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The Best Supplement Marketing Strategies That Work

The Best Supplement Marketing Strategies That Work

Are you using the best supplement marketing strategies to grow online sales? This comprehensive marketing guide will help you think through the many options for marketing a dietary supplement brand.

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Looking at the past, the future would suggest that there’s always going to be a market for health, wellness and prevention.

Dietary supplements is one of those markets where theres a long history of customers spending money in the category.

The current market value is $163.9 billion USD, as of 2022 and is expected to reach $210.3 billion USD by the year 2026. And there’s no sign of that stopping or slowing down anytime soon.

The active market is enormous. 77% of Americans take at least one supplement and spend on average over $500 per year on dietary supplements. If you’d like to learn more details about supplement customers, I wrote an article on who buys dietary supplements and why that you can read it here.

Why Does Your Supplement Brand Need a Unique Marketing Approach?

A marketing strategy sets your brand apart from the competition. In many cases, it is the difference between success and failure.

The supplement market is a crowded space. So, developing your unique value proposition and understanding your customer is vital.

There are 3 key ways to compete in this market.

  • Find a gap in a market that is underserved or is not being spoken to directly. Or by other brands. For example Supplements for gamers or vegan gardeners.
  • Leverage your unique founder’s story. Or, by get a Doctor or medical advisory board to be the face of your supplement brand.
  • Solve a “BIG” pain point that already has a proven market. Avoid a problem that is more preventative care and go after one that has a higher urgency. Don’t get too caught up with following trends. There will always be a new trending ingredient or form factor that enters the market and takes off.

How Marketing and Advertising Dietary Supplements Different

Marketing a health supplement is different from marketing other products. The reason for this is that people don’t buy dietary supplements the way they buy other products.

Supplement marketing is not simply a matter of increasing clarity, reducing friction, or improving the user experience on your website. 

What works for the buyer psychology of this market is what I call the supplement buyer behavior framework, which focuses on trust, belief, hope, and desire. To learn more about my framework, here’s an article where you can read about it.

Since people buy supplements differently, the typical marketing advice that “works” for most eCommerce brands doesn’t always work in supplement marketing. 

I see it every day working with supplement brand owners.

In fact, the best supplement marketing strategies that work are not even used by the big-name vitamin brands like Gaia Herbs, Nature Made, Life Extension, Garden of Life, and others. 

Those brands already have traction and brand recognition among consumers. 

Smaller Direct to Consumer (DTC) supplement brands can’t act like the big guys and expect to beat them at the game.

But smaller online supplement brands have a big advantage over the big brands because… 

The Supplement Marketing Landscape is Changing

This massive shift can be attributed to four key factors.

  1. The shift towards Direct to Consumer (DTC)
  2. Covid’s effect on the supplement market
  3. The next generation of supplement buyers
  4. The merging of branding and direct response

1. The Shift Towards Direct to Consumer Brands Online

eMarketer forecasts that direct-to-consumer (DTC) purchases made up 2.5% of total retail sales in 2022. U.S. online retail sales are projected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2027.

Going direct to consumers online, allows smaller brands to launch new products at a smaller scale, test with selected demographics, and gather feedback quickly.

The trend of marketing direct to consumers and away from brick-and-mortar stores have been going on for over 10 years but has increased in the last 3 years.

Online stores such as Amazon, Walmart, iHerb, and other sites have accelerated this trend. But the newest DTC trend is to bypass these third-party retailers and sell directly to the customer from their own site. So the brand owner can also own the relationship with the customer.

Building trust and establishing a direct relationship with customers is key to supplement marketing success.

Having a one-to-one connection to the customer relationship through email and mobile creates a backend that is the true economic engine of a supplement company. To learn more about how the backend fuels business growth, read the article I wrote on it here.

The backend ties into the profitability of an online DTC company but margins also play an important role.

An online supplement business can be quite profitable. The average profit margin on a bottle of supplements is between 40% and 70%, a healthy profit margin for sure.

This overall DTC trend is responsible for a larger change in customer behavior. More and more customers are buying online now more than ever. 

Which ties into the next massive shift that took place.

2. The Supplement Market Changed due to Covid

It’s no surprise that growth in e-commerce sales accelerated during the 2020 pandemic. Online shopping was the only way to buy when in-person shopping shut down. 

