Profitable Supplement Funnels Start With The Marketplace

Sometimes you can be successful in spite of starting off on the wrong foot. But that won’t last very long and sooner or later you’re left wondering what happened and why things are no longer working the way they were before.

Most direct marketers, in the health space approach marketing and supplement funnels they almost always start off with the wrong foot, because they never start with the marketplace. They usually start with the product, and match or model what competitors are doing which is completely backwards. By starting with the marketplace you can create a new space in your prospects mind, stand out from the noise and differentiate your product to maximize sales and thus, help more people achieve optimal health.

Many products in the health space, especially health supplements, are copy-cat products, even if they have a unique and proprietary formulation, the benefits and problems they are solving for are very similar. And when a prospect has seen a similar benefit, promised by yet another health supplement product their trust is eroded and the decision they make is not to buy because they don’t believe you.

Which is why it’s vital to start with and understand how other products are being positioned compared to yours in order to optimize a health business, rather than first start with a VSL or funnel for your product.

But, how do you go about understanding the marketplace? And how does that effect your supplement funnel?

Let’s first breakdown how to determine where your prospects mindset is and then we’ll go into the different stages of awareness and how your marketing needs to evolve with the marketplace.

But first, you need to understand the…

3 Steps To Determining Where Your Prospects Are On The Marketplace Awareness Scale

Step 1 – First you’ll need to know who your competing against. The best way to do that is to survey your buyers and non-buyers. Ask them what other alternatives they’ve considered before purchasing your product. For non-buyers you’ll want to frame the question as: “What product did you buy or consider buying to help with your health condition?” It’s important to ask rather than just think you know who you’re competition is because your prospects may be looking at alternative solutions rather than direct competitors. And a competitor in your eyes is different than your prospects eyes.

Step 2 – Next you’ll want to study your competition and analyze what promises they are making on their sales pages.

What are they promising or implying a prospect will gain or experience, or feel by buying their product?

Step 3 – Document every promise in a grid and look for common themes, trends and similarities across your marketplace research. What are the differences and which are unique?

Once you spot the common trends, then you can, understand what stage your prospects are at on the Marketplace Awareness Scale. Once you know where your prospects are, you can architect your supplement funnel to stand out from the noise, differentiate your product and maximize your sales, so that you can help more people achieve better health.

Each stage of the Marketplace Awareness Scale requires a different approach to selling and positioning your product to your prospect. Which is why it’s so important to understand what other offers and promises are being talked about and being seen by your prospects. If all you’re doing is modeling your competition, your prospects trust level goes way down for your offer because they’ve heard it before and it becomes harder to sell to them.

And in order to understand where your prospects are in the Marketplace Awareness Scale, you have to first understand what the heck it is and also understand each stage.

The 5 Stages of Marketplace Awareness

Marketplace awareness is an understanding of:

What your prospects know about your product and or main ingredient
What do they know about the benefit?
What do they know about the problem?

Let’s go into detail for each stage…

Stage 1 – (The Promise Alone)

At this stage, the marketplace has not heard your promise before from you or any other competitor or alternative. You can see this in the marketplace in marketing and advertising that states very broad promises for example: “Lose Weight.”

It’s a marketing message with a very broad promise.

The health and supplement industry is well past this stage, unless you’re inventing a brand new device in a brand new category. If the marketplace is at this stage, you’re likely the first to market and you’re marketing based on the promise of the benefit alone.

Stage 2 – (Expand on the Promise)

At stage two awareness, your prospects are seeing and hearing competitors marketing that is expanding on the promise made from stage one marketing.

What I mean by “expanding” is adding to the promise along the following dimensions, but note that it’s not limited to these. Anything that takes the promise and makes it bigger can be considered an expansion. As a byproduct, consumer trust erodes quickly in this stage.

