Although it’s impossible to hold, taste, or touch digital products, customers can consume them due to their popularity and ease of use. You can create once and then sell them repeatedly to different customers without worrying about top inventory up.
That’s why more and more creatives, bloggers, educators, and freelancers finding ways to make money from these intangible goods.
However, it addresses questions about how to fight against the competitors and build a product that makes users willing to pay for? And these 7 challenges we have summarized will give you a multi-angle explanation.
- #1 Building The Right Product
- #2 Identifying Your Customer Segments
- #3 Setting Suitable Price for The Product
- #4 Rising Website Security and Digital Piracy Problem
- #5 Lacking of Research
- #6 Getting Squashed by the Competition
- #7 Marketing Your Digital Products
#1 Building The Right Product
The first and foremost step to take is building the right product for customers since it’s what you use to solve the buyers’ problems and also earn money from.
Almost everything is available on the internet. People would rather try to seek free information than paying for a piece of PDF or a video course. You should provide them with in-depth information about a specific niche.
You don’t know where to start? Firstly identify your strength and what you master. Then share your experience, what makes your success as well as failure in an academic way so that others can learn from it.
Plus, think about the product format you’ll offer. If you prefer presenting in front of a lot of people, go for webinars. Professional, on the other hand, can create online courses with PDF ebooks, tutorial videos, and guidelines. In case you work in photography, having a site selling albums, artworks, and images are ideal.
#2 Identifying Your Customer Segments
Customers can make or break a digital product. Your responsibility is developing products that meet their demains. Imagine you put a lot of effort into writing, designing, and marketing an ebook but nobody cares?
Before starting producing a digital product, why don’t you segment your target consumers are and then work backward? The customers’ ages, genders, or behaviors will decide what the product style is or how it looks like.
Take online cooking classes as an example. Housewives look for courses teaching knife skills, special dishes around the world, or dinner party preparation. Online culinary classes for kids, meanwhile, have to provide something easy to follow, funny, and less dangerous.
#3 Setting Suitable Price for The Product
Looking at the competitors and pricing a lower cost is the easiest way to kill your digital product-based business. You need to depend on numerous factors to price your products.
You’re sometimes aware that competitors will win your customers due to lower costs for a similar product ebook. Don’t worry! In some cases, higher cost means better quality.
You must clearly show how your digital products are better and how customers benefit from yours than others’. This is the best way to proves your position in the crowded and competitive niche.
We’d recommend you run giveaway programs to offer some products for free. They can be your useful research about an emerging problem, the first few chapters of an ebook, or the first lesson of an online course. More importantly, you don’t have to pay a lot of money for the giveaways since there are no additional costs for storage.
As a result, you can significantly increase your brand awareness exposure. On top of that, this gives buyers a chance to get to know your products before deciding to take money out of their pocket. You can not only get new customers but also generate return buyers.
#4 Rising Website Security and Digital Piracy Problem
When your product becomes popular, more and more people know about it and share it with their relatives and friends. You wouldn’t know anything about this issue until accidentally catch your own photos, ebooks, or videos on social groups.
This challenge requires you to increase your site security and protect your digital products from permitted users. You should block direct access from unwanted users to your product files.
Embedding these files on the website and covering them under a password form come as a handy solution to safeguard your products too.
#5 Lacking of Research
Running a business and creating digital products shouldn’t be derived from your personal sense. Apart from customer segments, it’s important to conduct research into the market.
What is the best time for product release? For example, summer can be the best time to provide soft-skill courses for children.
Ask yourself some other questions about whether your products fulfill the needs of the majority or a small group of people. Are your products relevant and up-to-date with the current social development?
#6 Getting Squashed by the Competition
You might not notice but the digital product market is becoming saturated. Since more and more businesses try to grab a bigger piece of the pie, you need to freshen your business and products.
Always come up with new ideas, and create fresh content in order to stay on the run with the competitors and innovate your products. Try expanding your offering to include additional content and extras.
It’s good to learn from the competitors too. Think about values that you can offer but your competitors don’t.
#7 Marketing Your Digital Products
Last but not least, marketing plays a key role in bringing your products to customers. Without it, it’ll be impossible to make others notice your business or purchase your products.
However, marketing your products doesn’t mean creating social channels and just leave them there. The true challenge comes from creating an effective strategy to build your brand awareness.
Besides blogs to educate users, you need a consistent posting schedule for social platforms. Taking advantage of paid advertisement helps you reach more customers in a short period of time.
What Is Your Challenge When Running a Digital Product Store?
It’s proved that investing in digital products creates a great ROI. They cost one time of researching, creating, and marketing then you can sell them repeatedly.
Developing digital products seems simple at the beginning. However, business owners fail to sell their intellectual products due to a lot of subjective reasons. We’ve gone through the 7 most common challenges you might face when running a digital product business.
What are your challenges and difficulties when managing your digital product brands? Share your experience in the comment box below!