Did you know that the digital media market is set to reach $560 billion by the end of 2024? That’s right: there’s currently $560B on the table to be made from selling digital assets. And that means there’s no time like the present to start selling digital products.
Today, digital products are one of the most popular (and profitable!) ways for creators to earn a passive income. If you want to cash in on them, however, you’ll need to set up shop online so your audience can buy your products.
In addition to creating an online storefront, this means creating landing pages where your digital products can be purchased — and that entails writing great product descriptions that will make your followers want to buy them.
In this article, we’re sharing our best tips for writing product descriptions that sell. We’re also providing you with a template that helps you write a compelling description for your online store — get it for free here!
Why should I write product descriptions?
Product descriptions are one of the most crucial (yet often overlooked) elements to actually selling your products. Why? Because, essentially, they’re your online storefront’s #1 sales tool.
Before we dive into the benefits of writing high-quality product descriptions, let’s get back to basics: what even is a product description? A product description is a form of marketing copy that describes a given product. In other words, it provides potential customers with all the need-to-know information about your digital product.
Standard product descriptions include a title and a description, which outlines the digital product’s features, benefits, and unique value. Within your online storefront, these descriptions live on your digital product’s landing page, alongside your product’s imagery and pricing, and the ultra-important “Buy Now” button.
Here’s a landing page example from creator Katarina Terentieva, who offers a mini-course on “How To Become a Creative Director” on her Leap store:
When writing digital product descriptions, it might be helpful to think of them as salespeople. Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, your online shop doesn’t have experts on the sales floor who are able to immediately (and effectively) talk up and sell your digital products to potential customers. In lieu of an IRL sales force, digital storefront owners have to rely on the written word — i.e. product descriptions.
Similar to the difference between an expert and inexperienced salesperson, the difference between a mediocre vs. a great product description can make or break a potential sale and has an impact on general sales in the long run. In other words, great product descriptions have the power to convert leads into paying customers — and, ultimately, earn you more money over time.
10 Tips to write digital product descriptions that sell
Want to write digital product descriptions that’ll make potential customers smash that “Buy Now” button? Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best tips for writing great product descriptions:
- Speak to your target customer
- Highlight your digital product’s benefits
- Avoid clichéd claims
- Don’t be afraid to boast (but back it up with facts)
- Capture your audience’s imagination
- Tell a story
- Use social proof
- Make your descriptions readable (and scannable!)
- Get technical with it
- Harness the power of SEO
Tip 1: Speak to your target customer
A good digital product description speaks directly to your customer. Remember that your product descriptions are part of your marketing efforts and, like all your other marketing assets, they should be tailored to your target customer. While product descriptions written for a general audience can feel vague, copy that targets your ideal customer’s preferences and needs is much more engaging — and much more likely to lead to a sale.
To create engaging digital product descriptions, you’ll want to address your target customer directly and communicate in a way that resonates with them personally.
Keep your target customer in mind while writing your digital product description. Ask yourself questions like: “How do they want to be spoken to?” “What vocabulary do they use?” “What questions might they have about my digital product?” These will help you determine the tone of your product description, as well as exactly which details to include (i.e. all the features and benefits your customers are looking for).
When writing your product description, it might be helpful to imagine yourself as a salesperson, speaking with your customer face-to-face in a brick-and-mortar store. The information and language you would use to engage them in this scenario is exactly what you’ll want to use in your product descriptions. And this means addressing your customers directly using the word “you!”
Tip 2: Highlight your digital product’s benefits
Of course, you’re excited about all your digital product’s cool features — you spent all that time and effort fine-tuning them, right? But while it might be tempting to focus on your product’s features, it’s important to remember that potential customers are more interested in how these features will benefit them. They want to learn how your product will solve their problems and add value to their lives.
A great product description does more than outline your product’s features, it also dives into the benefits of each feature. In other words, your copy should highlight how helpful your product is to your target customer, while dispelling any uncertainty they might have about your product’s use value.
When writing about your digital product’s unique benefits, ask yourself questions like, “How does my product make customers’ lives better or easier?” and “What problems does my product solve?” These will help you get into the mind of your customer, so you can highlight the ways your digital product best serves them.
Need help fleshing out your product’s unique benefits? Our Online Store Description Template provides you with helpful writing prompts and fillable tables that help you brainstorm and organize your digital product’s features, specs, and benefits, so you can write best-selling product descriptions.