The dietary supplement sales took off like a rocket during this time as everyone suddenly became concerned with preventative care and immunity.

This shift in consumer mindset opened up the idea of taking supplements as a preventative measure for health to many people. Especially for a lower age demographic, under 45, which is the typical sweet spot for supplement buyers.

With the effects of the pandemic still around, two-plus years after it started, this shift in mindset will stick around for much longer. It continues to add fuel to an already growing new market, younger buyers.

Now in 2023 that shift feels like it’s starting to swing back the other way.

3. The Next Generation of Supplement Customers are Different But Will Become The Same

Generation X and The Millennial Generation are different buyers than the Baby Boomers that have filled the wellness market for so many years.

The same supplement buying framework of trust, belief, hope, and desire still applies, but this younger audience also cares about a few things the older generation does not even consider.

Namely sustainability and the impact on the environment, along with the sourcing of ingredients and simplicity of ingredients.

Eventually, though all generations grow up and develop the same problems that come with age.

The desires are the same because we’re all human and all markets go towards the same physical problems that work so well in the Baby Boomer market. 

The big difference is that this new younger market is becoming more aware and better educated. 

Much better educated than the Baby Boomer market. So as they age up into the old sweet spot demographic they will be a more sophisticated buyer who’s likely already been taking supplements for a while.

Which leads to how marketing supplements are changing.

4. Supplement Marketing is Merging Two Different Worlds

As competition rises and the cost of acquiring a customer increases, the way marketing is done is changing. I’m already seeing this happening and much of this new way of marketing is what I work on with supplement clients one-on-one.

As a result of competition and increased marketing costs the two marketing schools, branding and direct response, are merging.

The merging of branding and direct response marketing is creating a hybrid approach to supplement marketing.

This hybrid approach takes the best of direct response and applies it to brand marketing.

Traditional brand marketing focused more on look and feel, whereas direct response marketing focused on immediate results and sales.

Many marketing tactics on the direct response side are blending into brand marketing

Some of which include long sales pages and conversion optimization tactics that increase front-end sales and average order value (AOV).

The more front-end conversions, and the higher the AOV along with a strong lifetime value through backend sales, the more you can afford to pay to acquire a new customer. That’s how you win the game.

Now that you understand the shift that’s happening in the marketplace, let’s move on to how to market a dietary supplement in this new paradigm.

There are many opportunities to sell supplements directly to consumers online, but no marketing guide for supplements would be complete without talking about what you can and can’t say when marketing supplements.

Supplement Marketing 101 – Claims

Every supplement marketer should be aware of the different types of allowable claims in the supplement industry. So let’s start off with a quick primer.

Under the Dietary Supplement Health Act (DSHEA) of 1994, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) regulates dietary supplements under a different set of regulations than “conventional” food and drugs.

The supplement niche is highly regulated and there are certain things that are off-limits.

Specifically in the types of claims you can and can’t make. I’ll briefly describe the three types below.

The most common is a Structure / Function Claim. It demonstrates how an ingredient affects the normal system or activity of the body.

Here are a couple of examples: “Helps promote heart health.” or “Promotes restful sleep.”

The second one is a Nutrient Content Claim. This type of claim describes the level of a component, or lack thereof, in the ingredients of a supplement.  

Here are a few examples of a nutrient content claim:

“Excellent source of Vitamin D” or “Dairy Free” 

Finally, the most tricky is the Health Claim. This type of claim explains the connection between an ingredient and your health or a health condition. 

Here’s an example: “A diet that contains x may reduce the risk of y.”

If you want to learn more you can read my two-part article on dietary supplement claims – what’s allowed and part two – what’s not allowed.

Paid ads are a great way to increase the speed of supplement marketing. This is the fastest way to get traffic and test if your sales message is strong enough to sell. You’re paying for speed. Even if you don’t get any sales, you’ve paid to learn if your current marketing approach works or not.

The supplement market is a very mature marketplace and thus it’s a pay-to-play world. If you’re not paying for ads to grow your supplement business then you’re not playing at the highest level. 

When it comes to paid ads online there are a ton of different options.

