marketing data from Litmus shows an average ROI of 3600%. That means for every $1 you spend on promotional emails, you could make $36 in revenue.
According to 2023 consumer data by Marigold, 52% of consumers had made a purchase directly from an email in the previous last year. That was an increase of 4% since their 2022 report.
Email marketing is so effective because you can send highly targeted messages to your leads.
Plus, your email list is full of people who have already shown interest in your business. After all, they gave you their contact information for a reason.
Wondering how to promote a product through email? We have several resources for that:
- Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing
- How to Create an Email Campaign (Step-by-Step Guide + Examples)
- Mastering Promotional Emails: Best Practices, Examples, & Templates
Through your marketing emails, you can introduce new products, build trust with potential customers, and offer coupons and special deals.
Here’s an example of a beautifully designed product announcement email from The Company Store:
With marketing emails like this one, you can promote your products directly to your target audience.
2. Use Your Website to Grow Your Email List
But what about getting more email subscribers in the first place? You can use your website to grow your email list with highly-engaged subscribers.
Email marketing is so successful because your subscribers specifically chose to receive messages from you.
Similarly, website visitors are primed to become engaged email subscribers. After all, they’ve just taken the time to visit your site and learn about your brand.
When it comes to growing your email list using your website, there’s simply no better tool than OptinMonster:
With OptinMonster, you can collect email addresses using lightbox popups, floating bars, inline forms, and other onsite marketing campaigns. You can use 100+ templates and easy drag-and-drop builder to have an email signup campaign up and running on your site in just a few minutes.
You can create an incentive to sign up by offering a lead magnet such as a coupon code or free ebook.
OptinMonster’s robust triggering and targeting rules let you offer the right offer to the right people at the right time. These rules include:
- Exit-Intent® Technology: Capture your visitor’s email address before they leave your site.
- Page-Level Targeting: Show visitors special offers based on the content they’re looking at on your site.
- Timed Display and Scroll Triggers: Only show your popup when a user has spent a certain amount of time on your site or has scrolled through a specific percentage of a page’s content.
You can even combine a discount offer with a countdown timer for increased urgency:
Collecting email addresses isn’t the only way you can use OptinMonster for product promotion. You can also create popups to suggest products based on the page they’re visiting:
These are just 2 examples of OptinMonster campaigns that can transform your product promotional strategy. Want to get started? Try OptinMonster with our 14-day money-back guarantee.
3. Market Your Products on Social Media
You probably already know that social media is vital to product marketing. But we’re not just talking about logging into Facebook, writing a 30-word post about your product, and blindly praying that you get some new leads.
If you want to learn how to promote your product on social media, you need a strategy that involves a few different platforms. Popular platforms include:
- X (formerly Twitter)
- TikTok
You’ll want to figure out which social media platforms are right for your business, fine-tune the best time to post for each platform, and engage with your audience consistently.
Experiment with different platforms and post types. For instance, Blenko Glass Company took a fun approach when they promoted limited-edition decanter on Instagram and Facebook. They broadcast a live video of their glassmakers creating one of the decanters in their hot shop:
This video shows off the care and skill that goes into each item and builds a sense of community with followers.
As you develop your social media strategy, you may find that some platforms are more suited for different promotions. For example, you might have great success promoting an online course on your Facebook page but find that your product launches gain more traction on Instagram.
Research, test, and tweak. That’s the only way to fine-tune your social media marketing plan.
Need some help with your social media strategy? We’ve curated a list of 33 tools to level up your social media game.
4. Create Product Landing Pages
Let’s say you’re already using email marketing and social media to promote your products. Where do you send those leads?
If you’re an eCommerce retailer, then you’ll likely simply send those leads to your existing product pages. But what if your product is more specialized?
That’s where a landing page come in.
A landing page is a stand-alone webpage that has a single call-to-action (CTA). In other words, it has just 1 goal. Common landing page goals include persuading visitors to:
- Subscribe to your email list
- Register for an event
And of course:
- Buy your product
When the landing page’s CTA is to purchase a product, then it’s often called a sales page.
Learn More: How to Win More Customers With Your Sales Page (Tips & Examples)
Sales pages are especially helpful for online courses, software, high-ticket products, or niche products.
Here’s our own sales page that we use for OptinMonster University:
OptinMonster University is a comprehensive set of digital marketing courses that our customers get for free when they buy our software. The goal of this sales page is to show the benefits of these courses and to encourage visitors to purchase OptinMonster.
As visitors scroll through the page, they’ll see more details about the classes, along with FAQs, customer testimonials, and more.
You don’t have to have a ton of web design skills to create an effective sales page.
If you use WordPress, we recommend using SeedProd, the best drag-and-drop page builder for WordPress.
