Marketing Nutraceuticals: Creating A Digital Advertising Plan

Creating a digital advertising plan as part of marketing your nutraceuticals business is a fun but extremely challenging task.

Being a marketer, your worries are how to easily and affordably get people’s attention, push them to your website, and convert them to subscribe to your news and ultimately make them buy, am I right?

Digital advertising is the answer to marketing nutraceuticals. If you understand how digital advertising works for your nutraceuticals business, it opens the faucet of traffic and sales in one go.

In this post, you get an overview of the process for planning, setting up, and optimizing your ads for your nutraceutical company, including the metrics you need to look, the language you’ll use when purchasing ads, and the people in your company who should be responsible for digital advertising.

But before we start, let’s clarify why paying for traffic is way a smarter investment than getting organic traffic.

What Is The Difference Between Paid and Organic Traffic When It Comes To Marketing Nutraceuticals ?

Nothing beats free, I get it. That’s why most vitamin retailers and nutraceutical manufacturers aim for organic traffic first. After all, if you can get a steady flow of free traffic, you’ll save a lot of money that you would otherwise invest in paid advertising.

As only as it was so simple.

Let’s compare traffic with a water faucet and rain.

Paid traffic is like a water faucet. Each time you turn the faucet on, you get water, at any direction you turn it to, at any amount you wish, and for as long as you are willing to keep it open.

Same with paid traffic – if you get more leads and sales that you ca handle, simply turn off the ads, or lower the bids, so as to slow the flow. You are in complete control of where it’s going, how fast, and when.

Rain, on the other hand is like organic traffic.

Are you sure when it will rain? No.

Do you know how long will it last? No.

Do you get equals amount of rain all over the rainy area? No.

No matter how close attention you pay to the weather forecast, you will never be in control of the rain.

What does this mean for organic traffic? Well, imagine that you are at the first page in Google, and suddenly they change their algorithm. Goodbye first page.

With organic traffic if you simply change your URL, you can kiss goodbye your traffic, because the cached page points to a different URL.

Is there a way not to pay for paid traffic?

Yes, there is.

The secret is to build funnels that reimburse your ad spend.

So in layman terms, you can acquire customers for free, and then once your advertising costs have been reimbursed, use simple tactics to build loyalty and optimize your customers’ lifetime value.

Also, when you optimize your paid traffic, you are also helping your organic traffic as well, because good advertising drives traffic—and the pages that get lots of traffic tend to rank higher in search engines.

However, you mustn’t be a dreamer. Be realistic. Running a traffic campaign does not mean that it will magically deposit a million in your bank account.

Want a constant flow of leads and customers for your nutraceuticals business? Then you must look at this as a system. 

What Are The Top 3 Sources for Paid Traffic That Guarantee Results For Nutraceutical Manufacturers & Retailers?

Well, the best platforms for paid traffic are Google Search Ads, Google Display, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

But to understand which one is the best channel for you, you must understand where the majority of your ideal customers are.

If You Are Manufacturing Vitamins & Supplements

You most likely sell B2B so your best bet is Google and Facebook. Why Facebook? Because chances are your ideal customers (retailers and online shops) are using Facebook to target their customers, so they are using this medium a lot.

If You Are Selling Supplements Online

Then your safest bet is to advertise on Instagram and Facebook, but do not forget Google display ads. I would also advise to experiment with search ads, if you sell off-the-self vitamins, like Omega 3, for example.

But again, it depends on what you’re trying to do.

Let’s see how each network contributes separately in marketing nutraceuticals:

Google Is Everyone’s Starting Point

People start searching online when they have a problem to solve, looking for information. Because Google is a search engine, people start there.

To drive traffic through Google, you’ll bid on keywords that will help people find you and can lead to an ideal sales conversation.

Facebook Is For Entertaining

Scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed is a bit like watching TV. As you scroll, you see ads, promoted posts, as well as random comments.

And if you, as a nutraceuticals business, are willing to pay to get in front of people, your message will also appear in the newsfeed of your target audience.

With Facebook, you can spend as little as you want and still expand your reach.

