Supplement Marketing Overview:
DeWitt’s Media, Inc. has a history in marketing supplements online. After years of marketing supplements for other companies based on a cost per acquisition payout, we realized that we could do much better by marketing our own supplements. And with that a new business idea was born. This is when we started marketing supplements aggressively.
The Supplement Marketing Challenge:
We quickly learned that the supplement industry plays dirty in how they market supplements. Our major competitors were making outrageous health claims, falsifying celebrity endorsements, and signing customers up for monthly subscriptions in shady ways. In order to run a clean business, we needed to find a way to differentiate ourselves from those practices. We initially sought out various affiliate networks to work with, but a lot of these affiliate networks were allowing people to insert non compliant offers into their network for their affiliates to market. With this said it made it hard for us to compete and sustain against these non compliant diet offers. Not only did we want to run an ethical business, but wanted to avoid major FTC fines that these affiliated networks were in the line of fire for. We realized that we had to go another way within the supplement business. In order to be ethical and successful, we had to strike out on our own.
The Supplement Marketing Solution:
Running an ethical business in such an immoral market is not an easy thing to do. We put in a lot of time brainstorming ways to get customers to trust us over the big names in supplements like Hyroxycut, GNC Total Lean, and more. We eventually decided that the best way to get ahead was to capitalize on the popularity of our competitors. We built dozens of new sites that were optimized for our competitors keywords. Searchers would find our pages through organic search, and on those pages was an analysis of why our product was healthier and more effective than the product they had initially been searching for. We offered our readers a trial of our supplements at a cost of $5.95. We did not hide our terms and stayed 100% in compliance. The sites we set up were designed to look like third-party review sites. Searches read our analyses (which were all true), and most of them concluded that we sold the better product. We provided a buy link on these owned “review” sites and leads began flooding in. By harnessing the traffic meant for our competitors, we were able to redirect leads to our selling pages very successfully. We had figured out a way to use the time and money our competitors spent developing brand recognition in a way that drove sales for us.
Our Supplement Marketing Results:
The results were incredible. Our monthly sales grew from an average of about ~ $3,500 to $275K in peak months, peaking at nearly $275,000 in monthly sales. This growth happened within about 16 month time frame. Since 70% of our traffic was organic, there was no need to pay for clicks or other types of advertising in the beginning. Our creative (outside the box) thinking helped us to grow by more than 8K% in under two years. How many supplement marketers can say they have done that?