Vitamin Supplement Marketing – 3 Step Starter Plan
Let’s face it, the market for vitamin supplements has exploded over the last 20 years. This means big opportunity………but it also means that you could quickly drown in an ocean of competition. Organify Digital works with companies in the vitamin supplement, sports nutrition and healthy food and beverage market, and we’ve come up with a simple three-step structure to keep our clients focused on the most important aspects of marketing your vitamin supplement brand.
1.) Identify Your Target Vitamin Shopper
The key word here is “target”. How do you define target vitamin shopper? When you were inspired to create your line, you saw a particular opportunity in the market. Perhaps it was a product feature or benefit that was lacking or did not exist. Or a particular shopper that was not being served. Maybe YOU were that shopper. It’s important to create a clear picture of that shopper. Below is a simple shopper profile that can be used to help target your marketing and create focus and direction for your marketing plan. It contains shopper demographic info, lifestyle preferences, and interests.
2.) Outline the Perfect Marketing Strategy for Your Vitamin Brand
Now that you’ve created your target shopper profile, think of your marketing as a big blanket. You want to take your big marketing blanket and wrap it around your shopper, surrounding them from all sides. If you want to wrap a blanket around someone, you have to be able to see exactly where they are. And marketing is no different. You have to have to be able to see where that shopper is spending their time. Two specific areas of focus;
- Where do they purchase products? Online websites or retail stores?
- Where does your shopper get information about the products that they purchase? Is it from social media, google search, bloggers, influencers, or others?
In most cases, there’s not one clear answer. For instance, your shopper may follow certain bloggers, be active on social media, and research nutritional trends on Google. Working with a marketing agency that focuses on a specific market like vitamin supplements can eliminate years of “guessing” and “testing”, potentially saving you an enormous amount of time and money. That’s because the marketing agency may have already been targeting this shopper for years and can leverage their historical data to get you on target faster. Also, an agency or consultant who is an expert in search marketing can help ensure that you have Google Analytics properly setup on your website and that each of your marketing channels are properly tagged with UTM parameters. This enables you to see exactly where your shoppers are coming from and the particular media that is driving their purchases.
3.) Assessing Competitive Vitamin Brands
So far, in steps 1 and 2, we’ve gotten a good sense of who our shopper is, where they shop, and where they get their media. Now we want to do an assessment of the competition to see how we stack up. Specifically, we want to look at the marketing tactics and messaging that your competitors in the vitamin category are using. By “messaging” we’re referring to the collective graphics, headlines and copy in both their marketing advertisements, as well as, the organic content on their website and in their social feeds. Examining the key competitors in the vitamin category will give us a sense of where to start. It will also give us a benchmark for how our messaging can be improved so that you can present your brand in a better light than these other brands. We recommend setting up a personal email box specifically so that you can subscribe to all of your competitors email newsletters. You’ll also want to follow them on social media using a personal social media page (not your business). You can see all of your competitors paid social media ads by going to their brand Facebook page under Page Transparency. You’ll see a link for the Ads Library. Here you can find all of their most recent ads. We look for ads that have been running for a long time as this is a good sign that they are working.
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