Facebook has the most advanced behavior data dump available today, and because it collects millions and trillions of behaviors each day, it provides marketers with comprehensive tools to advertise effectively.

If you know how, you can narrow down your ideal customer by the book they read.

YouTube Is The New Television

YouTube has become the new powerhouse for advertisers like you and me. You Tube is measuring how many minutes each video is watched and their primary goal is to keep you on the site watching videos.

They act like a TV, showing ads in the videos, interrupting people’s viewing.

Disruptive, sure, but unlike traditional TV, the ads you run are always relevant to the audience you are targeting.

YouTube allows you to target your ads based on the YouTube channels your audience likes, what kind of videos they watch, and obviously what they’re searching for.

With that said, let’s explore what methods you can pursue to execute your digital marketing campaigns.

How To Execute Digital Advertising Well

In this section we will talk about how to create ads that magnetically attract your best customers.

Two Concepts for Evaluating Your Target Audience

So you decide to run some ads. That’s great, but how do you know the type of ads you should be running and how to precisely target those ads?

It comes down to two foundational concepts: the customer path and the state of audience.

Concept 1: The Buyer’s Map (Or A funnel)

We discussed extensively about the Buyer’s Map in a previous post here. In case you forgot, it’s the path people follow as they form a relationship with your nutraceuticals business, from first touch to final sale.

The three core stages of The Map are:

Awareness. The top of the funnel. This is when new prospects discover your brand and that you can help them solve their problems.

Consideration. The middle of the funnel. Prospects at this stage are seriously considering buying something from you. Their biggest question is whether you’re the best source.

Purchase. The bottom of the funnel. At this stage people take action and actually buy something from you.

Concept 2: The State That The Audience Is In

At each stage of the Customer Map, your audience has a different kind of dynamic with you. For example, at the top of the funnel, they don’t know who you are and chances are they don’t really know what you do. But you move them through your funnel, your educational resources, ads, and content help them to learn more about you.

Cold Traffic. When referring to cold traffic we mean getting new prospects that are in Awareness stage. These people are good prospects for your supplements business but have never heard of you or your vitamins brand.

Your goal with cold traffic is to educate and become known to these people. You want to introduce your nutraceuticals business to new audiences and get to return for more info.

Warm Traffic. People that went through the Awareness stage are warm traffic. They now know who you are but haven’t bought anything yet. It aligns with the Evaluation stage.

Your goal with warm traffic is acquisition, to convert a site visitor into a lead.

Hot Traffic. Hot traffic comes from people who are at the Conversion stage. These are your buyers, people who are ready to buy or have already bought something from you.

Your goal with hot traffic is monetization, to sell additional products of higher value to your best customers.

With this scenario your goal is to move people from not knowing you to buying mode, converting new leads into clients, willing to buy from you on a repeat basis.

You do that by matching your message to your prospect’s stage.

When you address to people coming from cold traffic, you don’t necessarily offer a sale. Your time is better spent building a relationship. When you are addressing to hot traffic, the relationship has been already established, it’s there. Your language should be less formal, more friendly, and your offers are based on the topics you know they’re interested in.

These two tactics alone will massively improve your ability to create successful traffic campaigns. All you have to do is relate to people based on where they are in their journey, and you’ll build trust and engagement.

Still sound complicated? Contact us for a more thorough explanation.

Now let’s proceed to lay out the five elements that make up a winning ad campaign.

The Five Elements of a Massively Successful Marketing Nutraceuticals Campaign

Every ad campaign has five key components: the offer itself, the ad’s copy and creative (the design), the ad style (how it represents your brand), and the targeting.

1. Your Offer

So what is an offer? It’s the combination of the nutraceuticals or any services you offer when someone buys your vitamins with other add-ons, including all the details of your promotion:

• The deliverables
• The price
• The schedule
• How it’s being delivered
• And more

If you are a nutraceuticals manufacturer, chances are you are producing a variety of vitamins, formulas and other supplements. At each ad, you focus on only one and you must  offer it for sale in a variety of ways, creating hundreds of different offers.

Here are some creative ideas:

Let’s say that you are manufacturing Fish Oil.

