Nearly two out of three Americans are either overweight or obese. That means that diet products are always popular, and selling them can be a potentially lucrative business venture. To succeed, you'll need a solid marketing plan that will help you reach a target audience made up of interested prospects. Even more importantly, you'll need to establish connections with your prospects and customers so that you can make repeat sales and leverage your marketing investments into a higher return.
A well-rounded marketing plan will have strategies to land new customers and to generate repeat business from existing customers.
Instructions
1. Determine your marketing message. Because diet products are popular, you'll have a lot of competition. Your marketing message needs to be powerful, memorable and honest. Consider the factors that set you apart from other companies offering similar products and emphasize them. Focus on benefits over features in your marketing message. For example, if your product contains green tea, say so, but also say that green tea gives the metabolism a natural boost. Green tea is a feature; an improved metabolism is the benefit of that feature.
2. Launch a website so people can purchase your diet product online. A website should be the lynchpin of your marketing strategy. It provides you with a low-cost way to reach a broad audience. With a website, you don't have to limit your marketing to your region---you can reach people nationwide or even around the world.
3. Launch an e-letter so you can maintain contact with your interested prospects and existing customers. (Make sure you include a subscription field on your website so visitors can sign up for your e-letter.) Send your e-letter out on a regular basis--once or twice a month or once a week. Focus on providing your users with useful, relevant information--you represent a diet product, so keep the content of your e-letter focused on diet, weight loss and fitness topics. You can send promotions to this list, too, but make sure you send more useful information than sales material.
4. Use a variety of strategies to bring traffic to your website. Write articles and press releases that contain keywords you think your audience will use on search engines. Post these on your site. Visit weight loss, natural health, fitness and beauty sites, and comment on forums and blogs---include a link back to your site in your signature or profile. Contribute articles to these sites as well. Consider placing pay-per-click ads on related websites or on search engines. These ads bring traffic to your site, and you pay only for visitors.
5. Familiarize yourself with FCC regulations regarding marketing diet plans and online marketing. The FCC recently updated the regulations for using endorsements and testimonials. It's important to take steps to comply with these regulations; otherwise, you could get hit with hefty fines.
6. Practice good follow-up, and provide your customers with superior service. These two steps help ensure repeat sales, which are key to becoming profitable.
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