SeedProd offers over 200 professionally designed templates, so you can quickly build a beautiful sales page. It also comes with pre-made landing page blocks like testimonials, star ratings, videos, and more. SeedProd even has WooCommerce blocks like add to cart, shopping cart, checkout, and products grid to help you generate sales.
You can start with a beautiful template and add the blocks that you need to sell your product.
Once you’ve designed a sales page, you can link to it in your promotional emails and social media posts. That way, you’ll be driving traffic directly to your strongest sales pitch.
5. Start a Podcast
Podcasts are excellent for building an audience and expanding your voice within your niche. But they’re also one of the best ways to promote a product.
If you’ve already started a podcast, then you’ve got an audience ready to go. Just continue to provide excellent content as usual, but promote your product at the beginning and end of each episode.
But remember, don’t make your promotions too long. When people hear something that feels too salesy in a podcast, they’re quick to hit the skip ahead button. Even your loyal customers.
Don’t know much about podcasts? Don’t worry. Here’s a tutorial on how to get started in the world of podcasting.
6. Host Live Webinars and Demos
Webinars and product demos are powerful ways to connect directly with your most highly-interested potential customers.
At OptinMonster, we host a weekly live webinar that shows how businesses can use our software to grow their email list.
Here’s our webinar landing page where website visitors can register:
There are several ways to approach these virtual events:
- You can offer webinars on general topics within your niche, and include a sales pitch for your product.
- Your webinars can be exclusively about your product, focusing on the live demo aspect.
- You can let potential customers sign up for one-on-one live demos
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every demo event. You can simply write 1 webinar/demo script and do a weekly live event. Of course, you should also be prepared to answer any questions from attendees.
Webinars are valuable tools for promoting your product, and, if done well, they can lead to instant sales.
Make sure you check out our guide on how to sell anything with webinars.
Ready to build your webinar but not sure which software to use? Read this review of 9 of the best webinar software options for WordPress users.
7. Start Blogging for SEO
Blogs are a staple of content marketing. They can be vital for getting your website seen in search results.
That’s likely how you’re reading this post in the first place. Our OptinMonster blog has hundreds of posts like this one. We’ve optimized them to rank on search engines, and we use our blogs to build trust and authority with potential customers. And of course, to directly promote our software.
If you want to learn how to start a blog, you’ll need to also explore search engine optimization (SEO) so your posts will be seen. For that, you’ll need our ultimate beginner’s guide to SEO.
Not only are blogs great for promoting your business, but they’re also awesome for promoting a particular product or service. That’s because you can go in-depth into your buyer persona‘s pain points and discuss how your product is the perfect solution.
8. Create Video Content
Video is an incredibly valuable asset to product promotions. Video marketing statistics consistently support this medium’s popularity. And it makes sense because videos are engaging in so many ways.
Videos are informative, visually appealing, often entertaining, and more digestible than text-based content. You can create videos for your own YouTube channel or upload videos to your existing social media channels.
OptinMonster uses our YouTube channel to connect with and educate our audience:
Here’s an example of one of our instructional videos, showing how easy it is to add social media buttons to your OptinMonster campaign:
You can create videos directly related to your product’s features or videos about more general topics in your niche. The key is to make sure your content is helpful, builds trust, and promotes your products.
Want to learn how to build a following on YouTube? Check out this resource.
Learn More: How to Get Subscribers on YouTube (Reach 1,000 Subscriptions FAST!)
9. Write Guest Blogs or Be a Guest on Podcasts
Even if you’re doing a great job with your website and content, many potential customers still won’t find you. That’s why it’s a great idea to form partnerships that help you reach a bigger audience.
Guest blogging is an excellent way to get your message out to new audiences.
Here’s an example of a guest blog by OptinMonster’s cofounder, Thomas Griffin. This post shows his expertise in lead generation technology and increases brand awareness for our software.
Usually, the agreement works like this: you’ll write an entire piece of content that another site can publish, and you get to promote your product within that blog, with a link to your website or sales page.
As a side note, guest posting is also a great way to get more backlinks, which is really helpful for your SEO efforts.
Learn More: Guest Posting 101: How to Pitch and Secure Your Next Guest Blog Post
Another effective strategy is being a guest on industry podcasts. Unless you have a great reputation online with a wide audience, getting invited to another platform’s podcast can be difficult.
That said, it’s certainly not impossible, and you’ll never succeed if you don’t try!
Create a strong outreach email to various podcast hosts and offer to be a guest. With companies under pressure to create a lot of content in very little time, you’re bound to find a podcast that would love to host you.
10. Run Paid Ads
When it comes to advertising, sometimes throwing a little money at the problem can make a huge impact. When you’re trying to optimize how to market a product online, paid ads are a strategy you simply can’t ignore.
