One Thing Nutritional Health and Supplement Marketers Cannot Be Successful Without

We think we know what our nutritional health customers want but we really don’t.

When we start a nutritional supplement marketing campaign or write sales copy the most disciplined of us start with the customer first. Some smart marketers even start with a customer persona document to help envision the customer in their mind.

But somewhere along the way from concept or copy to web page, the purchase action gets lost in translation.

Our best intentions overlook the finer details and those details are the gaps between what we think we know and the actual truth.

Let’s use a web page as an example.

All of the things that surround what we know about our customer, the details, can include the layout of the page.

The images used to support our nutritional marketing message.

The process a visitor has to go through to buy.

And much more.

Much of these things are things that marketers take for granted. They think there job is done well before the visitor buys, that all they need to do is drive the traffic or set up the promotion and the system will handle the rest.

But there are opportunities to increase sales if only we really knew our visitors, or kept that customer persona in mind every step of the way all the way through, click by click and even post purchase.

The biggest thing standing in our way, is ourselves.

We inevitably get off track and default to us in our thinking.

We think everyone uses the web the way we do, and that everyone wants what we want and buys online in the exact same way as we do.

Have you ever watched someone else use a website? Starting my career as a designer I’ve done this many times and it’s truly enlightening to experience.

Here’s a little experiment for you to try. Find a website that someone you know has never been to before. Load up the home page and ask that person to do something on the site. It could be anything, like go find an xyz product of your choice and write a review on it. Or where would you go if you wanted to do x?

Then sit next to them and watch what they do. The hard part is not to say anything while they are trying to do what you asked them to do. You’ll quickly realize they don’t use the site the same way you do and the things that you thought that were so obvious are not at all obvious to them.

We all design and create and develop our marketing campaigns from the same place, even if we use personas or have a vision of the customer in our heads. We all default to “How we do it” or “How we think”, it’s just human nature since we’re too close to the goal.

What’s lacking here is empathy.

Empathy is the ability to truly experience and understand the emotions, fears and dreams of your site visitors.

This allows a great marketing optimizer to see things others cannot so that they can align emotion, motivation and intent with conversion goals.

The more empathy we have at each step of the process, the more impact we can make as marketers.

Empathy is a great quality to have and will take you much further than if you had none at all but it truly is only the starting point not the entire point.

Successful nutritional health and supplement marketers need to also have insatiable curiosity.

Without an insatiable curiosity that demands more, you won’t get to the root.

It’s usually the root of the problem that allows you to see things in different ways and gets you to the “Ah” moment.

The moment that connects all the dots across the entire customer experience.

Great marketers never stop asking “why“.

But the ONE THING every health marketer needs to be super successful is an understanding of buying psychology.

Technology will constantly change but human nature will always stay the same.

The reasons why we buy are universally coded into our DNA.

Tapping into those reasons are key to optimizing for people not webpages.

A basic understanding of buying psychology is essential to great optimization.

If you don’t understand people, you can’t help them buy.