7 Steps to Make Your Supplement Brand Stand Out
COVID-19 has led to a shift in our everyday lives, with people refocusing on themselves. The aim to improve overall wellness, and vitamin and supplement use has risen dramatically.
According to healthline, the nutritional supplement industry recorded its highest growth in more than two decades, increasing by 12.1% in 2020.
This trend is expected to continue into the next few years. Many people support their health through nutritional supplements, sports nutrition vitamins, and other health products to improve immunity and mental well-being, as well as bone and skin health.
You are now at the stage where you’ve got a brilliant business idea and have done the preliminary processes for your business. Still, you just don’t know how to build a brand for the modern consumer, enter the market strongly, and have a nutritional brand that will stand out for your audience.
Don’t worry, because you will know how to start molding your business to be a stand-out brand at the end of this article.
Identify and understand your target customer
After the hard work you’ve put into researching, formulating, talking to suppliers, and preparing everything for your product, you now have to translate your vision into reality. But how do you start that process? It doesn’t start with designing your logo; it begins with digging deeper into your brand.
The first stage is defining your target customer for your products. The supplement industry is enormous; hence, its target market is vast too. And that means that targeting “everyone” will not help your business because you’ll end up targeting no one.
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If your product is for weight management, you can target middle-aged moms who are busy in their everyday lives but want to look their best while being a supermom or female millennials, These women are exercising regularly and looking for a product that can help them maintain their weight while enjoying the prime of their life.
Align your brand with your target market’s values and preferences. For example, millennials are currently driving the growth of supplements, according to New Hope Network, because they are health-conscious consumers, and that’s why they require clean ingredients, product transparency, and sustainable packaging.
Other than knowing the demographics of your target customer (gender, age, income, location, and occupation), understanding and knowing them on a deeper level will help you create a more attractive brand for them.
Know their psychographics: their situations, emotions, and goals. You can start by asking these questions:
What are their circumstances?
Why do they want to keep their bones strong, or increase their IQ?
Where do they shop for their supplements?
What are their goals in life?
Once you know that your supplement brand can help, your business decisions will be easier because you know how who you are doing this for. Knowing the kind of people that make up your audience will largely affect the kind of brand you will have so don’t skip this step.
Establish your differentiator from your competitors
If you ever clicked on Amazon’s Vitamin and Dietary Supplements tab you’ll see that there are hundreds of products available online for every category. Walking into a health food store, you will be drowned in thousands of supplement bottles on shelves.
Despite the over-saturated market, we know the supplement industry will still continue to grow. There are still numerous ways for you to enter the market and stand out despite the countless competitors.
The main way to stand out is to know and communicate your key differentiator. This is what makes you distinct and better than your main competitors. Your key differentiator will be the reason that your target consumer will choose you over hundreds of options available to them.
To start, you will have to do a bit of competitor analysis. You can start by asking these simple questions:
What market positioning do they own?
What are their ingredient combinations?
Are they missing something your target market is looking for in a dietary supplement?
With the right strategy, you will find the nuggets of gold that will be your building blocks in claiming a position in the market.
This differentiator will be your main selling point, so make sure you vocalize this in all of your brand touchpoints, from your packaging, social media, and website, You can also dedicate a section—or even a page—on your website to learning more about your differentiator for your audience.
Your differentiator doesn’t solely depend on your product, but also on your brand experience. from the first interaction between your brand and your consumer, your brand should spark something in them: it might be the product name, the packaging design, your messaging, or your story.
Supplement branding will help you in molding your business to stand out in the middle of your hundreds of competitors.
Build trust and be the only supplement option
In the world of health and wellness, trust is a big factor in the purchase decision of the consumer. They're going to consume your product so it is important for them to trust your brand first before they even try one of your supplements.
As a supplement brand, how do you build trust with your potential customers? Build a relationship with them.
And as a brand, how do you build a relationship with people? By being a human brand that understands and communicates well with your audience.
Go back to your target customer and look at their characteristics. From those insights build your brand and humanize it using personalities that would best fit your relationship with your audience. As social beings, we connect to people through distinct personalities that we like and resonate with.
Develop a brand personality that your target audience will trust. Maybe your brand has a knowledgeable, articulate, authoritative personality that will guide your consumers on their journey in attaining their goal through your weight loss pills.
Or is your brand a friendly, pure, and humble one that your audience can relate to and talk to as a friend, and be with them whenever they’re having a hard time sleeping or dealing with stress?
Embody the personalities in all aspects of your brand; from design to experiences. In everything you do, you have to be as human as possible, and you can easily achieve that by following a brand guideline that will help you to be consistent in every aspect of your brand development and management.
Make sure you vocalize the value of your products on social media because this is where your audience will get to know you and build their trust towards your brand. Be transparent to them; tell your story, share some customer journeys and be an authentic brand in the modern world.
Remember, dietary supplement brands are all about building relationships with your audience so that your brand will be the only option for them and for their loved ones. When you have loyal customers, your brand will have a much higher chance of success.
Design a Stand-out Visual Identity
Designing your brand identity includes your logo, color palette, typography styling, packaging design, and marketing collaterals. These items are not just a part of your brand design checklist. It is a part of your strategy that you have to consider carefully because it will be a big part of your supplement branding and marketing for years.
Logo: Your logo is the face of your brand. Many supplement brands make mistakes when they overdesign by trying to summarize what they offer in their logo. Ultimately their logo will look compressed, crowded, and will not stand the test of time. Design a logo that is simple, significant, and strategic.