The Big 3 Are:

  1. Google Shopping Ads – Now Google Performance Max
  2. Google Pay Per Click Ads (PPC) – Now Google Performance Max
  3. YouTube Ads

And a ton of other paid ads like:

  • Retargeting Ads (on multiple platforms, Google, Facebook, etc.)
  • Other search engine PPC ads (Bing, Yahoo, etc.)
  • Amazon Ads – Specifically for selling on Amazon
  • Native Ads (Taboola, Outbrain, etc.)
  • Email List Buys 
  • Social media ads (Facebook, Instagram, etc) are listed below in their own section.
  • Google Display Ads

Each of the big four above has its own unique nuances and ways of marketing. 

For example, Google shopping ads are more of a comparison price shopping engine. The buyer intent is very high and therefore it can be a bit easier to convert a visitor into a sale. But the price point is important and a big driver, since those visitors are lower in the consideration phase of their buying journey. 

Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads are those where you’re bidding on a group of keywords with a text ad that appears at the top of search results. This is a warmer audience and generally a better buyer since they have high intent. They are actively searching for a solution and are in research mode. 

You might be more familiar with Display ads under their more common name, banner ads. These are the coldest of all the audiences of the big 4. And thus they generally are much more difficult to convert into a sale.

YouTube Ads are their own special animal and deserve their own section below.

YouTube Ads & Supplement Marketing

From an advertising perspective, there’s a lot of intent behind someone on YouTube that’s not on all of the other social media platforms.

People are using YouTube as a search engine to solve their problems with a video instead of a text article.

There are searches for certain things related to supplements. For example, people searching how to lower cholesterol.

And you can target based on certain videos watched. So you could literally handpick the video that you want to run your ad in front of. For example, if Dr. Oz has a video that has 10 million views and it’s about foods that lower your cholesterol. You can literally handpick that YouTube URL in your targeting options and run your ad right in front of that video. 

And specifically for supplement advertisers, there’s also fewer platform compliance problems on YouTube compared to Facebook. 

YouTube is a hidden gold mine for traffic, but what scares people away is the video aspect of it. 

It’s a lot more challenging to create a video than a text and image ad.

Beyond that, there is also a lot of nuances when it comes to YouTube as a traffic source. Everything from the structure of the ad, the offer, the length, and the production quality. 

To learn more about advertising a supplement brand on YouTube read my article here.

I did an hour-long interview on how to use YouTube ads to grow a health supplement business on my podcast which you can listen to here.

Some Options For Buying Traffic

Whether they are paid ads on Google, YouTube, or anywhere you’ll need to buy that traffic. There are a few options for that that I’ve outlined below.

Working with an agency – It’s vital to do your due diligence when hiring an agency. Many of them are not very good. And most don’t produce enough creative assets and rely on the brand to feed them creative ad images and sometimes even ad copy.

A good agency will also be creating the ad creative images and videos for you as part of the package.

If you’re planning on working with a traffic agency their fees can range anywhere between $3,000 to $7,500 a month and most also charge a percentage of the total ad spend. That’s just the agency management fee. The ad spend fee is the actual budget that goes to Google, Facebook, or wherever. This is the budget that’s spent on clicks.

Managing ads yourself – This may be the best option if you’re just starting out or if your budget is very low.

If you’re going this route you avoid the agency management fee and can spend that budget on more ad spend. However, there is a learning curve if you’ve never bought media before and you’ll end up paying for that learning curve in ad spend dollars. 

If you’re managing the ads yourself it’s really important that you understand each network’s rules for compliance. This knowledge is part of what you’re paying for when working with an agency. 

If you violate the rules the ad platform will shut your account down and you pretty much can not get it back or advertise on that platform again. Top agencies that spend a lot on advertising have Facebook representatives that can get their accounts reinstated and work with them to some degree. It’s not a special pass to do anything, but it is more than any individual alone can do.

Partnering with a media buyer – This is a tricky option that I would avoid unless you already know a good media buyer and can trust them. Plus they need to know what they are doing. So if they haven’t managed multiple clients before, you’re better off just managing the ads yourself.

Again understanding the ad network’s rules for compliance, of what’s allowed and what’s not, is vital. Facebook has similar but different nuanced rules than the FDA, especially when it comes to supplements.