Here are some ways a promise can be expanded:

Add specificity to the benefit
Add associated promises
Add a dimension of time

Here’s an example from Drew Canole…

This is an offer that is firmly in stage 2. It expands on the promise of fat loss in two dimensions. First by expanding beyond fat loss to include bloating and cravings. These are all promises that are associated with the stage 1 promise of simply lose fat. And second through time, with a solution that only takes 5 seconds.

Here’s an example from Brian Flatt…

This is another example in the weight loss space of a supplement funnel built for a stage 2 audience. The marketing message here in this VSL expands on the promise across the dimensions of time (3 weeks) just like the first example and also adds specificity to the benefit, (1 – 2 pounds of fat) along yet another layer of time (every day, for the first 7 days).

Stage 3 – (Promise + Unique Mechanism)

At this stage, your prospects have heard the standard promise many times before and it’s been expanded on in stage 2 and the expansion is commonplace, meaning they are seeing expansion marketing messages more and more. So, in an attempt to differentiate their products, marketers add a unique mechanism to their promise.

A unique mechanism is a specific part within the process of manufacturing, or a specific ingredient that is responsible for fulfilling the promise, implicitly or otherwise.

An example of this is the Garcinia Cambogia wave of popularity for fat loss supplements. This is the unique mechanism or ingredient that differentiates it from the competitors.

Tracking the supplement “Garcinia Cambogia” with Google trends, shows the rise and fall of popularity of the that ingredient as a unique marketing mechanism. You can see where the market was literally created out of nothing back in late 2013, and where it spiked in 2014, then it’s been on a downward trend ever since. This is an example of how response rates track over time as well, because you’re seeing the rise and fall of stage 3 of marketplace awareness.

Using the unique mechanism in your marketing message in late 2013 and early 2014 is when the market was in this stage of awareness. After that, the effectiveness of that mechanism started working less and less because of a spike in competition, which created similar promise + unique mechanism marketing messages that then starting popping up and the downward trend in the graph indicates the marketplace awareness is moving to the next stage.

The unique mechanism for a supplement funnel is usually found in the ingredients or the way the combination of ingredients work together to deliver the benefit but often in many cases it can be the way an ingredient is manufactures or sourced. The important part to understand is that a unique mechanism can be completely crafted literally out of imagination.

The best examples can be found in the information publishing space, because that industry is usually in this stage for a longer time than average industries. Because you can literally create a new mechanism over and over again out of thin air, allowing your marketing to stay in this stage much longer than other industries typically can. Which is why you’ll see a lot of health supplement companies creating information products and books to support supplement sales.

Stage 4 – (Promise + Unique Mechanism Expanded)

Your prospects are in this stage if your promise and your mechanism has been presented in the marketplace. Both have been seen and heard by your prospects many times but it hasn’t yet been expanded on.

So just like stage 2, this adds “expansion” on top of the previous stage, but this time the expansion is on the mechanism vs. the promise because the marketplace has become more sophisticated. You’re dealing with a more savvy BUYER at this stage of the market they have heard about the unique mechanism already and they need something new to propel them to buy. The promise is still important here but, how that promise is delivered is what is becoming expanded on.

The unique mechanism at this stage can be expanded by adding proof of how and why the mechanism works.

Stage 5 – (Prospect)

Your prospects are in this stage if you’re mechanism has been presented and it has been expanded on. But in stage 5 of the marketplace the messaging turns away from the benefits and the product and back towards the prospect.

The Key To Success For a Health Supplement Funnel

The important takeaway from the five levels of marketplace awareness is that it’s completely relative to your marketplace.

A message will work down towards marketplace stages below where the market is, but it won’t work at a higher stage.

So market designed for an awareness level of stage 3 will still work for stage 1 or 2 but not for stage 4 or 5.

The further you move away from stage 1, the more difficult it becomes to create a supplement funnel that will work because at the higher levels you add much more expansion.

If your prospects are seeing and hearing the same promises and unique mechanisms, across other competing or alternative products, which can be in other product categories than yours, their trust is eroding and it becomes harder to sell to them, build trust and make an impact in people’s lives.