The Buying Forces Behind Selling Dietary Supplements

Selling dietary supplements online has never been an easy task.

You can’t make any drug claims, which waters down your sales copy.

Approval issues are a nightmare with traffic sources, like Google and Facebook, which often feels like a mystery. Forcing you to have multiple funnels for each traffic source.

There are competitors like Amazon who are undercutting your margins. Cutting off your backend because you’re not allowed to own the customer. Yet if your product is not available on their platform, you know you’ll lose the sale.

And sales conversion challenges on your own website, are a challenge. Because people have heard all the same things from so many other dietary supplement companies online before. They see all supplements as the same and mistrust everyone.

None of these challenges will ever go away.

Unfortunately, they are just part of the industry that you’re in.

So where do you start?

To solve these challenges, you need a framework.

We’ve worked with many dietary supplement companies and over the years have developed our conversion optimization process for selling dietary health supplements online.

At the core of our framework is the supplement buying forces.

These forces include desire, hope, trust and belief.

Which push and pull people towards and away from a buying decision.

We’ll get into the difference between push and pull later in this article.

But first…

As you may know, our research has uncovered that people don’t buy dietary supplements or any health product the same way they buy other products online.

The buying forces around a dietary supplement purchase are different.

Which is where these forces come into play…

The First Pushing Force: DESIRE

Today, people buy online, but they aren’t sold as much anymore.

They want information about their health condition. And there’s more than enough places online to learn about, blood pressure, gut health, the Keto-diet and much more.

On their journey to learn more, they go down the Internet rabbit hole to do their own research.

In which case they either get trapped in a spiral of endless research, never making a decission…

Or when they are ready to buy, they then go to Amazon to find a cheaper option. Making their buying decision based on just two dimensions, price and reviews. Because that’s what Amazon has trained them to do.

If you can’t captivate them, in the instant they find your sales page and guide them through the supplement buying forces, then you’ve lost them to the Internet research rabbit hole or a competitor.

But in order to captivate them, you first need to hook them.

A hook is a big idea that permeates through your sales lead.

The best hooks are grounded in pre-wired ideas.

Ideas that already exist in the mind of your prospect. You’re tapping into the existing receptors that are already in the mind through an understanding of the level of awareness of the marketplace.

The hook can be built around the desire the prospect has for a solution to their problem.

Understanding the desire is part of the buying forces framework.

Desire is what pushes the prospect toward your marketing message.

It’s rooted to the situation or problem that they have the desire to remove.

It’s not about just tapping into the existing desire but also amplifying the state of desire through the marketing hook.

The hook can be explicitly stated and call out the problem directly.

Here’s an example hook that’s embedded in the headline and calls out the problem:

Suffer from hearing loss?

The desire to regain your hearing is implied here. And it will likely hook only those that have the problem. (Which is good)

Let’s look at another example hook:

The right protein can help you lose weight, but the wrong one can destroy your health.

The marketing hook doesn’t answer the question of the big idea… “How is the wrong thing I’m eating making me gain weight?”

Or even the implied question of the big idea… “What should I eat?”

The Second Pushing Force: HOPE

Next comes the second pushing force, which is hope.

Hope and desire are intrinsically connected to the outcome the prospect wants. The difference is that desire can often can have no force to motivate action. The desire to lose 15 pounds may be there, but desire in and of itself has no energy or force behind it for the typical dietary supplement buyer. They may desire it but are not willing to do anything differently from their current lifestyle in order to achieve it (and therefore won’t buy.)

Thus enters hope.

Hope is all about that energy to propel desire. (which is where belief, another force comes from. But more on that later.) It pushes the prospect towards your dietary supplement as the solution through the unique mechanism.

This is typically expressed as the mechanism of action or ingredient in your product that makes it work. This unique mechanism is what’s been missing from all the other solutions they have tried or are thinking about trying to achieve their desire. It’s what gives them HOPE that it will work for them this time.

