How to Launch and Grow your Digital Business
Courses, programs, memberships, coaching, etc…
Launching a digital product is one of the most exciting online businesses creators or coaches can invest their time in building. A digital product is a type of online business that sells products such as online courses, programs, guides, memberships, and one-on-one coaching. These businesses can also offer an exclusive online community for their customers.
Digital businesses are a popular choice for online entrepreneurs because they can monetize their expertise and reach a global audience. By creating and selling digital products, content creators can earn high-profit margins and easily scale their business to meet the demands of a growing customer base. In this article, we will explain the steps involved in setting up and growing your own digital business.
Before we get into how you can create a digital product, let’s quickly run through seven reasons why you should.
Why Should You Create A Digital Product?
There are plenty of reasons - here are seven:
Add an income stream, and make more money.
Enjoy a steadier, more predictable income stream with subscriptions.
Own your income stream and avoid reliance on social media platforms.
Build a sense of community and belonging for your audience.
Provide more value to your audience, helping them solve their problems.
Gain flexibility and control over content, pricing, and business direction.
Position yourself as an authority in your field and reach a global audience.
How To Create A Digital Product
Now that you've decided to launch your very own digital offer, how do you go about doing it? Let's break it down.
1. Create your Offer
Step one is to create your offer. Are you launching a course, a coaching program, a membership group that is providing exclusive content? Do you have any upsells or payment tiers? Free ebooks? This is when you want to strategize and build the skeleton for your digital product.
If you are unclear about what your best offer could be, or you feel overwhelmed because it’s your first time doing this, book a call with our team, we can help.
2. Define your Target Audience
Step two is to define your target audience. Before you create the content for your membership space and digital product, make sure you know exactly who you're talking to. Rember, you want to be solving a specific problem for someone. This should come easy for creators, as their audience is usually already defined based on the niche they are in.
For example, if you are selling a course on weight loss, your target audience is people who want to lose weight.
3. Validate your product Idea
Before you run with your idea, you need to validate it. This step is often overlooked but it is important. Run a poll with your followers and tease your idea, to see if they are interested. This among many other tactics can help you gauge your audience's interest, which can lead to a strong launch or save you from launching something people don’t want.
4. Establish a Membership Model
Once you have your product down, know your target customer, and whether there is demand for your content, you need to figure out a membership model. Determine how you want to price your membership model and how your members will pay.
There are many ways to price your business, and you can always adjust the pricing.
With that said, you should know what you want.
Take a look at these pricing options:
A Monthly Subscription: This one’s my favorite because it gives you recurring revenue. Customers pay for your membership on a monthly subscription basis until they choose to cancel.
A Membership Period: The membership lasts for a certain period, such as 90 days, and expires. Good use cases for this are quarterly fitness programs, 8-week guides, etc. You can choose to auto-renew these or make them a one-time purchase.
A One-Time Membership - Members will pay to access once, and get full access to everything you are offering.
Offering Service Membership: Members are paying you directly for something like coaching until they don’t need it anymore.
Of course, you can be very creative and choose to do quarterly pricing, free trials, etc…
Next, do you have any upsells?
One-on-one coaching
An ‘add on’’ that complements the original purchase
These are examples of things you want to price out. Play with scenarios in your head so you can predict your income. For example, if you have a $50 product, you’ll need to make 2,000 sales to make $100,000. Reverse engineering and having an income goal will help you price accordingly.
5. Choose a Hosting Platform
Once you've determined all the above, you need to find a platform to host your digital business on. Of course, we are biased, but we strongly believe you should launch your course, program, or membership-based business on Grouped.
Why? We give you your own branded web app, with the ability to launch your courses, programs, and digital products, and upsell anything you want, all in the same place you host your community.
So you don’t need a bunch of other softwares to launch your digital business.
Not to mention, there are no upfront costs, and no hidden fees, and you have our team on your side to make sure you maximize your launch and revenue potential.