When it comes to digital marketing, you’ll likely focus on Google Ads and social media ads:
- Google Ads: These are pay-per-click (PPC) ads that appear in search results. Check out our post about increasing your click-through rates (CTR) on Google Ads.
- Social Media Ads: When you discover the social platforms that work best for your business, consider placing ads on them. Read this post to learn how to optimize your Facebook ads for the most conversions.
Each of these platforms works a little differently, and your approach should change to match. Do a little research to find out which platform would be the most effective at making paid ads.
Don’t forget to track your ad’s success, either. Use Urchin Tracking Modules (UTMs) to create a tracking system with laser-sharp accuracy for your product.
And if you want to take your marketing game to the next level, A/B split test a few different ad campaigns. Successful advertising on paid platforms is a healthy mix of creativity, cold hard data, and patience.
When done right, paid ads can be the perfect tool when learning how to promote a product.
11. Host a Contest
One of the best ways to promote a new product is by running an online contest. Your contest can drive people to your website and help you collect email addresses for your marketing list.
That may sound complicated, but with the right giveaway software, you can run viral contests without a lot of work.
We recommend using RafflePress.
RafflePress is designed to build online contests that grow your audience quickly. When it comes to giveaway plugins, there’s simply no better alternative. Check out our RafflePress review here.
But here’s a pro tip: Choose your prize wisely. Giving away a cool prize is a great way to get traffic, but it may not be the kind of traffic you’re looking for.
Products like a free vacation or a Macbook Air are items that almost everyone is interested in. These prizes convert a whole lot of leads, but if your prizes aren’t related to your product, those leads are unlikely to become customers.
Hosting a giveaway of your own product is a surefire way to get leads who are highly interested in your brand. However, if you have low brand-awareness, you might not get a lot of entries. You can choose to give away a higher-profile prize, but choose a product that is likely to get entries from your target market.
That way, you’re not just getting lots of leads. You’re getting lots of the right kinds of leads.
12. Offer Sales, Promotions, or Discounts
Offering a discount, promotional offer, or flash sale to your audience is an excellent tool for increasing conversions.
Here’s an example of a seasonal discount for OptinMonster. We used a floating bar campaign so the offer would continue to be visible as website visitors scroll the page.
Countdown timers, like the one in this floating bar, are perfect for building scarcity and a sense of urgency. They also trigger a fear of missing out (FOMO) in your visitors.
When you’re running a sales promotion, you can advertise it through your email marketing, social media posts, and video content. Limited-time offers give you a reason to encourage your followers to act now.
13. Create an Affiliate Program
Here’s another tip for how to market a product: create an affiliate program.
Learn More: How to Create an Affiliate Program & Increase Your Sales
With an affiliate program, you allow content creators and influencers to promote your products for you. You provide them with unique affiliate links that they can share with their followers. When someone purchases your product through that link, your affiliate gets a commission.
Essentially, you create a team of “risk-free” ambassadors because you don’t pay anything unless you make a sale.
By creating an affiliate program around your new product, you can have dozens of experienced marketers pitching your product to their audience.
It doesn’t get much more effective than that.
To easily create your own affiliate program, I recommend using AffiliateWP.
AffiliateWP is the best affiliate management plugin for WordPress. You can add unlimited affiliates yourself or let them register themselves. It tracks sales through your affiliate links and manages payouts.
It takes some work to set up a robust affiliate program. But once it’s up and running, your affiliates will run product promotions for you, and you’ll win more sales.
14. Start a Referral Program
Another plan similar to an affiliate program is a referral program. This is perfect for leveraging the power of word-of-mouth marketing.
Here’s an example of the referral program for the grocery delivery service Instacart:
In referral marketing, you offer existing customers an incentive to promote your product or service to their friends. And those new customers also get an incentive for making their first purchase.
Whatever product you’re trying to promote, referral programs can be the perfect way to increase your conversions.
Why is referral marketing so effective? Because 83% of Americans say that a recommendation from a friend or family member makes them more likely to purchase a product. Referral programs let you leverage the power of social proof to earn more sales.
Promote Your Product Like a Pro
And that’s it! You now have 14 killer strategies for product promotion. Even if you use just a few of our tips, you’ll be positioned to reach a larger audience, increase brand awareness, and make more sales.
Want to learn even more about product promotion? Here are a few resources:
- 17 Ingredients for High-Converting Product Pages
- How to Create a Product Recommendation Popup (the Easy Way)
- How to Crush Your New Product Launch: Ultimate Guide
And if you want to turn your website into your best product marketing tool, OptinMonster is the best choice! Our promotional campaigns let you generate more leads and show your best offers to the right people.
Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers.