A bit about budgets

Minimum ad spend is $5k a month. Realistically $10 – $20k to really get traction faster and your sales cranking. You need pressure, that is traffic to pages to test performance as well as ad creative. Ad creative is just as much the key to success as budget is.

Email Marketing

Email is the backend of every supplement marketing strategy. The backend is where the big money is often made. This is why building an email list is so vital, because if you don’t own the customer you can’t market to them. Owning the customer means you have a relationship with them, either because they purchased from you or they opted-in to connect with your brand.

Getting a prospect to opt-in by offering a resource guide or a discount off is a proven way to build an email list. But an even better strategy is to get a buyer email, rather than a prospect. A buyer is infinitely more valuable because they already paid with their wallet. Buyer emails are easier to convert into more sales on the backend.

Your email list should be constantly growing and contracting, with new people getting on your list and people unsubscribing. Once your email list gets to a certain size, at least a few thousand people, you’ll want to consider segmenting your list with different offers, to maximize email revenue.

Segmenting by RFM data is going to be the most impactful for any email campaign. RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value.

You can increase the response rate by segmenting for Recency. This email segment is a group of customers whose last purchase was more recent.  

You can increase conversion rates by segmenting by Frequency. This is a group of customers who purchased once or more than once. Customers who purchased before are more likely to buy again.

And you can increase LTV by segmenting by Monetary Value. This segment is grouped by how much a customer spent. Those who spent a lot today, are more likely to spend a lot more in the future and thus raise the LTV of that segment.

Email is such an important lever of a supplement business that it IS the business. It’s where all of the money is made because that’s your lifeline to the customer.

Email will never go away but a slice of that pie is now going to texting.

SMS Marketing For Health & Wellness E-commerce Brands

SMS stands for (Short Message Service) and SMS marketing is any type of marketing sent via a text message. Typically these marketing texts are mostly promotional discounts and flash sales. 

The typical SMS promotion text looks like this:

Brand Name: As summer comes to an end, we’ve been doing a bit of cleanup at the warehouse…

And I realized, we have just enough jars of our premium coconut-derived MCT Oil Powder to GIVE SOME AWAY for free.

Overstock End of Summer Super Sale: Get up to 2 FREE BONUS Jars of MCT Oil Powder with your order today (plus  get FREE Shipping!) ==> link.ct

Supplement brands have a huge opportunity to increase customer lifetime value with two very powerful often overlooked SMS marketing messages.

The first strategy turns hesitant shoppers into raving fans by nurturing and educating prospects and customers with guides, quizzes, and informative content delivered via SMS. This builds fans, by providing valuable content and long-term sales.

The second is upselling other products that work even better together.

Once your customer has purchased from you, send them an SMS upsell offer that makes sense using product-level segmentation and purchase triggers.

Here’s an example:

Brand Name: Julie, we hope you’re loving your Keto bars. You might also want to include a gut-balancing probiotic on your health journey.

Probiotics are amazing for maintaining optimal health and ours is ultra clean & today we’ll throw in a free bottle of Prebiotics to go with it. Here’s 15% off so you can try it 🙂 Just use code TRY NOW at checkout: link.ct

Lastly, all of the same email marketing strategies work well on SMS, perhaps even better as a text message. Including, content value add messages, promotions and sales, cart abandonment, and welcome messages.

Once you’ve maximized your own list, an alternative is to leverage someone else’s and the best way to do that is with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing For Supplements

Affiliate marketing can be a secret weapon for supplement marketing. 

Affiliate marketing is where third-party publishers, or affiliates, promote your supplements to their email list and often, vice versa for a commission on sales.

It’s not uncommon to have email swaps between the brand and the affiliate, because many affiliates also have their own offers to promote.

When it comes to this type of marketing it’s all about relationships.

Affiliates however are not a set-it-and-forget-it activity. As a brand, you need to support affiliates with marketing materials including everything from email swipes, that they can cut and paste to an affiliate tracking link so they can get paid.

This method sounds easy, just pay commissions for what sells. But the reality is that to work in the affiliate space your marketing have to be very aggressive “black hat” to make it work. There are simply too many bad apples in the affiliate space with large email lists and to get them to promote for you it has to convert or else they won’t make any money. 