Sounds like a no-brainer to me, if you want to learn more, feel free to book a call with us here.
6. Build a Marketing Strategy
Now that you’ve set up your membership business almost completely, it’s time to plan out how you will launch it.
What social media platforms will you leverage, how will you build pre-launch hype, and how often will you promote it? These are all questions that you should answer and plan before launching your group… We break down some marketing steps at the bottom of the article.
7. Create the Content That Will Go into the Course
Once you've finalized the finer details of creating your platform, you can begin creating your membership content. Create content that is valuable and relevant to your members.
You can offer everything from exclusive articles to calculators, programs, and tools. Don’t stop at just whatever content is in the program or course, try to go above and beyond. This will increase the lifetime value of your customers because they’ll stay, and make it more likely for them to refer friends.
It’s important that you have to have a good tech stack to create your content, programs, etc. From recording to editing, to design…
8. Launch
Once you have all the above, you are ready to launch your Group and start bringing in some dollars!!
Be sure to strongly announce your launch by leveraging Instagram stories with swipe-up links, short-form video content like Reels and TikTok, and whatever other strong channels you have.
This is also when you’ll send an email blast to your audience and pre-launch lists…
Launching can be overwhelming because they’re are so many steps, if you decide to go with Grouped, we can take these off your plate so you can focus on what you do best while making sure all your systems are perfectly in place so you maximize revenue.
How to Grow your Digital Business
Once your digital business is established and ready to go, you need to begin growing your customer base. Check out these four channels that you can use to attract new members.
Create a strong pre-launch strategy: Develop a plan for generating excitement and anticipation for your product before it launches. This can include social media marketing, email marketing, and creating competition with challenges. It’s important that you have a pre-launch email list, or something similar, so you have an immediate audience of interested people you can make sales from on day one.
Build hype through social media: Utilize social media platforms to share valuable content and promote your product. Use the 90/10 rule of content marketing, where 90% of your content is providing value or entertainment, and 10% promotes your membership community or other offerings.
Create competition with challenges: Spark competition among your potential community members by inviting them to participate in challenges or goals related to your product. Offer rewards or bragging rights to encourage participation. The fitness industry is a great example of this, where they will run 30-day boot camps or 90-day shreds, and offer prizes to the winners. This brings lots of hype, and builds a great community with a collective goal around the product.
Use email marketing: Keep in touch with your email list and use it to promote your digital product to both members and non-members. Offer exclusive discounts and rewards to non-members to encourage them to join.
Have a strong customer retention strategy: Make sure to go above and beyond to serve your customers and engage with them in your membership community of customers. This can help keep your current members happy and encourage them to stay long-term.
Plan your content to attract new customers: After your product launches, continue to create valuable and relevant content to attract new members. Tease this content with your audience and share testimonials from satisfied members to show the value of your community. Remember, you shouldn’t stop making money after your first few days of being live, you want to be constantly adding members and growing your business. If it’s a time-based product like a quarterly challenge, you might as well do the same thing and start building a waitlist for your next challenge because people will want in - especially when they see your testimonials and social proof.
Last Words
A membership space or digital product is a no-brainer for any digital entrepreneurs who want to expand their online business with a profitable online model, all the while creating a meaningful connection with their audiences.
By offering exclusive content, services, and a community to members (if you use a platform like Grouped), creators can enjoy a steady and predictable income stream, own their income stream, build authority in their field, and have a creative outlet for their passions. To set up a digital product, content creators should define their offer, identify their target audience, validate their idea, establish a membership model, choose a platform like Grouped, design their site, create their membership content, and launch their community. To grow their digital business, creators can use social media marketing, and email marketing, create competition with challenges, and have a strong customer retention strategy. By following these steps and continually providing value to their members, content creators can build a successful and profitable membership space.
Now that we’ve run through the basics, if you are interested in launching your membership space or digital product, and want to do it with your OWN web app, on the best software possible, with the best support team, fill out the following 30-second form and we'll have you set up soon.