How To Use YouTube Ads To Grow a Supplement Business

YouTube ads may just be the last haven left to growing a health supplement business today.

This article will cover:

How to scale a YouTube Ad
Optimizing your YouTube Ads
The YouTube opportunities for supplement brands
The challenge with YouTube for supplement brands
Branding vs. direct response on YouTube
A simple, yet effective YouTube ad structure that works
How to make high quality video ads for less than $300
What are your competitors doing on YouTube?

With so many traffic channels failing after the aftermath of iOS 14 and the removal many targeting capabilities on Facebook there’s really no social media channel that’s working for supplement marketing at the moment.

Traffic costs on Facebook as well as policy restrictions make it really hard for a supplement company to grow with paid Facebook or Instagram ads. It’s not impossible, it takes a different strategy from what was working a few years ago on Facebook. But that’s a topic for another article.

This article is all about using YouTube to grow a supplement business. Let’s jump right in with a brief summary of how to scale a supplement brand with YouTube.

How to Scale a YouTube Ad

The first question to ask is, does your YouTube ad pass the initial click through rate test?

Can your ad get clicks?

Here, you’re validating if your ad sucks or not.

You can spend a $100 on a click-through rate test for one video ad, and know whether or not you have a good ad.

But only if you have targeting in place. Because you could have a good ad, but it’s just going to the wrong people.

If you’re just going wide to women over 55 or no targeting at all, then you’re not going to be able to gauge your click-through rate on your ad.

But if you narrow down your targeting to women over 55 searching for or watching content related to your specific health condition, now you’ve got better targeting on which to judge CTR.

So it’s important to remember that as long as you’re targeting is good, the click-through rate test will be very effective way of saying, yes, this is a good enough ad or no, I need to go back to the drawing board.

If your ads are getting over 1% click-through rate (CTR), you have an ad that has potential.

If you’re getting less than a 1% click-through rate, take the budget down to $5 or $10 a day to give the algorithm more time to learn. The click-through rate could improve over time. Give it at least a week.

If there’s no improvement after that, get two or three new ads created, and start again.

Anywhere over 1% CTR is okay, 3% is very good, anything over that, that’s excellent.

Along with click through, you’re also judging if the ad is converting to a sale, based on conversion rate.

Conversion rate can be a bit tricky because you could have an ad that gets clicks but is going to a sales page that is just terrible at selling.

If you have a high click-through rate and a poor conversion, something’s off at the landing page level.

However, if your sales page is decent enough, look for a 0.6 to 0.7 return on ad spend (ROAS) then optimization can get you into the green.

If you’re anywhere in the 0.1 – 0.4 ROAS range, you still have ways to go because even ad campaign optimization is probably not going to get a lift.

There’s something not working likely on the sales page. But it could be the ad or the landing page or the offer. That’s where optimization comes in and the work I do one-on-one with supplement business owners and marketers.

If your ad ROAS is in the 0.6 to 0.7 range then increase the budget to that ad slowly with continued optimizations to the landing page. While continuously trying new ad creative.

You’re not going to hit a home run right out of the park and be ROI positive in the first test. All advertising takes time and money to dial in.

How long it takes depends on your ad budget. And how good your ads and landing page are. The only way to reduce the time is to have a higher budget, better ads and a better sales page.

If you’re starting slow and you’re spending $50 or $100 a day, it’s going to take you at least two weeks to probably get any data that’s worth looking at.

Starting at $250 a day and working your way up will get you learnings faster. At this stage it’s all about learnings and feeding the YouTube algorithm. This is kind of the learning tax you pay up front when growing a business.

However, whatever amount you put into ads it will spend all of it. So you need to watch your ROAS as the guiding metric. If spending $250 a day, it’s working, go up slowly. Raise your ad budget by 10%. That’s another 25 bucks.

Now you’re spending $275 a day. Let that run for a couple days, see how it performs. Then add another 10% at that. Slow scale is the name of the game, else you really upset the algorithm.

It’s not so much about time, it’s more about eyeballs. How many eyeballs have you sent to this offer? Did you send enough to really gauge whether or not this is working?

You may see a click-through rate on YouTube that ranges from 70 cents to one dollar. So if you spend a $1,000, you’re sending a thousand eyeballs to that offer.

That’s a good starting point. If you send a thousand eyeballs, how many sales did you get?

There’s no way around paying for the data of how an ad and landing page performs.

