Digital goods are products that your customers only need a good internet connection and a screen to consume. They do not require logistics, are mainly focused on a knowledge that you might already have and, often, just need some time to be put together.
After the product is done, comes the best part: scalability. Digital goods are easy to scale and to be fully automated so you can focus on new opportunities while profiting from your previous investments.
Those digital products can be ebooks, online courses, videos, podcasts, softwares, downloadable templates and many other types. This economy is bigger than ever. By the end of 2015, according to a PWC Global Media and Entertainment study, the market reached $100 billion US dollars. And this growth has a lot to do with tech and mobile penetration within nations.
In Brazil, the rapid adoption of tech and mobile is something that already caught your attention for a good reason. With a population of 207 million people and growing, Brazil is the eighth largest economy in the world and the country has avid internet users consuming content during 6.1 hours per day, on average.
We know it can be daunting – especially in a market that might not be your native one. Worry no more! Today we’re going to talk about the power of digital goods in Brazil and how you can grow your brand selling digital goods to reach millions of Brazilians. We will also go through the benefits of investing in online products and services.
Expanding your business from a regular store to creating your own digital products is indeed a big step, but it can get really valuable.
Is this the right time to invest in digital products in Brazil?
Brazil is a huge market opportunity for those who are willing to create high quality digital products. Nowadays, if you have a valuable skill set that might benefit people out there, and this knowledge can be put together in audio, video, text, services or any sort of online products, yes, it might be the right time.
Brazilians have seen from fishing courses to pet training to beauty classes happening online over the past few years. The most popular and profitable niches in the country when it comes to digital goods are Business, Health and Sports, Education, Relationships, and Personal Development, according to Hotmart’s platform focused on digital entrepreneurs.
Digital products can be focused on your products, your services or even what you can do best for your clients. Research and Markets forecasts that the market size of e-learning industry will be $331 billion US dollars by 2025.
We’re not talking about creating products just for the sake of it. We’re talking about providing value to your Brazilian customers in a way that you can scale and make it more accessible to more and more people.
Focusing on an audience like Brazil, it’s easy to see how you might want to expand as soon as possible to reach this growing population of digital consumers. Statista stats forecasted that by 2021, the number of digital product buyers will be of about 2.1 billion people.
Just to give you a single example, Mairo Vergara’s course, focused on teaching English online to the Brazilian audience, sold more than $32.000 US dollars four months after its launch.
Brazil has plenty of opportunities for you to invest and work with digital products. Just make sure that you know your product well – and how to reach your customers in Brazil.
Creating digital products that sell
Find the perfect idea
If you already have an established business and you are looking to expand things online, it’s time to find an idea that makes sense to your existing customers. They’re the easiest ones you can reach and will most definitely be the first ones to purchase your online goods.
Find digital products or services that might enhance or boost your existing physical products or solve a problem your customers might have in the same niche you work with.
If you sell beauty products, for example, think about schedules for skin care regimens or exclusive courses with dermatologists or beauty artists.
If you sell clothes for dolls, like one of Shopify’s success cases, focus on selling doll clothing patterns and courses so people can create their own. It’s all about your own niche.
Validate the concept
It doesn’t make sense to focus on a digital product for weeks or months to building something that no one really wants. When you have an idea, before you make any other move, make sure people are looking for it.
If you have a close relationship with your audience, ask them what they actually want and make sure to take notes on that. Google tools such as Search, Keyword Planner and Trends can help you out with that as well.
The goal here is to find a match between high demand and low competition inside your own niche, making sure you’re creating something that people actually want and are keen to purchase.
Build a waiting list
During the development of your digital good, make sure to talk to your customers and everyone that might be interested in it. They will probably be the first ones to invest in your digital product, so keep them close by creating a waiting list.
This waiting list can be created with previous customers you have – especially if you’ve created a survey to help people decide which type of products they would like you to sell – or found while you’re researching about your idea.
Keep this waiting list close – it will be of great importance as soon as you have your launch.
You can grow this list by talking directly to your customers, start reaching out to people on Facebook groups, create high-quality content on your landing page, write guest posts to other websites that cover the same niche as you, use Facebook Ads, whatever works best for you.
Develop your product
Alright, now that you have found out exactly what you should invest your precious time and efforts in, it’s time. While your waiting list grows, it’s time to develop the product this audience wants.
This is, of course, the hardest part of the whole process. Make sure to remember that this material can be reused in multiple occasions and even in different formats – a course can be adapted to become multiple ebooks, a podcast can become an article, a video can grow to a series of videos that can become another course… things like that.
The best part is that if you already have a product that exists in another language and you’re considering taking it to the Brazilian market, after you make sure that the audience is also interested in that, you already have plenty of studies and material to back up your content and create your product way faster.
Don’t have enough time to develop everything yourself or have some money to invest? Hire copywriters, designers and other pros to help you out. You come with the knowledge, they come with what they do best.
Even though not everyone has the time and money to invest in outsourcing, this is by far the best way to create a digital product that is going to work well from scratch.
Launch to your existing audience
Remember that waiting list we’ve been putting together during the development process? It’s time to talk to those people. Those are the first customers you want to sell your product to and the higher chances of converting. They already know you, were interested in what you sell and now they are feeling special because they will be the first ones to get whatever you’re offering.
Before reaching out to your audience, build momentum. Focus on a sequence of emails showing what your product is trying to solve, how you came up with the idea, and how it can help the audience. Make people excited about it.
When you have everything ready, make sure your audience knows this is exclusively for them for now. This will give them a sense of importance that will also make them feel more prone to help you with the next step.
Ask for feedback
When you launch something, you want it to grow and evolve with your audience.
When your product is out there, make sure you can have some real feedback from people explaining you whatever they think could be improved. This feedback is gold.
Your customers will appreciate getting updated versions of your product when those changes are made. They will actually see that their investment was worth the price, because you’re actually taking care of the product even after they purchase it. This will make them more likely to get your next digital product.
Launch to the world
After your audience gave you feedback and you implemented whatever you felt was necessary, it’s time to put out into the world. Choose the right tools to focus on reaching your audience and make sure you have the right partners to run this process smoothly.
In Brazil, the research “Digital AdSpend 2018”, conducted by IAB Brasil (Interactive Advertising Bureau), Search, Classified Advertising and Price Comparison are the main focus when it comes to digital advertising, accounting for 44% of the total investments in digital marketing around the country.
Paid advertising on Instagram and Facebook also can work wonders in Brazil – especially Facebook, since 90% of Brazilian internet users are on this particular social media.
Once your product is released into the world, you can start doing A/B tests with your landing page, find out which kind of paid advertising is providing better results and improve your conversion rates every single day.
Digital products can be a profitable way to generate sustainable income for years to come. Create a product that your audience wants, develop the right strategy to make it reach those people and play around with your conversion numbers every day.
At some point, this can become a fully automated system with which you can make money more passively with digital goods in Brazil while investing in a brand new product.
Then it’s time to repeat!
