Do you want to know how to promote a new product? A good promotion determines your success on launch day. But how do you convince a customer to buy your product online?

In this article, we’ll share some insanely effective ways to promote a new product so you can get more customers, drive sales, and maximize profits.

The Best Ways to Market a Product Online

We’ve summarized our suggestions for marketing your new product below. Click on any solution to jump straight to that section:

Let’s get started!

1. Drip Feed Information Before Launch Day

During the lead up to launch day, it’s important you get people interested enough to check your product out. Without that buzz and excitement, there’s little chance you’ll get any sales.

You can create excitement for a product launch by slowly releasing snippets of information to your audience on social media.

In this example, Rostra hints at a new product feature they’ll be announcing soon. The image coupled with the announcement encourages fans to keep an eye out for more information.

Continue dripping content hinting at your new offering over time to maximize the levels of expectation.

2. Send Notifications

Another way to build excitement is to send existing customers notifications about a new feature or release. This is really useful for businesses offering digital products like apps and downloads.

You can make use of push notifications to highlight new promotions within your app or website.

This coloring app, for example, sends notifications to its users for an upcoming event as you can see below.

And when users tap to view the notification, they can take advantage of the new features and offers.

Website owners can learn how to add web push notifications to WordPress in this step by step guide.

3. Tell a True Story

One of the things that gets a lot of people interested in new products is the story attached to them. The way you talk about your product or service has the power to create an emotional connection.

It’s easy to sell your product features and benefits. But chances are people will glaze over this information. Yet when you craft a story around it, complete with characters and emotions, you’re tapping into human empathy and giving the object more value. 

You can build this kind of connection by getting potential customers involved with the story in the following ways:

• Sharing the ideas behind why it was created
• The process involved in building your product
• Any struggles you faced along the way
• Breakthrough moments that showed you were on the right track
• …and more.

Just remember to keep the story genuine. Making up a story will only cause problems further down the road and hurt your reputation.

4. Make a Promise (and Deliver)

You can also tap into human desire by making a promise. If you can genuinely promise that your product will solve a problem, it’s easier to market it. Let’s face it, who wouldn’t want something that promises to fix their issues?

But this only works if you can deliver. If you can’t follow through with your promise it will have the opposite effect.

Instead of building loyal customers through powerful word of mouth accounts, the word will be to avoid you at all costs.

Let’s use Apple as an example:

Apple’s promise is to inspire its customers to see the world a little differently. Which also happens to be how they build their products. And they can deliver on that promise with the proof being in their huge success and cult-like following. 

So the bottom line here is to make a genuine promise during your promotions and over-deliver it.

5. Launch a Giveaway

A great way to promote your business and new product at the same time is to host and run a giveaway. Creating a contest can quickly help spread the news to a wide and varied audience. 

Plus when you use RafflePress, the best giveaway plugin for WordPress you can use the power of word-of-mouth to make the giveaway go viral.

Here are a few ways you can promote a new product with a giveaway:

• Offer the product as the prize
• Give away a customized version of your goods to winners
• Ask people to share a message on social media about the product to enter
• Get participants to refer a friend as a way to enter
• Ask entrants to sign up to get emails when your product launches

And for even more contest promotion ideas that can also promote your launch, check this article out.

6. Share With Instagram Stories

With over 1 billion active users, Instagram’s visual-centric platform is perfect for marketing new services and products. But where you can really connect with your target audience, is by using Instagram Stories.

Stories on Instagram are both fun to create and easy to consume. Plus, the entire experience is less formal than traditional marketing strategies, which gives you plenty of room to get creative. 

With Stories, no-one expects you to spend hours getting the perfect product shot. So all it takes is a good idea to find a creative way to promote a product. And if you have more than 10k followers you can ask fans to swipe up and follow a link to a specific web page.

You can take an approach similar to the example above where the small business includes a quick shot of the product and some text asking people to swipe up to learn more. Sometimes the simplest way is often the most effective.

7. Write a Gift Guide

While we’re on the topic of effective promotional strategies, you could do worse than including your new product in a roundup or guide.