It’s just a sad truth, that aggressive offers tend to convey better. In the affiliate arena, you’re competing with marketing claims that may be outside your comfort zone.

Additionally, a traditional eCommerce website is not going to work with this traffic source. What works well here are long-form text or video sales pages (VSLs) that are 25 – 60 minutes long.

Anyone serious about using this marketing strategy should hire a dedicated affiliate manager to build and nurture relationships, and manage the day-to-day affiliate activities and joint venture partnerships, which are often used interchangeably with affiliates. 

Joint ventures are really a different type of partnership, so let’s look at that next.

Marketing Supplements With Joint Venture Partnerships

Joint Ventures (JVs) have a deeper partnership relationship than an affiliate. Where an affiliate gets paid only on sales made. A JV shares in the costs, among other things.

What that means is if a mailing does not generate the projected amount of sales you as a partner will do what’s called a ‘Make Good.’ 

Meaning you’ll pay the JV the difference even if you didn’t get the sales you had hoped for. This maintains the relationship but also maintains your reputation in the industry. 

The JV and affiliate world in dietary supplements is very small and once your reputation is tarnished you can’t get it back.

In either case JV or Affiliate, it’s not as easy as a secret low-cost traffic source where you only pay for sales. 

Both the affiliate and JV route take a lot more time and effort to build up a meaningful program than you might expect. 

You can’t simply put it out there and expect people to come to you. In both areas, it’s all about building relationships and supporting the JV / Affiliate in many different ways.

Something that has a lot fewer barriers is Amazon.

Using Amazon Sponsored Ads to Sell Supplements

It’s a challenge to get your supplement on store shelves in physical brick-and-mortar stores, but they have a steady stream of customers. Online the equivalent is Amazon. 

Getting your supplement listed on Amazon is infinitely easier than negotiating with a brick-and-mortar store. 

However, there are a ton of hoops you have to go through to get a supplement listed on Amazon. Don’t be surprised if you have to pay for quality control studies and send them to Amazon to prove that your supplement does not contain any heavy metals, contaminants, etc.

But Amazon is a great way to test the market. Think of Amazon as a search engine where people go to buy. Unlike Google where they are searching not only to buy but also to learn, be entertained, etc. 

The big difference is that Amazon wants to make a sale. Amazon doesn’t particularly care who that sale is for, just that there is a sale conversion.

Because Amazon is optimized for sales. Therefore, the products that show in the search results are those that already sell really well. 

Amazon uses its own unique algorithm to determine what’s shown but it’s primarily based on conversion rate, the click-through rate in the first week, and reviews. 

Reviews are a chicken and egg situation, you don’t get any if you’re not selling well. And Amazon has cracked down on tactics to game the number of reviews.

Your first week on Amazon is critical. Because, when you first list your supplement on Amazon you have a very brief time period to show Amazon that you’re better than all the other competitors. 

One metric the Amazon algorithm looks for is click-through rate. That is click-through from the listing to Amazon’s product detail page. 

So, if you have a higher click-through rate compared to other top-seller alternative products in your first week, compared to what they had in their first week, then the Amazon algorithm will boost your product because it takes into account how well you’re doing for where you are in your Amazon lifecycle time period.

One of the dirty truths about selling on Amazon is that to really get any traction if you’re brand new is that you need to pay for Amazon Ads to promote your supplement listings. 

Sponsored Amazon Ads are those ads that appear at the top of Amazon search results with a little ‘sponsored’ label on them. Other than that they look like normal Amazon search results.

It works just like Google, meaning it’s a pay-per-click (PPC) model where advertisers bid on keywords and pay only if someone clicks on a sponsored ad that takes them to that product brand’s Amazon listing.

Personally, I feel that there is a time and place for supplement brands to market on Amazon but overall Amazon is not the best place for supplement brands because you don’t own the customer so the entire backend of the business is not there, which is critical to making a supplement company work. 

Amazon is a double-edged sword so as much as it can help it can also hurt. If you don’t own the customer, you can’t grow your business beyond Amazon.

In that way, it’s very similar to the way all of the social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc. operate. They want to keep you on their platform.

