Industry Report: Dietary Supplement Trends for Q1 2019
The global dietary supplement market is predicted to grow in 2019. Typically in the past supplement companies competed on health benefits, product differentiation, category extension and delivery innovation. Which isn’t anything new to those who market supplements.
What is new however, is what’s working to sell dietary supplements online in 2019 and beyond. This changing trend of the dietary supplement industry is effecting how direct response marketers will sell their products online in 2019 and the near future.
Bobby Hewitt, the founder of Creative Thirst, a conversion rate optimization agency that specializes in the dietary supplement market said,
“I’ve been seeing this trend play out for a while. For at least 3 years now… And everything seems to be lining up to make 2019 the year this goes into the new way of selling supplements online. If that’s good for the dietary supplement marketer is another story altogether.”
8 Years ago, back in 2011, 80% of all traffic was on desktop. And the biggest traffic sources online had no issues at all promoting dietary supplements.
Today in 2019, 80% of all traffic is on a mobile phone. The biggest online traffic sources are definitely NOT okay with promoting dietary supplements. Direct response long-form sales letters and video sales letters, (VSL) are frowned upon by the top traffic sources.
This trend, will greatly affect the approach to copywriting for selling supplements online in 2019 and beyond.
If the major online traffic sources are restricting you from getting any serious volume of visitors to your sales page at all, there’s no way you can sell.
That includes both Google and Facebook. Which control the majority of all Internet traffic plus what gets through via Gmail and Facebook Messenger.
The Keys for Supplement Marketing Success in 2019
The broad consumer demand for health and wellness products and services continues to fuel online customer research, which influences buying decisions when it comes to health supplements.
Thriving and growing today in this new world of “Doctor Google” and Facebook is poised for another big shift and I’m already seeing it play out right now.
Those who market supplements online need to prepare for this 2019 dietary supplement marketing trend. Especially those that use direct response marketing to sell supplements.
Back when major traffic channels didn’t tighten up their will on your sales pages, it didn’t matter as much.
Back in the day, you could have the same sales page for all of your traffic.
The more advanced supplement marketers had different pre-sell pages for each type of traffic temperature, (cold, warm, hot) and maybe if they had the time and resources they had a different marketing lead (the first 300 – 500 words) on a sales page that was unique to the traffic source, if it was big enough promotion to be worth the effort.
Today, in 2019 successful supplement marketers will need to have separate funnels for each traffic source, just to keep up with sales.
It’s all because of tighter restrictions from the top tier traffic sources due to changes in the culture.
This will only continue to get worse as fake news continues to span the collective consciousness.
This forever changes the way people are open to receiving information.
Trust and Belief, two critical factors in selling dietary supplements online, have always been important and what sets supplements apart from selling another product online.
It’s not all bad… creating multiple funnels for each traffic source, is actually a good thing. It forces direct response supplement marketers to think more strategically about the buyer. We’ve been seeing and learning what works and what doesn’t for years working in the industry, across many health clients, everyone else is playing catch-up.
It’s always been this way to a degree. What email buys will allow is very different than what Google and Facebook will.
The difference is the rules about what you can and can’t do with direct response supplement marketing are getting stricter.
Facebook is becoming it’s own nuanced beast that’s very different than any other top tier traffic source. Yet, it’s probably the best one out there because of the volume, reach and ability to hyper target. Not to mention build trust quickly.
Supplement marketers are now forced to “play their game” if they want access to such a large audience, which is part of how you scale beyond your current limit.
And this changes how development teams are organized around projects as well as how A/B tests will be run.
We’re going to see a higher need for bigger development teams to compensate for multiple funnels. The supplement companies that can’t keep up, will need more time to keep up with the changes needed.
The needs also increase for the conversion optimization team to keep up with A/B testing different funnels for each traffic source.
The bottom line is the funnel won’t be the same anymore.
A Facebook funnel will have different A/B tests than another funnel with a different traffic source.
The way supplement funnels are marketed to the mainstream will also change as a result.
Facebook is now “mainstream” and it will need to accept that it’s NOT a platform but a media company. Even if they will never publicly say that, it is their business model after all.
The impact this has on supplement marketing is profound.
This will force direct response supplement marketing to move away from curiosity and fear driven approaches to selling and move towards OFFER driven selling.
Less, if any, agitation of the problem in the content, and more towards discounting. Facebook hates when marketers push the fear and pain buttons to sell.
This “mainstream” offer approach, is a double edged sword. And it may hurt the medium sized supplement companies in the $5 – $30 Million dollar revenue range because they simply won’t convert at the same level. Restricting where they can scale an offer or forcing them to get WAY more creative.
This is the game you have to play to get traffic from Facebook / Google in the health supplement space.
These new watered-down, Facebook friendly version of your copy and discount offer driven front-ends are harder to convert visitors into sales from because they eliminate all of the emotion from the sale. Competing on price rather than how people buy health supplements. Making your unique proprietary blend dietary supplement a commodity. At least on Facebook.
The other route is getting people in via legitimate compliant articles that provide value. This is nothing new. Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher have been using these tactics and teaching them for more than 3 years. Driving traffic to high quality content and then retargeting them back to a lead magnet and or a direct response funnel. It’s safer for Google and Facebook Traffic. Plus it builds trust and familiarity by building trust.
The bottom line is health supplement marketers in 2019 will need to play a longer game when it comes to acquiring traffic. As a result, costs for acquisition will go up as well as time to purchase.
Three Funnels Every Health Supplement Business Needs To Build A Multi-Million Dollar Empire
Through our work in the online health space, we’ve optimized many dietary supplement businesses. In that time, we’ve uncovered the three critical funnels for success.
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