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At Supplement Marketers, we know that reaching your customers requires tried and true tactics. However, we also believe that the industry needs a little shaking up. How can we give our clients tested marketing plans with proven results? Well, we’re a little like mad scientists — we tested our methods on ourselves.
Our sister company, DeWitt’s Media, Inc., has been marketing supplements for other companies for many years. They wanted to strike out on their own, with their own supplements and their own marketing strategy. We were excited to assist them in this new venture, but we saw one major challenge looming overhead: how can we get retailers and clients to trust us over the “big boys”?
The supplement industry is… interesting, to say the least. Firstly, we ran into an issue of exaggerated advertising claims. While the FTC does regulate the advertising language in the supplement industry, the standards they’ve set are vague enough that many brands can safely make outrageous claims, from unrealistic health results to fake celebrity endorsements.
We also discovered that many supplement companies use shady methods to get customers to sign up for monthly subscriptions. This was something we noticed primarily with affiliate networks; many of these organizations allowed people to include non-compliant offers into their network for the purposes of affiliate marketing.
This practice left a bad taste in our mouths, so we decided to take the road less traveled. After all, the wellness industry is all about making our bodies — and by extension, our lives — better and healthier. Don’t our customers deserve an industry that’s also healthy and thriving? We were committed to making our supplement marketing a more ethical operation.
Getting attention as a brand-new brand is hard in any market, but when you’re bucking industry norms to run a more ethical business, it’s next to impossible. We knew that established brands like Hydroxycut, GNC Total Lean, and others would dwarf our brand — but if we couldn’t beat them, we could get a boost from their popularity.
We built dozens of websites, each of them optimized with our competitors’ keywords. This put us in the running, as we’d show up alongside our competitors in Google search results. What set us apart was the content of those websites: instead of outlandish claims that will get you in trouble, we filled our sites with informative analysis on the value of our products. We had real users share their powerful stories on how our products helped them with the assistance of our copywriters of course.
We also offered our readers a supplement trial. For the low cost of $5.95, they could try out our product and see the results for themselves. This, coupled with our straightforward copy (which was 100% in compliance with FTC regulations), helped us undercut our competitors and drive sales toward the superior product — ours!
Even with all our efforts, we knew that the major brands may still win out. They had years on us, name recognition, and (perhaps most importantly) the dubious ethics of their marketing behind them. We were hoping that just a few health enthusiasts would give us a try…
But we had no idea that our own brand was going to hit new heights.
With our new marketing efforts in place, monthly sales climbed from $3,500 to a peak of $275,000 in under 16 months! We were attracting customers from all over the country, people who were tired of the old brands and wanted something new. And even as our sales were climbing, our overhead stayed low; 70% of our traffic was organic in the early stages, just people who stumbled upon us in a Google search, and therefore we didn’t need to pay for clicks or other types of advertising. Craziest of all, our initial growth occurred in just 16 MONTHS! In just under two years, our unique marketing style helped our sister company achieve 8,000% GROWTH!
Our earliest adventures in supplement marketing taught us two things: people want honest marketing from their supplements, and some outside the box thinking is well worth the effort. This is why we bring innovative and unique marketing methods to all our clients today!