Color palette: People subconsciously associate emotions with specific colors. Green is naturalistic and pure; violet is rich and luxurious; yellow is energetic and positive; blue is loyal and trustworthy. Think about the brands that use these colors and you can see how color psychology is used in branding.
But don’t limit your brand in color psychology because your brand colors can also be your differentiator. If your competitors use a lot of green and white, curate a new color combination that will still be appropriate and meaningful for your brand, and that will help you stand out on the shelves and in online catalogs
Typography: As a supplement brand, don’t overlook the importance of typography because it highly influences the characteristics of your brand. If you want to communicate that you're trustworthy and knowledgeable in the area of health and nutrition, use serif fonts that depict safety and reliability for the traditional style it embodies. But if you're a scientific and innovative nutrition brand, use sans serif fonts that have modern and clean styles.
Patterns/Style: Each shape and form you use in your brand is a part of your brand identity and contributes to your overall look and feel. Do you use realistic illustrations of your ingredients, or are you a minimalist brand that uses modern symbols? Ensure that each of your branding decisions is rooted in your strategic direction so you will have a successful business with the help of effective supplement branding.
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Introduce Your Brand Through Touchpoints
Humans are visual: We love learning through our eyes because we recognize patterns and images in just a split second. And that’s the main reason why ensuing that your visual touchpoints are on point and attractive to your target customer.
Packaging design: As we mentioned above, you have fierce competitors; a great and eye-catching supplement packaging design is crucial, whether your product is going to be sitting on a shelf or on a virtual shelf. Your label is going to be the first experience your customers get from your brand, so make sure it is a good and distinct experience for them through communicating the right message, look, and feel.
In order to stand out, look at your competitors and see what they have in common. You’re going to use these insights not to copy what they do but to learn how to create something unique that will set you apart from everything on the shelves.
You also have the control of the label copy. Make sure that the text is legible, especially if it’s going to be in physical stores. Consider including label claims and popular certifications as they provide value to your product.
Include the necessary elements in your label that will help your customer decide that your product is the right supplement/vitamin for their problem. Of course, make sure that your label is fully compliant with supplement industry guidelines in your country and the locations where you’ll be selling them.
Most customers base their supplement selection on the packaging alone, so it is essential to have a professionally designed label.
Marketing collaterals: Whether you’re posting content for social media advertising or creating a physical pamphlet on your health store, it’s important that your marketing or educational assets are properly designed and written. Aside from your packaging design, your marketing collaterals can be the first brand experience of your potential customers so make sure that whatever you show them is interesting enough for them to learn more about your product and possibly buy your supplements or vitamins.
Create a High-Converting
E-commerce Site
Your website is your virtual store, so it is the place where your customers should get the information needed from your brand. It is a sales tool, so the end goal is to sell your product. Your homepage should be attractive and your website copy easy to digest so that your audience will want to learn more.
Design your website in such a way that your audience will have a smooth experience in learning more, gaining trust in your brand, and buying your nutritional products.
Build Your Brand Presence and Launch
Last, but not least, is supplement marketing: putting your product in front of your customers on the right platform, at the right time, and with the right message.
At this stage, you now have a great foundation provided through supplement branding about your customers, competitors, and your brand. Now is the time to articulate your brand message to your audience and generate sales.
We learned above that it is essential for supplement brands to be trustworthy. So putting up an ad saying “Omega 3 Fatty Acids, Buy Now!” will not work, but educating them about the product will help them gain knowledge about, and hence, trust in your brands. Once you offer them an opportunity to buy your supplement product they will most likely buy it or refer it to a friend or family member.
Products may be sold directly to customers, or through distributors, retailers or dieticians, so learning how your target customer knows about and gets their supplements is a valuable marketing insight. Influencer marketing is also an effective way to get sales, because once your product is referred by someone whom your audience looks up to and trusts, getting those sales will be a piece of cake.
The supplement and vitamin audience are more critical because they have experienced false claims by other brands that don’t match up with their products. So your consumers will do their research first and look for reviews and testimonials. If you can provide honest but powerful testimonials on your website and social media platform then they will trust your brand because consumers trust consumers.
This is how you make your supplement business to be a stand out brand:
1. Identify and understand your target customer
2. Establish your differentiator from your competitors
3. Build trust and be the only supplement option
4. Design a stand-out visual identity
5. Introduce your brand through touchpoints
6. Create a high-converting e-commerce site
7. Build your brand presence and launch
Building a stand-out supplement brand is not easy, but it’s possible with the right strategy and effective branding. Start your nutrition business with your target customer in mind and everything will follow through. Be strategic with every business decision, big or small, because all of it will be a part of the brand experience you will give to your customers. And that experience will be the reason why they choose your brand—or not.
Redd Creatives can help your supplement or vitamin business to be a modern brand that your audience will remember and love. We are a branding agency that specializes in developing intentional and stand-out wellness brands through brand strategy and visual design.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or scaling your business, we will work with you to strategize and design the best roadmap for success in order to reach your vision and goals. Contact Redd Creatives here to learn more and discover how to get started.
AUTHOR - GHIAN RED of REDD CREATIVES
BRAND DESIGNER & STRATEGIST
A branding expert who is passionately focused on transforming businesses through effective strategy and experiences. Working with global, small to large businesses, she makes sure that each detail and decision is carefully made to ensure each clients’ success to grow and scale their brand with ease and clarity.