Writing a gift guide can highlight a new range to customers, and drive new traffic to included product pages. Even better, gift guides are highly shareable pieces of content creating greater awareness.

What’s more, they’re ideal for getting quality backlinks which can help improve your rankings in search engines.

In this gift guide for beauty enthusiasts, for example, the site includes high-quality visuals, a link to the online store, and a customer review to encourage people to click through.

8. Market to Your Email List

When you introduce something new to your audience, letting existing customers know about it first can yield great results. And this is where you can unleash the power of email marketing tools.

Chances are you’ve already started growing an email list for your business. So why not go ahead and send a new campaign announcing your product launch.

Your email list is the perfect place for product promotion because these people have already made the decision to hear from you. This makes it more likely that they’ll take interest in what you have to say. 

Netflix is great at using their email list for announcements. They make sure to keep their emails minimal, eye-catching, and straight-to-the-point. This leaves fewer decisions for readers to make and guides them to the desired action.

9. Set Up an Affiliate Program

To take some of the legwork out of your new promotion, consider adding an affiliate program. Affiliate marketing programs use other people to promote your product in return for a small commission.

Affiliate programs work by creating a unique link for each individual promoting the product. This link can be shared on social media, added to blog posts, and even videos. You can then track clicks and sales through those links for you to compensate them appropriately.

To help you create your own program, you can research the best affiliate marketing tools here.

10. Make an Unboxing Video

When you think of search engines, thoughts instantly turn to sites like Google. But in fact, YouTube is also one of the largest search engines for finding new and interesting content.

Even better, YouTube videos rank in Google search too, offering ample opportunities for you to promote your new offering.

Creating helpful, and educational videos are a good way to tap into an audience already looking for brand or product views.

So why not go further by creating your own unboxing video – one of the most popular types of videos on youtube. That way you can also induce the fear of missing out in your viewers by revealing what they could get their hands on. 

11. Reach Out to Bloggers

Smart marketers know that the best way to promote something with minimal effort is to get popular bloggers involved. Bloggers, especially those aligned with your niche, have their own audience interested in your product category.

To give you an example, brands releasing new clothes ranges could reach out to fashion bloggers with a dedicated, engaged audience and ask them to review a few items. 

You can also get bloggers involved with the following activities:

• Sharing sponsored ads on their social media networks
• Writing their own gift guides featuring your items
• Recording vlogs reviewing your product
• Attending events on your behalf as a brand ambassador

In this article, the blogger rounds up her favorite plants, linking to each product with an affiliate link. This effectively promotes the product and if her readers make a purchase, earns her a commission too.

12. Work with Influencers

It’s not just bloggers you can work with either. Influencer marketing is all the rage these days and working with an influencer to promote your product can dramatically raise awareness.

Influencer reviews and recommendations can generate social proof with your target audience. And because their followers trust them enough to make informed choices, many base their purchasing decisions on what influencers recommend.

Most influencers are happy to promote products for a free copy of the unit. However, to get involved with the most prolific influencers, businesses should be prepared to pay a fee.

13. Create Shoppable Instagram Posts

As we mentioned earlier Instagram is a great platform for getting the word out about new products. But did you know you can use the network as a shopping resource too?

Well, it’s true. Customers can now by your products without even having to leave Instagram, making it easier for you to promote and sell your new range with as few clicks as possible.

To be eligible for a shoppable Instagram feed, you need to have the following:

• The latest version of the Instagram app
• A business Instagram profile
• Have admin or manager access to the account
• A product catalog associated with a Facebook shop

After waiting for approval, you’ll get a notification letting you know if you’re approved for product tagging. Then you can move onto the next step, which is setting up those tags.

To set up product tagging on Instagram, take the following steps:

1. Tap the Get Started notification at the top of your profile
2. Or tap the gear wheel if you don’t see the alert
3. Select Products
4. Choose Continue
5. Select the product catalog to connect it to your profile
6. Choose Done

Now to tag products in your posts on Instagram, follow this checklist:

1. Choose a photo and add your desired captions and filters
2. From the share screen tap Tag Products
3. Enter the name of the product and select them when they appear
4. Choose Done
5. Tap Share

Perfect, now your fans can buy that product right from the Instagram app!