Here’s some example sales copy from a detox formula supplement that provides hope through a unique mechanism:

The good news is scientific studies indicate that the combination of two natural substances, pectins and alginates, can bind to these dioxins and eliminate them. Both of these substances are found in a breakthrough new formula called PectaSol® Detox Formula.
It’s the ONLY detox formula that combines a patented form of Modified Citrus Pectin called PectaSol® made from the inner peel of citrus fruits. Plus a Modified Alginate Complex made from seaweed.

The Next Two Forces: TRUST & BELIEF

The next two forces act as chameleons.

Because, they switch between pushing forces and pulling forces.

A pushing force, is external.

It comes from some outside force.

The prospect has reached some point where they are ready to make a change.

Maybe they have just been told by their doctor that they have high blood pressure and for whatever reason don’t want to fill that prescription. (Maybe they don’t want to admit it to themselves.)

Or maybe their spouse has has been struggling with thyroid issues and they can’t stand to see them suffer anymore.

Those are outside forces pushing them towards a change.

On the other hand, a pulling force, is internal.

It comes from an inside force.

These inside forces are made up of basic emotions, which include:

Fear – Anger

Joy – Sadness

Trust – Disgust

These internal forces pull your prospect through your sales funnel by evolving one or more of these emotions.

For example your message may evoke a feeling that something is wrong. A disgust in Big Pharma for example. In order to leverage the opposite force of trust.

The Push & Pulling Force: TRUST

It’s difficult to get cold traffic to trust you.

Especially if you’re in the supplement industry where trust has been eroding for years because of so much misinformation.

Yet, trust is vital to a supplement sale.

But trust is both…

A pushing force…

In the sense that evolving the emotional state in your sales copy like disgust raises in the prospect.

In that case your copy is pushing them toward feeling like you’re more like them and you both have a common enemy, Big Pharma.

But, trust is also a pulling force…

When you reduce the prospects anxiety though credibility. Sometimes that credibility is in the form of a Doctor (as in the case of Golden Hippo and Dr. Gundry) in other cases it’s in the form of a celebrity Influencer that resonates with your audience.

But trust can also act as a pulling force when the logic of the sales argument makes sense. More specifically the science behind how your dietary supplement works in the body.

When trust is alined with the inner beliefs of your prospects you’re on your way to building enough force to buy, if it aligns to their beliefs.

Which brings us to…

The Push & Pulling Force: BELIEF

There’s a great amount of emotional energy attached to what someone believes.

Belief is intrinsically connected to our desires. Because we believe what we want to be true.

But at the same time belief both pushes and pulls a health supplement prospect towards buying.

Belief is a pushing force…

In the sense that it pushes a prospect towards believing what they want to believe.

The easiest example of this is that they want to believe there is a solution to there to their problem. This is where the Unique Mechanism comes into play.

The unique mechanism is the thing that all the other solutions they have tried had been missing and it’s the one thing that they believe will make your solution work.

But belief is also a pulling force…

In that it’s the energy that drives what they are already doing. It pulls them toward their current reality.

This is what the prospect already believes about themselves and their situation.

If their belief is that they are not the type of person that goes to the gym, then, getting them to do that is not going to happen, no matter what you say.

There’s just no changing a deep core belief. There is usually too much pulling force that already exists, making it very difficult to change.

If there’s not enough push you’re not going to get them to buy. There’s just no anxiety and they don’t even think about the problem in order to make a change.

Tying All The Forces Together

Prospects wrestle with all four of these forces

They are the anxieties that people have to manage in order to buy supplements. This is how buying supplements is different than buying another product online. These forces are unique to a health buying decision.

Both of these forces, trust and belief, keep people from buying.

And all four of the forces build up over time across different dimensions, including functional, social, and emotional. (Which we didn’t get into in this article.)

Finding where the emotion fits across those dimensions in the forces is the key to making them all work together to influence a cold prospect to buy a supplement online.