Tip 3: Avoid clichéd claims
Writing a great product description is tough work! And when the going gets tough, it’s totally tempting to lean back on generic, overused phrases and marketing terms. You know the ones, like “high-quality” or “effective.” Sure, these words add bulk to your product descriptions, but when you start to think about it, they’re really just saying a whole lot of nothing.
These clichés make for ineffective digital product copy because they’re vague and, ultimately, uninformative. Rather than being filled with, well, filler, your digital product descriptions should provide unique and persuasive information about your products. You know, the kind of copy that tells potential customers exactly what your product is about and the results they can expect from it.
When writing your digital product description, get as specific as possible with the details you include and the claims you make about your digital product. Rather than using a word like “effective” (which only describes that your product fulfills its intended outcome), describe how your digital product provides value to your customer.
At the end of the day, you want to make every word in your digital product description meaningful and count for something.
Tip 4: Don’t be afraid to boast (but back it up with facts)
In addition to clichéd claims, it’s also easy to fall back on superlatives when writing your digital product descriptions. Superlatives are words that are used to express that something is the highest quality of its kind. Think of phrases like, “the best,” “the most effective,” or “the easiest.”
In marketing copy, superlatives are commonly used to make exaggerated or unfounded claims about products. At best, they read as insincere and, at worst, they can undermine your product’s actual value — unless you can back them up with real evidence.
If you say that your product is “the best” (or “the most advanced” or the “most efficient”), then you need to provide your customers with specific reasons why these claims are true. This proof can take many forms, including data from product testing or competitor analysis, and testimonials from existing customers.
If your digital product really is the best and you want to boast about it (because, why wouldn’t you?), then you’ll need to include solid proof in your product descriptions. If not, then you’ll need to turn down the superlative language so it accurately reflects your product’s capabilities.
Tip 5: Capture your audience’s imagination
Ever wonder why perfume ads are so over the top? It’s because they tap into aspirational marketing.
Aspirational marketing sells more than just a product or service, but an idea. Specifically, your target audience’s idea of success, progress, or the ideal state they want to achieve after overcoming their challenges. In other words, aspirational marketing targets audiences by capturing their imagination.
Aspirational marketing is especially relevant to products that aren’t tangibly shoppable (i.e. physical products in e-commerce boutiques) or products that are altogether intangible (like perfumes or — you guessed it — digital products.) Customers aren’t able to physically interact with these kinds of products. However, harnessing the power of aspirational copywriting helps you recreate the same effect online. In other words, your copy should help readers imagine what it would be like to own and use your digital product.
Here’s a writing prompt to get started: beginning with the word “imagine,” write a short paragraph describing how a customer would feel owning your digital product. What emotions are they feeling? What does your digital product enable them to accomplish? How does owning your digital product change their day-to-day life? Paint as vivid a picture as possible. From there, you can use this paragraph as inspiration while writing your digital product description.
Tip 6: Tell a story
Did you know that the human brain is hard-wired for story-telling? That’s right: science has proven that the human brain is programmed to organize information into narratives. Why? Because stories make things more meaningful and memorable to us.
So, if you want to create meaningful, memorable product descriptions, you’ll definitely want to harness the power of narrative in your copywriting.
To do this, you’ll want to write a product description that tells your digital product’s story. A well-written, narrative-driven product description is more likely to resonate with your readers and make your digital product more memorable in the crowded online market.
There are tons of different ways you can tell your digital product’s story, including the inspiration behind your digital product, its evolution throughout the development process, and how it’s helped customers overcome challenges and achieve their goals.
Tip 7: Use social proof
Want to write high-conversion product descriptions? Consider adding social proof to your copy.
Social proof is a psychological concept that says people are influenced by others’ behaviors, actions, and opinions. When extrapolated to the world of digital marketing, it means that people look to the opinion of others when shopping online. Examples of social proof in this scenario include reviews, testimonials, sponsored content, quotes from professionals, recommendations from influencers, and mentions in reputable publications.
Social proof is an incredibly powerful social phenomenon — and marketing tactic. Seriously! Think of the last time you bought a product because of a positive review or went to a restaurant because it had a 4+ star rating on Google. In fact, the entire premise of influencer marketing is based on the concept of social proof.
One of the best (and easiest) ways to leverage social proof is to include customer reviews on your product listing page. If your storefront tool allows, add a review section to your product listing page. Then, get busy asking existing customers to leave their ratings and reviews. Even if you’re not able to include a review block on your PLP, you can always include quotes and testimonials from happy customers directly into your descriptions.
Tip 8: Make your descriptions readable (and scannable!)