Your offer could have:

• Offer a small MOQ
• Bundle this SKU with another (i.e. CBD)
• Make a trial and provide an upsell – for example you could say “Buy just a case to try for just $20 – instead of $50)

In this way, you presenting a valuable product by helping them save massively, in order to start the conversation.

Your offer is also the starting point for your ad campaign. Get it right, and everything else will usually fall into place.

But the opposite is just as true: put together a bad offer, and your ad won’t convert.

2. Your Copy

By referring to the ad copy we mean the messaging you use in your ad campaign. It should be clear and “make a case” so the benefits stand out.

Good copy has a strong emotional element. It’s intriguing and persuasive without hype.

Generally, you want to start your ad by speaking to a pain point your target is dealing with. Then your offer should be presented as the solution.

For example, if you know that i.e. a small segment of your ideal clients are just starting out, you could say “Troubled about having to buy large MOQ to start your supplements business?

If someone resonates with that problem, they’ll be eager to see the solution.

3. The Creative

Creative refers to the graphic elements of your ad: the image, or video.

Creative is a subjective thing. You don’t have to be overly imaginative or find professional designers to do it. Good creative sends the right message visually in just a second or two. So it supports and enhances your copy.

If you can visually display the offer, then people will know at a glance what the deliverable is.

4. Ad Consistency

Your brand needs to be congruent throughout your campaign.

Why is this important?

Because it transmits the element of trust, which is a huge conversion factor. If people feel at ease that your offer is solid, they’ll seriously consider it. Anything else creating doubt or fear, and they’ll exit without taking up on it.

Your visitors should always feel like they’re not duped.

You do this by creating consistency—visually, in your messaging, and in the presentation of your offer—from your ad to your landing page, and every other piece of your campaign.

To create consistency, focus on three elements:

• Design: Use similar images and colors on each piece of the campaign.
• Messaging: Use the same phrases and benefits in the ad and on the landing page.
• Offer: Your offer should be the same at the campaign level and at the landing page. It should be repeated at the thank you page and the follow up email too.

Consistency is key in digital advertising. Get it right, and you’ll boost your conversion rate and lower costs.

5. Targeting

The final element in a great ad campaign is targeting, and it’s important because even a fantastic offer won’t convert if you put it in front of the wrong audience.

Follow just two rules when planning your targeting.

First, be as specific as possible.

Dong extensive research has everything to do with being as specific as possible. When planning your targeting, learn as much as possible about your target audience. Your objective is to know your target audience so well, you can single out specific interests that this group has but no one else would have.

Second, get the message right for the prospects at any stage

Your prospects exist at any stage of your funnel. Your job is to find the right message to the level of relationship you have with your target audience.

Here are some guidelines for getting this right.

Cold Traffic. At this level you’re only introducing your nutraceuticals company to new audiences, so you have only three goals – and none of them being to sell:

• Your high level target is to build trust and establish credibility by sharing valuable information for free.
• When they arrive on your content, pixel them so you run more ads to them and warm them up.
• If they click on a blog post about any of your products, your services or your processes, we know they’re interested in that topic, so we can make them a more relevant offer later.

What kind of “offers” do you make to new prospects that don’t know you (cold traffic)?

• Blog posts
• Social media updates
• Content videos
• Downloadable assets
• Lead-qualification quizzes
• White papers
• YouTube ads to content
• Twitter ads to pillar content
• Infographics

When paying for brand awareness, you’ll pixel people who engage with your ad or click through to free content. You want to give them value so they begin to like your brand. Your objective is to keep things informative, inspiring, and educating everyone who clicks through.

Warm Traffic. If you achieved the first part, now some of your prospects will return. It’s not relationship yet, a connection has been made. Your warm traffic ads will need to target:

• People that opted into your email list. (You’ll upload that list to a traffic platform.)
• People who have visited your website and been pixeled.
• Facebook fans, Twitter followers, YouTube channel subscribers, LinkedIn etc.

Your goals for this kind of traffic are to:

• Generate leads or,
• Sell low-cost products in order to create customers that you can upsell later

What kind of offers do you make to this kind of traffic?