Social Media Marketing (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube)

Marketing supplements on social media can be very tricky. There are a lot of options in the social media sandbox, everything from… 

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • TikTok
  • Pinterest
  • YouTube
  • And more

Each of them has an opportunity to get sales, but each also has its own pitfalls to watch out for. 

Facebook doesn’t really like supplement advertisers, but if you play nice it can work for marketing supplements online. 

Typically it can work with more of an eCommerce discount and branding approach, but there are other ninja ways to do it. (that I can’t reveal for free in this article.) In addition, ever since the Apple iOS update in 2022, Facebook’s targeting is all wonky. You can’t trust the attribution data anymore.

Instagram has a similar dislike for dietary supplements, which makes sense, since it’s a Facebook company, and it also skews a much younger audience, which, at the moment, is outside of the sweet spot of 45+ women for supplement buyers.

TikTok is still at this moment an up-and-coming platform. There has been some promise and traction that supplement brands are getting here. However, not for all supplements, ads promoting weight loss/management supplements specifically are against TikTok policy.

Pinterest is an underrated platform for supplements and can actually be a great way to build a following to move to another platform like email, where you can market and sell supplements.

YouTube, at the moment, is a wild west opportunity for supplement marketing, the biggest hurdle is the video ad production itself. Keeping up with the volume of video content production can be challenging.

What all of these social media platforms have in common is the constant need for ad content. It’s a never-ending state of testing different creative. There’s also the social component of it which requires constant engagement with the platform and audience via comments and direct messages, which is the blessing and the curse of many of these platforms. You have to do all the heavy lifting of community building yourself.

The close cousin to social media marketing is influencer marketing, which is its own unique best for supplements.

How To Use Influencer Marketing For Supplement Brands

Influencers that are great at creating content with an audience that already knows, likes, and trusts them, could be a good traffic source for your supplement. If you leverage that audience and borrow some of that trust, it’s a no-brainer for supplement marketing.

You can expect a short-term boost of new customers and brand awareness.

But there are many pitfalls that dietary supplement brands can easily fall into when working with an influencer.

  • Fake audiences – fitness influencers with fewer followers (in the 10,000 – 15,000 range) often have more engagement with their audience than bigger follower numbers.
  • Payment structure – In many ways, influencer marketing is similar to affiliate marketing but the payment deal is different. Influencers are typically paid like a traditional media campaign, sometimes with the addition of a commission.
  • Don’t give them a script – The influencer’s own voice is always going to be more effective than handing them a rigid word-for-word script. But do give them guidelines.
  • A following alone does not make a fit – Not every health influencer may be right for your supplement brand.

A good influencer conversion rate benchmark is around 2 – 3% but that really depends on the market fit of your influencer.

The size of the influencer that’s right for you depends on market fit, first and foremost, and your budget.

As far as market fit goes, you want an influencer who has the same core values as your brand. 

Often it is the micro-influencers, those with 10,000 to 100,000 followers, work out better.

When it comes to a good budget for an influencer, between $1,000 – $10,000 for a year is what you should shoot for, if you’re just starting out.

Content Marketing and Blogging For Supplement Brands

This section could have been titled SEO, Search Engine Optimization. 

This route is very slow, especially if you’re a new site. 

The reality of content marketing is that you likely won’t see any traffic from this for quite a while. It’s not uncommon to publish 1 article a week for a full year before you see any meaningful traffic. 

So if you need cash flow quicker, then content marketing is not your best option. 

Many early-stage supplement brands opt not to do any content marketing, instead going straight to paid marketing methods that have faster results. As mentioned earlier, you’re paying for speed. 

However, if you fall into a niche that has low competition you could see results faster. 

If SEO is a part of your marketing, you want to focus on building authority and vital core metrics, most of all.

Authority is one of the most important factors in SEO today. If Google does not see your site as an authority in your topic your search engine rankings will suffer.

No one knows exactly how the algorithms work for SEO but there are a few signals that are important to focus on.

First and foremost is writing quality unique content that has a point of view that is different and factually accurate. It’s better to niche down to a subtopic than to be broad and write about many different topics.

Other signals include domain-level authority, or the quality of links to your domain, which takes time to build up. Too many backless links too quickly is a signal of something fishy.