14. Let Customers Pre-Order

But what if you’re not ready to release your product and only want to build up some hype? An easy solution for this is to let customers sign up to pre-order their goods. And you can reward early-bird customers with a discount, free shipping, or even an exclusive gift.

Gaming companies often use pre-orders to build excitement about a new game launch.

Take the upcoming Avengers game for example. Gamers who pre-order also get a range of official goodies including action figures, key chains, pins, and more. People who don’t want to miss out on those exclusives will make sure they snap it up.

15. Release Your Product in Batches 

Speaking of the fear of missing out (FOMO), there’s another way you can use it to not only make it more attractive to customers but drive up prices too.

Many businesses use this tactic, which is known as scarcity marketing. Scarcity is a psychological tool that makes a product appear to be limited to make it more attractive to buyers. This drives up the demand because there are only so many of them.

You can use scarcity marketing by releasing your product in limited batches. It encourages people to snap it up while there’s still stock and raises anticipation for the next release.

16. Promote Your Product on Pinterest

Pinterest might be most known for sharing visual content, but you can use it to promote products too. With promoted pins, you can promote a product image linking to its sales page, and it’ll look like any other pin in the feed.

And if you optimize your Pinterest boards around the product category, chances are you’ll appear in search engine results and get more leads from Pinterest.

Click here to learn how to run a successful Pinterest contest.

17. Use Product Recommendations

eCommerce stores can use the entire shopping experience to promote new products. All it takes is to identify areas of your site that get the most visibility.

Here are a few places you can insert product recommendations:

• A featured product image carousel on your homepage
• Related product sliders on other product pages
• In product categories as a complimentary item
• In the sidebar alongside blog posts mentioning the goods
• On the checkout page as a discount bundle

You can also use high-traffic content to promote products too. Use your analytics software to identify your top-performing posts and pages, and include your new range as a recommendation to drive more traffic that way.

18. Leverage Social Proof

You know what it’s like when a new movie is released and everyone’s raving about how you should see it? It must be good because tickets are sold out, right? Well, that’s how social proof works.

And you can use it in promotions too. When people see a ton of reviews, or suddenly the item is sold out, there’s a good reason behind it. And naturally, they want to know more. 

Our favorite tool for social proof is TrustPulse. It works by displaying popups whenever someone buys a product on your site.

There’s even On Fire Notifications for triggering FOMO which shows how many people have bought the item in a set period of time. This can speed up your product cycle and encourage people to buy sooner.

19. Write Guest Articles

We’ve talked a lot about what you can do on your own site for promoting and increasing sales. But taking the time to write for other sites, can work wonders too.

By writing valuable content for sites in your niche, you can gain more exposure to a targeted audience.

Put together a list of sites in your field of interest and personally reach out to them with your article pitch. But remember, don’t try and sell your product. Instead, pitch informative, educational, and entertaining content the host site’s audience will find useful.

20. Create an Infographic

And speaking of useful content, infographics are a super-popular way to pitch content to a new website. They’re highly shareable due to their visual nature, and easy for people to consume.

Commission an infographic that communicates the value of your product to your desired audience. It doesn’t have to be anything flashy. Simple is often the best way to go when communicating ideas. 

For instance, this infographic shares how the product works, which can remove the barriers preventing people from getting involved.

21. Write a Press Release

Lastly, no product promotion is complete without dropping a press release. They can be a really effective way to generate press coverage. 

But journalists are often bombarded with hundreds of press releases a day, so it’s easy for yours to get overlooked.

So alongside sending releases to services like HARO and PRWeb, seek out coverage of products related to your own. Then reach out to those journalists or publications, with your own release and a personalized pitch, referencing their similar coverage.

And there you have it.

In this article, we’ve covered how to promote a new product in over 20 effective ways. Now all that’s left is for you to get started!

And if you want to secure loyal customers, check out our best business giveaway ideas here.

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