• Downloadable content
• Lead generation quizzes or surveys
• Webinars
• Low value sales
• Product trials
• Video explanations
• E-Books (free or paid)

Hot Traffic. People from this stage may be prospects who have opted in and are not yet ready or considering buying from you. They may even have added products to their shopping cart but never purchased. Also, they may have been past clients but haven’t responded to recent offers.

Your ads to this group of prospects has the following goals:

• Re-activate them. If they haven’t purchased in a while, tell them you are still in business!
• Higher value sales. Upsell buyers of lower-priced products.

What kind of offers do you make to hot traffic?

• Events, like presentations, exhibitions etc.
• High value offers
• Done-for-you private labeling services or any other similar service

No matter where your prospects or customers are, creating the right targeting allows you to put your campaign in front of the right people. And the more precisely you can target your ads, the better they’ll perform.

On to the next step:

Creating an Ad Campaign That Gets Results

How do you combine all the above to create an ad campaign that converts?

Prior of trying to set up your campaigns, you must be willing to create everything in advance—all the copy, creative, and targeting. The idea is to create highly targeted ads that speak directly to your target audience. In order to do that you must create a process, which is no other than an Ad Plan System.

The Ad Plan System: From Strategy to Profits

The Ad Plan is a strategic process to creating campaigns that align with the stage and interests of your ideal audience you’re targeting.

The idea behind the Ad Plan is to identify in advance the types of people you’re targeting and what will most likely get their attention, so you can be sure you’re creating a good marketing/message fit.

It’s not difficult to create your own Ad Plan. Simply create a spreadsheet like this one:

Now, with your spreadsheet ready, you will need to go through seven steps in order to plan, implement, and scale your campaign.

Step 1: Identify your client persona

A persona of your ideal client is a profile for one type of person who’d be interested in your offer (example: vitamins retailer, online supplement seller, supplements distributor).

Basically, for each campaign, you’ll have 2-4 different personas.

Don’t know who your persona is? Well, take a look at your offer (e.g., the blog post, or webinar or any other offer you’re promoting) and brainstorm several different types of clients who’d want it and benefit from it.

Each of these will be a persona for your campaign. Just place them into the top row of your grid.

Step 2: Locate the points of interest

What’s most interesting about your offer? Each benefit or outcome of your offer can be turned into a point of interest to get the attention of your audience.

Generally, you’ll create points of interests based on these five questions (make them a checklist):

• What will they have if they get your offer? i.e. a better product for their customers.
• How will they feel better, more successful or even smarter for accepting your offer? i.e. a piece of content (like this one) which will educate them in paid advertising for nutraceuticals.
• How is your offer going to change or improve their average day?
• What social proof, case studies, or testimonials validate your offer?
• Appeal to the time savings or quickness of learning or applying the information in your offer.

Okay, now that you have your points of interest, enter them in the first column of your grid.

Step 3: Create your ad text

You need to write different messages for every cell in your spreadsheet, each targeting one point of interest and persona.

What you need is unique ad texts for every segment: Persona1/POI1, Persona 2/POI1, etc. And for each segment, you want the text for the entire ad: text, headline, description and ad type.

In that case, let’s say you have two personas and two points of interests: 2×2= 4 ads in total.

This level of detail provides you with the best chance of hitting success in your campaign. Rather than creating ads that try to appeal to anyone, you will create highly sophisticated and targeted advertising aimed at your ideal audience.

Step 4: Persona Research

As soon as you write the copy, now is the time to conduct research on your personas to identify what interest them so you can add them to your ads.

For this, you will need to perform as much detailed research on each persona separately, finding the answers to each of these questions:

• Who are the best sources of information in the nutraceuticals industry? Who are the leaders?
• What kind of books/magazines/newspapers does your customer read?
• What events do they attend?
• What websites do they visit more often?
• What tools do they use to make their job easier?
• What’s specifically unique about this group?

It’s not really that hard to perform research these days. You start with a Google search and then you ask past customers if you have.

Yes, the results are not in an instant however these answers will help you get your ads in front of the people who need to see them.

Step 5: Create The … Creative

Your creative is the visual element you’ll use in each ad. At a minimum, you need one creative for each point of interest.