There is also page rank and trust rank which are basically derived from the quality of links to and from your page. Who you’re linking out to and who’s linking to you are all signals to search engines.

And finally, there is the authority of the author. Including what content on the web is supporting the authority of the author as an expert and the history of that content. Has the author been around for a long time or has it been artificially manufactured? Is the author published on other websites of high authority like news sites, etc.

Vital core metrics are the second most important factor when it comes to SEO. Vital core metrics can be simplified into two main areas.

First, provide a great user experience. The main driver in this camp is to have a website that is mobile-friendly.

The second area is having a super fast page load. Milliseconds matter here. 

The best page load speed for conversion rates is between zero and 4 seconds. (0 – 2 seconds is even better and the best e-commerce sites shoot for this page load speed.) 

What loads in the first five seconds has the highest impact on conversion.

How much traffic you can expect from SEO all depends on what volume of searches already exist for the keywords you rank for and what position you come up in the rankings for those keywords. If you’re not on page 1 of the search engine ranking you’re not going to get much traffic. 

In short, because of time and effort along with the cost of writing content if you hire for it, most DTC supplement brands opt for paid media vs content marketing.

Bonus Supplement Marketing Tips To Consider

There is a lot more to consider other than simply which marketing channel is going to be right for your supplement marketing. 

Here is a short list to help frame your thinking:

  • Offer Structure – Are you considering a traditional 1,3,6 bottle structure, a free plus shipping offer, BOGOs, what guarantee and bonuses, etc.
  • Pricing Structure – To make a DTC supplement business to work you’ll need an average price for a single bottle of anywhere from $39 – $69, that’s the sweet spot that you’ll need to charge to make it work for the average cost of acquisition of an online buyer.
  • Niche – Targeting a specific group of users is key if the problem you’re going after is competitive. However you should always stick with a proven niche, so find competitors who have niched down.
  • Unique Formulation – This is an area that is becoming increasingly important however the trade off is that it becomes more expensive so you’ll need a bigger bank roll for the business. You may decide to do thi slater rather than at the start depending on how much you have to invest.
  • The Mechanism of Action –  Is there a unique ingredient in your product that has studies behind it and can you develop a good metaphor and story around it?
  • Your Brand Story / Spokesperson –  Will you be the face of your brand or do you want to give a piece of the business or a cut to a doctor to be that front facing brand person?

So Which Marketing Channel is Best For Supplements?

Each of these marketing strategies work, but no business can do them all, especially when you’re first getting started. 

Pick one or two at first and really dive in completely because nothing is likely to work right away. Testing, learning and adjusting is critical to any marketing strategy. 

Long-term success lies in the execution of your marketing so that you can acquire a customer.

No one strategy works forever in this industry. The principles are timeless but the tactics change and burn out over time as the market continues to get more and more saturated. That is simply the nature of any market. It goes through stages, no matter what you’re selling.

But no matter what you do the most important thing is to take action, jump in and learn as you go.

Need Help Marketing Your Dietary Supplement?

My 10+ years of marketing supplements with DTC clients, combined with my unique point of view of what works and what doesn’t for selling supplements online, could be your best asset.

I work one-on-one with a small group of clients at a time to increase sales and lifetime value exclusively for DTC supplement brands selling on their own website. Learn more about how you can work with me here, or get my free eBook below.

Discover the 3 funnels that can help your health supplement business succeed.

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Health Supplement Business Mastery Podcast

Listen to the Health Supplement Business Mastery Podcast for for dietary supplement entrepreneurs and marketers.

Listen to the health supplement business mastery podcast on Spotify
Listen to the health supplement business mastery podcast on Google Podcasts

By Bobby Hewitt

Bobby Hewitt is the founder of Creative Thirst. A conversion rate optimization agency for health and wellness companies with a specialized focus in dietary supplements. We’ve helped health clients profitably scale using our four framework growth model validated through A/B testing. Bobby has over 17 years of experience in web design and Internet marketing and holds a bachelors degree in Marketing from Rutgers University. He is also certified in Online Testing and Landing Page Optimization and won the Jim Novo Award of Academic Excellence for Web Analytics. As well as a public speaker and contributing author to “Google Analytics Breakthrough: From Zero to Business Impact, published by Wiley.