How to market a product: 8 best strategies in 2024

Updated Jan 15 2024

Whether you're the business owner of a brick-and-mortar store or an ecommerce website, knowing how to market a product is vital to success. From attracting potential customers to creating brand loyalty among existing customers, there are plenty of great marketing channels for promoting your products.

We'll introduce you to great ways to effectively market your brand, drive customer interest, and generate more sales. You'll even get a crash course in what every business needs to know to build and maintain a solid customer base.

• Learning how to market a product to your target audience can make or break the success of any business.

• There are many ways to market a product online, from social media platforms and email lists to paid advertising campaigns.

• We'll introduce you to several key product marketing methods and review the foundational concepts of product marketing 101.

Digital marketing has become a global industry projected to pull in nearly $740 billion in 2024 alone. As advertisers worldwide have discovered, developing an online marketing strategy has plenty of perks over traditional marketing campaigns like billboards, mailing, and TV advertisements.

Not only does it allow business owners to engage customers worldwide, but it's also substantially cheaper than many traditional advertising methods. Let's explore several powerful ways to engage customers with today's most popular product marketing tactics.

Who doesn't love a good sale? Offering perks, promotions, and discounts is a time-honored marketing strategy that can entice current and prospective customers to check out your products.

Many marketers also offer new customers free shipping, discounts, or promos in exchange for providing their emails or signing up for text alerts. Ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Etsy make creating targeted and sitewide sales and promos for your online store easy.

Here are some ideas for sales and promos that can help drive website traffic and boost sales:

• Offer free shipping

• Include a free gift with customers' orders

• Offer discounts like 20% off in exchange for email/SMS text sign-ups

• Upselling through product recommendations

• Cross-selling products with promos, bundle sales, or BOGO offers

SMS and email marketing can both be solid strategies if approached correctly. Text message marketing, in particular, has its own unique set of pros and cons.

On the one hand, most texts have a 97% read rate within 15 minutes of delivery. The downside, of course, is the danger of annoying customers with personal texts.

That's why it's essential to familiarize yourself with best practices if you intend to use SMS as a marketing strategy. Keep it short and to the point, and include only your best offers or promos.

Email marketing tends to be much more versatile, though it's still important to familiarize yourself with effectively marketing a product via email. It's definitely worth checking out email marketing platforms like Constant Contact and MailChimp, which offer features like customizable templates, automation, and segmentation capabilities.

Segmentation allows you to break down your customer base into specific groups based on anything from demographics to the current stage of the customer journey. It can also help you set up abandoned carts and win-back email campaigns.

According to research by HubSpot, 4.74 billion people worldwide now use social media platforms. These figures haven't escaped the attention of marketers, who are projected to spend $207.10 billion in social advertising in 2023.

While running paid ad campaigns on social media platforms can be an incredibly effective strategy for attracting new customers through targeted ads, organic social marketing efforts also have plenty of benefits. Ensuring your business maintains a strong social media presence by regularly sharing engaging content, encouraging user-generated content, and interacting with your customer base.

Several great tools can help you keep your social media marketing strategy on point. Buffer and SocialPilot are some of the most affordable, while SocialSprout and HootSuite may be worth exploring for businesses with a larger budget.

Influencer marketing is a social media marketing strategy that involves partnering with influential personalities with large followings. The idea is to select an influencer who shares your target audience and convince them to promote or mention your products in their social media posts.

If you have a large audience, you might consider offering to cross-promote products with another influencer. If not, you might offer the influencer an incentive, such as free merchandise to a pre-agreed upon payment.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a content marketing strategy used to increase a piece of content's chances of ranking higher in search engine results. While there are now entire agencies specializing in search engine marketing, even a solid understanding of SEO basics can help increase your content's ranking on search engines.

One common tactic is market research to determine the keywords a customer will most likely type into a search engine when searching for your products. By working these keywords into your product titles and descriptions, you can increase the odds of your website ranking higher on search engine results pages.

But don't make the common beginner's mistake of assuming that search engine optimization begins and ends with cleverly placed keywords! Google considers several factors when generating ranking scores, such as:

• Expertise in your niche

• "People first" content that's readable and informative

• Quality of any images used

• Link building

• How fast your page loads

• Your site's overall structure, crawlability, and loading time

Ever wish you knew how to market a product so well that your product page would pop up right at the top of a search results page? A paid marketing strategy is a shortcut to making your dream a reality.

You know how you will do a Google search; the first few results always say "sponsored" next to their links? Those are paid ads that the website set up to get their links in front of more potential customers using Google Ads.

In addition to search ads, you can also pay to run a marketing campaign that includes display ads, paid Facebook advertising, or even video ads. But are paid marketing campaigns effective?