What should your creatives look like?

Do a Google image search of each point’s keywords, and see what comes up.

The top-ranking images show you what people think about when they hear your keyword.

Your images, photos or videos must include the visuals people associate with your keyword—but that also have your brand’s unique look and feel.

Step 6: Set up your ads and analyse your results

We are nearly there. We have all the assets we need for our marketing campaigns. Now it’s time to set up your ads. Use the ad planner to help you build each ad:

• You have a persona for your targeting
• You have developed copy and creative to build the ads
• Use your persona’s interests to build an audience size in the range of half a million to 1.5 million each.

Then turn your ads on and run them about a week. Once you start getting results, you can begin analyzing your metrics.

What will be your success metric? This largely depends on depends on your goals and the stage your ideal prospect is. For example, success metrics might be:

• cost per click
• cost per acquisition
• ROI
• Conversions
• Form fills (aka conversions)
• Chat initiations

Make a record of that metric in your ad planner below the ad copy for each persona. What you need to do is collect the metrics at 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, and at the end of each campaign.

Step 7: Scaling up

You hear the term “scaling” but what does this mean? In simple terms, when you understand what’s working & what’s not, then you decide to pour more effort/resources on whatever works so as to get better results.

There are a couple of good ways to scale a campaign:

• Option 1:If you get results for a persona that are better than average, buy traffic in on other ad platforms to boost your visibility to that group of people.
• Option 2: If a specific point of interest or persona is giving you great results via the ads, create different ad sets or split test the existing addressing that group on the same platform.

How To Create A Process To Optimise Marketing Nutraceuticals

In digital advertising, your goal is to attract people that don’t know youc, then warm them up over time, so eventually you persuade them to buy.

To achieve this, you’ll build campaigns that include all sort of ads for all sort of customer stages of your target audience. The challenge is optimise your budget while targeting different segments. Here’s how:

Your magic “equation” for success in marketing nutraceuticals is

6-3-1

Let’s assume you have a given budget of €100/day. Your daily spend SHOULD look like this:

• €60/day on cold traffic, driving traffic to your site with pure content
• €30/day turning warm traffic into leads or buyers
• €10/day retargeting and selling a higher-value product

Obviously that dynamic may change from time to time depending on your needs, but generally this is a rule of thumb, allowing you to target all stages while maintaining control of your spending.

Optimizing a Weak Campaign

If a campaign isn’t performing well, check your offer. If you have a great offer, chances are that your other elements can be weak. However, if your offer isn’t the right one, there is no chance in the world it will convert.

Other times your ads will start out strong, but results will deteriorate over time. This means that too many people have seen the ad repeatedly and you reached “ad fatigue” – meaning that people aren’t responding to it anymore.

You can fix this in 2 ways:

1. Just retarget to another audience – i.e. of you are retargeting resellers, now change that to importers (just an idea)
2. Change the campaign completely

The Metrics You’ll Use to Measure If Your Nutraceuticals Marketing Campaign Works

The major metrics you need to pay attention to when you are advertising nutraceuticals (or any other product or service for that matter) are:

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click through rate is calculated by the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions on an ad and any other call-to-action. The higher the click-through rate, the more prospects you will be moving from stage to stage in the customer journey.

Cost Per Acquisition of Customer (CPA)

Cost per acquisition is calculated by the amount of advertising spend divided by the number of customers generated. Get more granular by calculating CPA by traffic campaign, traffic source, and more.

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

How much you spent on ads, divided by the number of leads generated. Once again, you can go deeper by calculating CPL by traffic campaign, traffic source, and more.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

The amount of advertising spend divided by the number of clicks on the ad, ad set, or ad campaign. Believe it or not, this is the least important of these four metrics.

Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM)

The amount it costs to reach a million people. When you’re creating a campaign to extend your reach or build brand awareness, this is the metric to use.

Summing Up

Online advertising for marketing nutraceuticals is one of the most important tactics for digital marketers because it gives you control over your traffic flow.

To succeed, though, you need to create different campaigns for each stage of the Customer Path—and you need to understand the stage of each customer depending on their situation.