Great product descriptions are easily readable and, ideally, scannable. That’s to say that they’re able to convey key information to readers, quickly.
Scannable product descriptions leverage a combination of web design, graphic design, and copywriting elements to make product descriptions more reader- (and customer-) friendly. When used together, elements like eye-grabbing headlines and bullet points can help potential customers find, read, and absorb the information they care about in just a few seconds.
It almost goes without saying that easy-to-read product descriptions are appealing to potential customers. While difficult-to-read product descriptions can detract from your customer’s experience (and lose you potential sales), reader-friendly copy make the buying experience much more enjoyable.
Here are some of our best tips to creating easy-to-read product descriptions:
- Use headlines: Headlines help you divide your product information into groupings, so your customer can find the details they want faster.
- Use bullet points: Bullet points enable you to break up information into more easily digestible tidbits, which makes your product description easier to read and absorb.
- Consider font size: Larger font sizes don’t just improve your copy’s readability, it makes your product descriptions more accessible to all potential customers.
Tip 9: Get technical with it
We know we already mentioned that, when writing your product descriptions, you should stick to vocabulary within your customer’s wheelhouse. And, in most cases, we totally stand by this advice! However, if you have a more technical product, it’s definitely alright to get a little technical with the language you’re using in your descriptions. This includes getting into the nitty=gritty with your product’s niche specs and features, and, yes, even some jargon.
Using technical language in your product descriptions can help you build trust with potential customers by proving your industry expertise, and providing them with all the information they need to make a sound purchase.
While it’s good to use jargon to describe more technical products, it’s also important not to go overboard with it. If you’re using niche terms, it’s important that your audience is able to understand them and that, in the end, you’re able to get your point across. This often comes down to context, but it can also be helpful to integrate simple definitions of technical terms into your copy. You can also balance out your product descriptions by offsetting technical terms with a conversational tone or colloquial language.
Tip 10: Harness the power of SEO
Great product descriptions actually serve double duty. On one hand, they act as effective sales tools for your digital products. On the other hand, however, product descriptions are powerful vessels for your business’s SEO efforts.
Need an SEO refresh? SEO (also known as search engine optimization) is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility on search engines like Google. From a copywriting standpoint, this process involves integrating popular search engine keywords into your website’s copy. The idea behind SEO goes a little something like this: the keywords you use in your copy helps Google understand what your website is all about and, if you use enough of the right keywords, your website will rank higher on Google’s search results pages so potential customers can find you faster and more easily.
This all means that, when writing your product descriptions, you’ll want to balance your marketing copy with the SEO keywords that will help customers find your product.
Now, SEO copywriting is an industry unto itself, with brands hiring professional SEO-trained copywriters to help them rank higher than their competitors. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t DIY your SEO efforts! Free online tools like Google Keyword Planner can help you find the relevant keywords to use in your descriptions.
It also doesn’t hurt to use a bit of common sense. When writing, ask yourself what kinds of words or phrases your target audience might type into Google to find your product. These are all great terms to sprinkle throughout your product descriptions — and, crucially, in your product’s title.
Launch your online storefront today
And that’s it: all of our best tips for writing product descriptions that will have your digital products flying off the (digital) shelves, and a handy template to help you create them. Now, it’s up to you to put those fingers to the keyboard and start writing them!
If you’re looking for a platform to host your digital products (and write product descriptions for you!), look no further than The Leap.
The Leap is an all-in-one creator platform with features including a mobile-optimized storefront, AI-powered digital product builder, and email marketing tools. In other words, it allows you to create, sell, and market your digital products all in one app.
In addition to enabling you to create your own digital product in just minutes, The Leap’s easy-to-use online storefront builder helps you set up shop in just a few clicks, so you can start selling ASAP — and earning sooner. What’s more, The Leap’s smart AI assistant can generate descriptions for your digital products in seconds, saving you time and effort in writing the perfect copy to promote your products.
The best part? The Leap is totally free to use.
Want to start building your online store today? Try The Leap for free now.
Build, market, and sell digital products all in one spot with The Leap!
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Further reading
- How To Sell Digital Products Online: A 6-Step Launch Checklist
- 15 Profitable Digital Products To Sell Online (+ Real Examples)
- How to Price Your Digital Products for More Sales
- How To Promote Your Digital Products: 10 Ways To Boost Sales
- How To Make Passive Income Selling Digital Products
- 15 Digital Product Ideas To Sell for Every Niche
- 10 Best Platforms To Sell Digital Products Online
- 10 Best Creator Store Platforms for Monetizing Your Knowledge