They can be a great way to reach your ideal customer faster if you take the time to create eye-catching and compelling ads. Creating a paid marketing campaign also comes with perks like the ability to leverage retargeting, which means reaching out to customers who have previously interacted with your site but haven't yet made a purchase.

Some studies suggest that attracting new customers can cost anywhere from 5x - 7x more than retaining current customers. That's one of the many reasons that customer retention is so important.

While many product marketers make the mistake of focusing solely on lead generation, never underestimate the power of repeat buyers! Creating a loyalty program can be a great product marketing strategy for boosting sales among existing customers.

From restaurants that offer you every tenth sandwich or burrito for free to grocery cards that offer discounts on every purchase, many businesses now use loyalty programs as part of their marketing efforts. Depending on which marketing tactics you want to use, you might consider creating a loyalty program with software like LoyaltyZoo or Kangaroo.

Here are some more tips on how to use a loyalty program as an effective part of your product marketing strategy:

• Do your customer research to ensure you offer rewards that align with your target audience's values and interests.

• Offer a variety of different rewards to choose from

• Make it super easy to join.

• Reward several actions (email sign-ups, referrals, purchases, etc.)

When it comes to how to market a product, there's no substitute for what's known as "earned advertising." Unlike paid product marketing or your own organic product marketing efforts, earned advertising consists of online reviews, shares, mentions, and reposts.

Earned media is generated by your customers, whether on a social media platform, Yelp, or even your website. Some marketers argue that earned media is quite possibly the most powerful product marketing strategy simply because there's no way to fake it.

No matter how many social media ads you run or how convincing your blog post may be, there's no better way to drive sales than positive customer testimonials. Here are some tips that can lead to earned advertisements, repeat purchases, and happy customers.

• Offer customers outstanding service

• Create a brand image based on trust, and make sure you back it up

• Don't be shy about inviting customers to review their products after they are delivered

• Encourage customers to leave a review in exchange for a discount or promo

• Respond to every review, whether good or bad. Attempt to offer a solution whenever a review mentions a problem or complaint.

• Display some of the best reviews on your website.

There are several key concepts that every great product marketing strategy is built on. Here are some foundational tips for your product marketing journey.

Before launching a marketing campaign, ensure you understand what you want to achieve. In the early stages, the goals of your product marketing campaigns may be to attract visitors to your website, establish your brand voice, or customer education and brand awareness.

As your business grows, your goals will center more on marketing products and driving sales. Whether the goal of a campaign is to announce a product launch or promote a sale, it's important to pick specific, measurable goals.

Some marketing products have built-in analytics tools to measure your campaigns' success based on site traffic, conversion rate, bounce rate, etc. While it involves a bit of a learning curve, Google Analytics offers an amazing set of free tools to help you measure your success.

To effectively promote pretty much anything, thoroughly understanding your target audience, aka target market, is vital. A product's target audience is basically the type of customers who are the most likely to be interested in buying it.

Customers in the same target market tend to share the same interests, demographics, values, or other common traits. Examples of a target market include pet owners, sports fans, millennials, parents, customers interested in sustainability, etc.

Get to know your target customer by creating a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your target customer that can help influence your product marketing strategy and selling points.

Building a recognizable brand identity will make marketing products much easier in the long run. After all, it's hard to turn a regular product into a successful product if no one can remember the name of the company that sells it!

As every good product marketer knows, it's important to have a catchy, memorable business name relevant to your target audience. Select a few brand colors and work them into your logo, site design, and content in your marketing campaigns.

By solidifying your brand voice and personality, you'll create a memorable identity that loyal customers can connect to. Free design software Canva can be a great tool for designing logos, product promotion materials, logos, social media ads, and more.

No matter how amazing a product marketer you may be, there's no substitute for having a great product to market! Gelato is a print on demand service that can turn your designs and images into one-of-a-kind products your target audience will love.

Sign up for a free Gelato account, upload your designs, and choose which of our high-quality products you'd like to customize. Then use one of our easy integrations to connect Gelato to your online store.

Whether you want to create your own custom clothing shop using our high-quality t-shirts and hoodies or turn a piece of art into incredible wall art, we've got you covered. We even offer plenty of great accessories like customizable phone cases and drinkware, as well as all the design tools you need to develop your next product effectively.

When a customer places an order, one of our 130+ local producers will print your product and ship it straight to your customer. We offer product marketers and creators everywhere a reliable, sustainable approach to ecommerce.

With Gelato, you can launch a successful store without the need to keep up with inventory, shipment, or even order fulfillment. You develop the product marketing strategy, and we'll handle the rest.