What The Top Direct Response Marketers Know About Marketplace Sophistication And How To Use It In The Health And Wellness Industry

Marketers struggle with creating a self-liquidating, breakeven funnel because they don’t start with an understanding of the marketplace sophistication.  It’s vital to understand this before creating a single word, pixel or code of their marketing funnel.

This article goes deep into marketplace sophistication, but first let’s recap the previous article.

We looked at marketplace awareness as a way of understanding what the market already knows and thinks as it relates to the problem, benefit and product.

In addition to examining a few strategies to uncover the level of awareness of your market.

Plus, we looked at what each level of awareness means.

Here’s a Quick Recap

Completely Unaware – Your prospects are not aware of their problem or the need for a solution.
Problem Aware – They are only aware of the problem and nothing else.
Solution Aware – They are aware of the problem and the different solutions available to them.
Product Aware – They are aware of the problem and the solution.
Most Aware – They are aware of what you offer and how it meets their needs.

Once you know what the market is already aware of then you can…

1. Build the right marketing message (including your hook, promise, proof and benefit) and…

2. Build the right funnel length to…

…match the level of awareness you’re targeting.

It’s not a question of “which level is your market in?”

This is a key concept that only the truly best direct marketers know…

You see, every market is made up of multiple segments and every market has a segment of buyers that exists in each of the different levels of awareness.

So in reality, the market is actually fractured across all spectrums – the completely unaware, problem, solution, product, and most aware. The key is knowing which level of awareness to design your marketing funnel for.

This fact ties into your traffic source, in the direct marketing world it would be your list. To crush it with a self-liquidating marketing funnel you need to tie your traffic/list to a specific level of awareness. Meaning there has to be an awareness-traffic match.

But that’s only the first step, and the core foundation of awareness, the next step is…

To discover how to use Marketplace Sophistication along with awareness and tie that to Conversion Rate Optimization in the health and wellness industry.

But first, let’s clearly define each…

The Difference Between Marketplace Awareness and Marketplace Sophistication

Marketplace awareness is simply how “well known” your product, benefit, or problem is, in the marketplace.

Once you know that, you can align your hook, sales copy and funnel complexity with where the market already is in relationship to their awareness with your product, benefit and problem.

To put this into context let’s look at an example of awareness for the supplement product L-arginine.

Taking an L-arginine supplement benefits your cardiovascular health by promoting nitric oxide production, which is essential to optimal blood flow. Bodybuilders want more nitric oxide because it reduces the amount of lactic acid produced during exercise and extends the amount of time until exhaustion, meaning you can exercise longer to build more mass.

The bodybuilder market for L-arginine is in the completely aware stage. They are aware of what you offer and how it meets their needs.

So if you’re targeting the bodybuilder market you can’t start with the benefits or explain what L-arginine does or even the nitric oxide angle. It’s simply old news to this segment. They have heard it before. The better thing to do would be to develop a hook that comes at it from a different angle.

But that’s just the marketplace awareness piece, we also have to factor in the there half and answer the question…

What’s The Level of Marketplace Sophistication?

Marketplace sophistication is simply the answer to – How many times has your prospect (or “the market”) heard the promise before, from other products?

The key here is PROMISE…

It’s where your product’s promise fits into the already existing market’s sophistication. Think of it as the “product-market fit”.

This is where the experienced direct marketer fits the marketplace awareness with sophistication. Just like awareness, marketplace sophistication has five stages.

Let’s discover how each stage works…

Stage 1) Offer + Promise / Benefit

In the first stage, you’re the first to market and therefore the sophistication of the market is very low or nonexistent. The marketplace has NOT heard your promise before because there are simply no other, or not many, products or alternatives that you’re competing with that exist.

At this stage all you need to do is be direct and state your claim, nothing more, you need to just simply get them interested… Then give them an opportunity to buy.

You want to be simple, direct and dramatize the claim…

For example – Take L-arginine and you’ll be the biggest guy in the gym.

You’ll want to state the claim then dramatize that claim in your sales copy, ming it as powerful as possible. Then simply introduce your product and prove that it works.

One important thing to note is that most of the time the market exists before our product and it is usually through innovation in technology or science that a new product is created for stage one sophistication. Viagra is a great stage one example because it literally created a new market with no competition… at first. Competition always follows stage one, which leads us to…

Stage 2) Expand on the promise / benefit

In this next stage, the competition heats up. There may not be many competitors but they are starting to pop up and your marketing message moves from simply stating a claim to expanding on that promise. And there are several sub-stages within this stage itself…

At first stage two sounds like this:
Take L-arginine to get bigger, because you’ll be able to work out longer.