You’re going to pay to get that data. But you can get it in seven days, or you can get it in 30 days. It just depends on how quickly you’re willing to spend that initial money.

The absolute minimum test budget for YouTube, I’d say is $1,500 to $2,500 to test an initial one or two video ad creatives.

The more ads you have, the more traffic you need to each one of those ad creatives. And the more ad budget you’re going to need.

Optimizing Your YouTube Ads

Once you’ve identified that you have a strong ad, with a 1% CTR, then you can start testing different custom affinity audiences. For example, expanding to women over 55 that also watch travel and leisure videos. Because they may be a little bit higher on the income scale.

You can layer in custom audiences to get a better performance, but it all starts with the ad. Is the ad good? Or do you need to go back to the drawing board?

When you run your reports on YouTube, it’ll give you all the YouTube channels that showed your ad. You might have one channel that’s converting better than the others. Maybe you spent $150 and you got seven sales from that one YouTube channel.

So you can take that channel out and run a campaign specifically just to that channel because it’s working.

But then you may have another channel where you spent $120 and didn’t get any sales at all, so you can start excluding that channel from spending any more money.

You spent a thousand, but you wasted a hundred on this one channel because it was irrelevant. But YouTube decided to show your ad there.

Pruning the bad ones, and spending more on the good ones, and increasing your budget on the ones that are working, is how you get that 0.6, 0.7 ROAS as to a 0.8, 0.9, or even better.

That’s how that optimization process works.

The YouTube Opportunity for Supplement Brands

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. People are there looking for solutions, looking for information. There’s intent behind YouTube that Facebook just doesn’t have.

For example, there are people searching how to lower cholesterol, on You Tube.

But there’s also the reciprocal approach of just putting an ad in front of someone that happens to be looking for something else, but also has that symptom or that condition.

You can also target based on certain videos that they’re watching already. You can even handpick the video that you want to run your ad in front of.

So let’s say Dr. Oz has a video that has 10 million views and it’s about seven foods that lower your cholesterol. Well, you can literally handpick that YouTube URL in your targeting options and say, I want to run my ad right in front of this video.

So there’s different ways to advertise on YouTube.

But you should always start with identifying the searches that people would be searching for that your product solves.

Because if you can’t make that work, you’re not going to make a broader or adjacent audience segment (using custom affinity audiences) on YouTube work.

So anybody that types in cholesterol, or lower cholesterol, you would target those keywords first. But just like with Google ads, you’re going to overpay for tighter targeting. Pretty much all the traffic platforms work like that.

The more niche down you get, the more expensive the traffic is, but if you’re willing to sacrifice that high traffic cost in the very beginning to figure out if you have a product, a landing page and an ad that can be sold to these people.

Once you’ve done that, then you can widen your audience a bit, and your traffic cost can go lower and you can reach more people.

But first, prove that you have a good ad, a good offer and a good sales page that’s converting at a high enough level to make the cost of acquisition for a new customer work.

The Challenge with YouTube Ads for Supplements

One of the challenges with YouTube is that in general, the clicks are often more expensive than Facebook.

But the benefit is that there is more intent behind a click on YouTube compared to Facebook or Instagram.

That extra cost for a higher intent visitor who is more likely to buy than a Facebook or Instagram visitor may be worth it.

Another challenge is the video production itself.

The companies that do really well on YouTube are the companies that test the most creative.

So if you go in thinking, oh, this one ad is going to be my winner, you’re probably not going to do well. The data will tell you which ads are the best ads. And in order for you to get that home run, seven or eight out of the 10 ads that you do are going to lose.

You’re lucky if you get two or three winners out of a batch of 10. You don’t have to have 10 ads to start, but to keep going to really figure this thing out, you’re going to have to create a half a dozen or more ads to test against each other.

So the challenge of creating different video ads with different scripts and angles is the biggest hurdle when it comes to advertising supplements on YouTube.

High quality video production takes a lot of time. You could spend six to eight weeks creating something that looks amazing, and then it flops. You wasted three months of your time and a lot of money to figure out that lesson.

Branding vs. Direct Response on YouTube

Branding ads will be very difficult to work on YouTube. You’re going to have to spend a lot of money to do that.

It makes sense for a company like Geiko car insurance, that has a boat load of ad budget. They’re not expecting to see a return on that spend.

But for a direct to consumer (DTC) supplement company approaching the ad creative in a more direct response way, that goes for the sale or the click is far more beneficial. In fact if they don’t watch the ad, that might be more beneficial to the DTC marketer.

