Do you believe you’re a healthy person?
What do your beliefs say about you and what you spend your money on?
A belief is not just how you feel about something.
Beliefs are responsible for a lot more than that you might think.
Your personal beliefs define the decisions you make and shape your life. They determine how you feel, what you think, the goals you pursue and even what you buy.
Most people don’t connect beliefs and buying, but the link between the two is clearly present when you closely examine the psychology of the purchase decision.
In my opinion, this link is stronger for some product categories than others. Specifically when it comes to buying anything related to health or wellness.
You see, people don’t buy health products the same way they buy other products. When a customer buys a pair of shoes the purchase decision mostly comes down to three things.
Looks or style, do these look good on her?
Availability, do they have this in her size?
And price, how much do they cost.
Most of the time the last factor of price is questionable. If the first two factors are strong enough, price is almost not relevant for the right pair of shoes on the right woman.
The Belief Before The Buying Decision
Decisions are made according to the assumptions we believe and our beliefs shape our actions. But we must decide before we can act and that decision comes out of belief.
When people buy a health product like a medical device such as a brace for your knee or a natural health supplement for high blood pressure, or any condition really, what matters more is your prospects belief system.
Health buyers are uniquely different from other markets, because prospects have to believe before they can buy.
The people that buy any health product, including a bottle of supplements, are not so much buying a solution as much as they are reassuring their inner belief of health. This is a key distinctive piece of the health buying decision that does not exist when buying any other product.
So, in order to sell more health products we must fully understand our prospects beliefs. And to do that you have to understand what your prospects believe about them selves as well as what they believe about the product based on what they have already seen in the marketplace.
No health product exists in a vacuum.
Every product exists in context to other products and therefore health products need to be positioned within the market that already exists.
To do that you need to understand the competing and substitute products that you’re up against as well as understand both the prospects and buyers within the marketplace you’re looking to target. Not to mention what the target prospects already believe.
What Do Your Prospects Believe About Themselves?
We choose what we choose because we believe it and our beliefs are driven by our desires.
Our desire for that healthy lifestyle is as much part of our individual personal narrative as our belief in the product itself.
If you believe you’re a healthy person, you’ll act in accord with the inner healthy person that you believe you are.
This is the principal of commitment and consistency from Robert Cialdini, one of the world renown leaders in the area of persuasion psychology.
Our inner desire needs to be consistent with our commitment. That is if we believe something to be true about ourselves we need to also match our evolving story of who we believe we are and how we believe we should behave.
If our inner “why” is not consistent with that commitment of our belief then the buying decision will default to a no sale.
And since our personal beliefs define our choices, literally defining our decision to buy in the natural health supplement market, the job of the health marketer is to tap into that existing belief system by understanding the prospects desire as well as their self story.
Because the way people buy health products uniquely requires your prospect to believe before they buy.
Our Self-Stories Drive Us, Motivate Us
And Hold Us Back
Sometimes we get in our own way and other times we’re compelled to do the things we do by an unstoppable force.
In both cases it comes down to the unique story in our own head…
Our self-story.
Which comes from our desires that form our core beliefs and are interlinked to our buying decision.
People buy health products because of what they believe about themselves.
But if your prospect’s belief in health is not inline with your marketing then their self-story needs to be supported, and this is best done through copy and story.
In order to do that, you need to really uncover the limiting beliefs that tie into the product to really address this aspect of your prospects.
This is why, selling any health product, from wheelchairs to skin care products, requires a different approach, because the buying process is different.
Health marketers need to shift their focus on completely understanding the customer, deeper than you may think you understand them right now through a series of several lenses.
The first of which is a series of open ended survey questions for both your buyers and non-buyers. We recommend at least 100-200 responses per survey. This helps us start to understand why people didn’t buy and why others did.
Surveys are great but they can only tell you what people put into words, which is why we suggest to couple this with a second lens, one-on-one phone interviews. This gives you a full understanding of what your customers are thinking.
But we also want to know what they don’t tell us.
Which is why we look through our next lens to tell us what they actually do on your website. To put it another way, what are they doing that’s costing you sales?
For this you can take a virtual “look over their shoulders” during their visit with recordings of their actual online behavior. Along with heatmaps / clickmaps and scroll depth maps to see where people click, where they don’t and how far people scroll on your sales page.
The final lens is an analysis of at least 2 of your direct competitors to understand the context in which your visitors are making their buying decision.
All of these lenses combine to give you a complete picture of you ideal buyer. We will learn the real reasons why your customers buy, (not why you think they buy) and why prospects don’t.
We’ll uncover their fears, doubts, and hesitations, it’s not always about your product, most of the time it’s about their own self-story.
There Are Three Funnels Every Health Supplement Business Needs To Build A Multi-Million Dollar Empire…
The problem is most dietary supplement companies only have one funnel. Through our work in the online health space, we’ve had the opportunity to observe hundreds of health businesses. What we’ve uncovered are the three critical funnels that each work together that make the difference between the average supplement company just selling on Amazon and a multi-million dollar health empire and compiled our findings in the book below. Click here to get the ebook delivered right to your email for FREE.