Then the message levels up…
Take L-arginine and gain an extra quarter inch on your biceps.

But it does not stop there, marketers get into an expansion war, and continue to exaggerate the claims. It quickly turns into an even bigger promise…

Take L-arginine and gain an extra half an inch on your biceps.

Take L-arginine and gain an extra inch on your biceps.

Take L-arginine and gain an extra two inches on your biceps in three weeks.

The reaction to the marketing message itself begins to add sophistication to the marketplace. Thus stage two changes the market and prospects automatically discount the promise by at least half, so the claim has no choice but to get bigger and bigger until the market gets to the point where they stop believing you all together…

It is at this point that the market sophistication enters stage three. Most products are created in a market that is in the 3rd or 4th stage, so pay particular attention to the next section, especially if you are in the health supplement or wellness industry.

Stage 3) Expand the Offer Using Unique Mechanism

A stage three market has changed significantly compared to stage one and two. They have heard all the claims before and may have even tried several different products in your category. But most of all they are jaded and they are skeptical.

The market needs a new way to make the old promise work and a bigger claim no longer works.

So our marketing now has to expand on the offer by using a Unique Mechanism.

The unique mechanism – is the reason why this will work (i.e. the proof for the claim).

Sometimes in this stage we’ll see marketers enter into a competition over who can trump who’s proof, layering on bigger scientific studies in the supplement industry or more proof than the competition.

Most of the amateur health marketers get tripped up here, getting stuck in a proof game. It is important to understand that the unique mechanism is what makes your product different. But it doesn’t have to actually be unique, it could just be a particular way the product is manufactured that no one else is talking about.

The classic example is Schlitz Beer from copywriting legend Claud Hopkins, who took the beer from number five in the U.S. market to neck and neck with number one in just a few months.

At the time all of the beer companies were talking about how “pure” their beer was.

But Hopkins tapped into a unique mechanism in the process Schlitz was doing to ensure purity. Which was actually the same exact process every beer company was doing but no beer company was talking about it in their marketing and advertising.

The key take away is that unique mechanisms already exist within your product.

The Unique Mechanism can be:

• A particular part of manufacturing process, or sourcing of a raw ingredient, i.e. plant based vs. animal based
• An ingredient or combination of ingredients and how they interact together
• The delivery method, i.e the way a supplement get into your body or system like a spray vs. sublingual or lysosomal delivery
• A method or process or philosophy of healing

The important thing to note is that, the unique mechanism is actually just an idea… meaning you can conjure it up out of thin air.

But just like in the saturation of stage 3, the unique mechanism expands too far because of the increased audience sophistication and the increased competition and marketing needs to level up again to the next stage.

Stage 4) Differentiate the Unique Mechanism + Expand the Benefit

In stage four the mechanism becomes elaborated, just like the promise did in stage two and quickly pushes itself out of the range of believability. This is the sign of a mature market, which is where the health and supplement market squarely sits. This is why trust and belief are so vital to optimizing any health sale online.

Eventually, no new mechanism will work. The market will grow tired of all the false promises. They would have heard dozens of times before. Once this happens the market begins to shrink because the competitors start dropping out in large numbers.

This leads quickly into stage five…

Stage 5) Identify With The Product

This is the final stage of marketplace sophistication, at this stage, the market is very mature. Your market no longer believes in your marketing message. They don’t care about your product.

At this stage the marketing message moves from the promise and the mechanism that delivers the promise, to bring the prospect back into your marketing message with the identification of the prospect and emotion rather than their desire for the outcome.

To do that you need to understand your prospect extremely well and thus tap into the biggest emotional advantage of the future state your prospect is trying to achieve.

It becomes more difficult to convert your prospect at this stage and moves off of your product and focuses on the prospect.

So What Does This All Mean For The Health and Wellness Market Online?

The health and wellness market is a very mature one, meaning that people have already heard “almost” every promise marketers can think of, as a result, trust is strained to the breaking point and it’s getting harder to market your product. it’s just the nature of markets, as they are exposed to marketing their advertising sophistication increases and the marketing stops working unless it evolves to the next stage.

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