How I market + sell digital design products
So you’re thinking about getting into digital design products? Awesome! Yes! Do it!
Selling digital products can be such a huge asset to your business and income for any type of business. And if you’re a designer, you may have realized that there is a huge market for digital design products these days.
I’ve been selling digital products for about a year and a half now, and I will say it’s the best decision I made in my design business.
The fact that you can create one design product and you can get paid for it over and over… and over again will never get old.
Whether you want to sell digital products full time, or you want to just get some extra income on the side, either way, I believe creating digital design products is a great investment of your time.
But here’s the catch, how do you get it to actually sell after you’ve created it?
This is where a lot of designers get stuck, so today I’m pulling back the curtain on exactly how I get customers for my digital products (and lots of them!)
1 - Promote them more often
This seems like such an obvious one, but honestly, a lot of the time, you’re just not promoting your products enough!
So often I see designers who have a few digital products but they don’t see any sales because people don’t actually know that they have those products.
They’re hiding in a dusty old page on their website and they never get promoted on social media.
As the saying goes, “If you build it they will come”. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, that saying is totally bullsh*t.
“If you build it, they won’t know about it until you tell them about it, and then they might come.” - A quote by me 😂
So go ahead and start promoting your digital design products more. Post about it on your social media at least once a week. Put them on your homepage of your website. Add them into your blog posts or content. Send them out to your email list every once in a while.
Because people won’t come until they know!
2 - Pinterest
Pinterest is a powerhouse for promoting digital design products!
It’s basically a giant search engine but instead of words it shows people pictures. And those pictures could be your digital design products!
If you’re not already using Pinterest for your business, I would stop right now, signup for Pinterest Business + Tailwind and start pinning your butt off, because it’s a huge needle mover in my business.
I recommend Pinning all of your digital design products to Pinterest, in as many different designs as possible.
There are two main reasons to promote the same digital product in a few different designs..
People are attracted to different things, where one person might enjoy the design of one of your pins, someone else might like a different design.
It’s a way to promote the same thing and get it in front of people over and over again without being spammy and constantly repining the same image.
For example, here are 5 different designs I Pin for 1 digital product:
So go ahead and create a bunch of different designs for your digital products and get them on a schedule to pin, a lot!
I also recommend joining a bunch of group “design” boards and pinning them there, often. Remember to read the group board rules about how often you can pin!
As soon as you start pinning to Pinterest regularly and growing your Pinterest, you’ll start to see more sales coming in, guaranteed!
3 - Create content that relates to your digital products
When it comes to marketing anything online, I always, always, go back to content creation.
Creating high quality content has been one of the biggest needle movers in my business for sure.
For me, my content platform is blogging. But you can choose anything: Blogging, YouTube, Podcast… it really doesn’t matter how you present the information, as long as the information it helpful to your audience and relates back to your digital products.
For example, I chose to sell Squarespace Template Kits, so with that in mind I thought about what kind of person would want to buy those templates, and then how I could help them.
So, I write tons of Squarespace Tutorials and helpful Squarespace tips on my blog. This attracts people that want to learn more about Squarespace or need help with their Squarespace site. This strategy is getting the right sort of people into my audience, as these are the sorts of people who will likely buy my product.
Simple, right? So think about..
What you’re selling
Who are you selling it to
What kind of content you could create that would attract those sorts of people into your audience
Then start creating some killer content!
4. Get on a Marketplace
Another awesome strategy that I got into more recently was joining design marketplaces that sell digital products.
These are great if you don’t have much an audience already because they already have audiences coming to them, ready to buy, every day.
I personally love Creative Market and I sell a lot of products on here, but I’ve also recently joined FontBundles.net and I know a lot of people who have had success on Etsy and a few other marketplaces.
The downside to some of these marketplaces is that they can take a pretty hefty fee (for example, Creative Market takes 30% of every sale).
Also, it takes a little while for you to get traction. Don’t post one item and expect to make sales. I’ve found that the more you can create, the more you will sell, and it takes a bit of time before you start making consistent sales.
But with those things in mind, it’s totally worth it! And if you’re creating digital design products anyway, you may as well put them up there and reach more people.
So that’s it! Those are the 4 main ways I get lots of sales for my digital design products.
And if you already have an online design business, you may already be doing a lot of these methods to sell your services anyway, which is great!
It doesn’t take too much else to sell digital design products, and when they start selling, you will be so happy you put in the effort!
If you liked this post, Pin it to Pinterest! 👇🏻