On YouTube you’re actually not paying for the ad until you get to the 30 second point. So if someone slips the ad, it doesn’t cost you anything. It only costs you if they’re engaged.

So your job as a marketer is to get them to make a decision in the first 30 seconds whether this is something that they’re actually serious about knowing. Because we want to create that fork. We want to get rid of everybody that’s not in our target. Get them to intentionally skip the ad because we don’t want them watching it. We don’t want to pay for someone that’s not qualified.

It’s almost the opposite of click bait. YouTube ads for the DTC marketer need to be as direct as possible in the first 30 seconds.

A Very Simple But Effective YouTube Ad Framework That Works

Since the first 30 seconds sets the hook, starting with a bold statement is going to get somebody to pay attention.

But that bold statement also has to qualify that person. For example, if can use the cholesterol example again the bold statement might be:

If you have high cholesterol, there’s a certain fruit that you need to avoid at all costs.

If you do have high cholesterol, your curiosity is piqued, you need to know which fruit is not good for you.

However, if your bold statement is too big of an unsubstantiated claim the viewer won’t believe you. A quick test is to ask is, would your ad make somebody say, yeah right? And if it does, you probably need to tone it down or tweak it. Make the benefits less quick.

You don’t want to say you’re going to lose 10 pounds in seven days. The specifics are a problem. You can say, you can lose up to 10 pounds in just a few weeks or in a shorter period of time.

Which is why the second part of the YouTube ad framework is to reduce friction. This helps to overcome any immediate subconscious barriers that they have in their mind.

For example, I’m going to show you how to lower your cholesterol in just a few weeks and it’s not going to involve you going on any crazy restrictive diets, taking any dangerous medications, whatever the three or probably three most common pain points.

You want to get them to believe, okay, this is going to be easier than I thought.

Next you want to present the offer or the solution.

For example: I’m about to give you my 10 recipes for lowering your cholesterol in 10 minutes or less, whatever your lead magnet is or your product offering is that’s when you present it.

And then you want to justify that your solution is different from the other ones that you’ve tried before.

In supplement direct response marketing, this is known as the unique mechanism.

It answers the question, why your solution is different from the last solution they tried?

And then if you do that well, and they’re still watching and social proof.

Having a testimonial of someone else say that exactly what they’re thinking or are afraid about, seals the deal.

And finally, tell them what to do. Tell them to click on the button, to go download this PDF or click on the button to try this risk-free. Whatever that call to action is, that’s how you close it out.

But how do you actually produce and edit your ad, without breaking the bank?

How To Make High Quality Video Ads For Less Than $300

Here’s how to producing a high-quality video for less than $300.

$200 – $250 for talent

$19.99/mo for editing + royalty free stock footage

For video editing I recommend using WeVideo it’s affordable at $19.99 a month and it has stock video footage available.

For on screen talent, it does not have to be you. In fact it’s probably better if it’s not. There are tons of actors out there that can do a better job of acting on camera than you or I could probably do. The go to places to find affordable talent is Fiverr and Backstage

All you need to do from there is write the script and manage the ads.

What are Your Competitors Doing on YouTube?

Research the competitors that are already doing ads by browsing the the library of YouTube ads running right now, in every market imaginable through a tool called Vidtao it’s the best way to spy on the competition.

It’s free, you just need to sign up and you can type in either an advertiser brand name or you can search for the niche or the product that you’re looking for.

It will show you what advertisers are running ads, the ads themselves, how long the ads have been running and the volume that they’re getting.

That’ll give you an indication of what angle or hooks are out there for your industry.

Selling a supplement as you know outright is very difficult. There’re tons of supplements on shelves that they see every day.

So for you to sell something direct to consumer, you need something that’s interesting. You need an interesting angle, an interesting hook or something that sets your supplement apart from somebody else’s.

On YouTube, there’s traffic for pretty much every condition that a supplement would be supporting.

There’s no way you can get a how to solution video on YouTube that’s going to solve an internal health condition like cholesterol

Unlike a neck pain video, that can actually solve the problem. For a health condition the video is not going to solve your problem. You still need the supplement to solve it, which is why supplement advertising on YouTube is such a great opportunity to engage with motion and audio to build trust for a cold prospect to buy.

YouTube like other social media advertising platforms can be a strategic part of your supplement marketing mix. To go discover more supplement marketing strategies read my article on the best marketing strategies that work for dietary supplements.