The worldwide market of supplements is experiencing exponential growth now. The supplement market value is supposed to exceed $200 billion by the upcoming year. Naturally, there cannot be a more opportune moment for building your new supplement brand than now.
But launching and running a supplement company requires some well-calibrated steps to ensure a strong foothold from the very beginning. Here we are going to explain the steps for starting a supplement business.
Identify Trends
Consumer preferences in the supplement market are leaning more towards organic and plant-based products. An increasing number of customers are now preferring personalized formulations. People are also voicing their links for eco-friendly recyclable packaging material and manufacturing processes with low carbon footprints. To establish a new supplement brand, it is important to stay informed about these emerging trends. For this you can check Google Trends, read industry white papers, and keep listening to supplement topics across forums and social media platforms. Both SproutSocial and Hootsuite offer great social listening tools.
Analyze Competitors
For starting a supplement business, shortlist the biggest competitors offering a similar product line and then for each one of them carry out a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). Compare the pricing, ingredients they use, their transparency score with product description, customer loyalty programs, and marketing channels and tactics they leverage. Determine the weaklings or gaps and figure out how you can do competitively better and bring some unique value propositions that others are unable to deliver.
Understand Regulatory Requirements
As we all know that supplements, whether from third-party supplement manufacturers or established supplement brands with their own manufacturing plants, come under strict regulations and pertaining scrutiny in different regions. In the US, the compliance regulations imposed by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) fairly encompass all ingredient safety and labeling transparency requirements through their assessment processes. The EFSA guidelines in the European market also uphold customer safety as they leverage clinical tests and the latest scientific research to review the claims made by supplement brands. Get yourself familiar with these global requirements and accordingly align your product line.
Demographic Profiling
You need to create multiple customer personas based on demographic profiles. The research can encompass different tools and platforms like customer surveys, focus groups and forums, and customer analytics. Some of the crucial data points that such profiling should prioritize for supplement customers include age, nutrition and dietary habits, income, location, and education level. Different combinations of such data points can be analyzed to determine supplement requirements for different ethnic groups, people with different dietary habits, locations, and age groups.
Psychographic Analysis
A psychographic analysis contextualizes the insights from demographic profiling with the different sets of lifestyle habits, values, and pain points. This analysis easily reveals how many of the target customers are environmentally conscious. Similarly, such analysis can also reveal their preferences for convenience nutrition measures like supplements over raw or cooked foods. The insights drawn from such research help you to shortlist the right private-label supplement manufacturers. This will help you to figure out where you need to emphasize product labeling, branding, and marketing campaigns.
Product Differentiation
First, you need to differentiate your product by highlighting the unique features. Now here comes the twist. While many brands highlight organic or vegan certifications, you can offer a glimpse of how the authentic ingredients are sourced and tell a story about traditional processes. Even when you are sourcing products from supplement contract manufacturing companies, you can push custom orders that align with distinct quality requirements. Similarly, in product labels and marketing messages, you can highlight the scientific backing with data points, statistics, and reports.
Create a Brand Story
Keeping the product differentiation narrative forward, you should create a brand story highlighting the emotional connection and commitment to organic processes. The brand story should showcase the company’s journey and milestones that it achieved along the way to creating a sustainable and healthy alternative. To establish credibility, the brand story should also incorporate testimonials of people from all walks of life who benefitted from your products.
Select Supplement Types
Before deciding to get onboard third-party supplement manufacturers, you need to have a clear idea of the supplement types you are going to market. Based on the market and competitor research, you should determine the specific supplement categories that are higher in demand or face lower competition. Here you need to make a detailed analysis of both demand and competition. For instance, sports and general supplements stay at the top of the demand curve but it also faces the highest competition. On the other hand, functional supplements for problems like stress relief skin care, or mood disorders can cater to a specific audience.
Ensure Quality and Safety
When it comes to the supplement market, quality is not a vague word but rather represents several attributes such as following Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), organic and transparent sourcing of materials, stringent quality and safety testing, packaging to ensure a low carbon footprint, and certification from regulatory bodies and industry watchdogs. Make sure private-label supplement manufacturers you hire meet all of these quality and safety requirements.
Obtain Necessary Licenses
As for required licenses, FDA registration can help you meet global regulatory requirements and standards approved in most countries. To add further credibility you can obtain third-party certifications like NSF International. To obtain these industry-acclaimed certifications and licenses you need to submit ingredient dossiers, product testing data, and product samples to the respective authorities. Reputed supplement contract manufacturing companies can take care of the quality requirements you need for certification and licensing.
Labeling and Claims
Labels and the claims that you put in product labels can help your brand earn credibility. To start from the basics, make sure labels have all the key points as per regulatory requirements such as ingredient details, calorie information, suggested usage, and disclaimers. Make sure the labels do not mention any unsubstantiated claims like “cure for obesity in 3 months”. Instead, use credible and research-backed claims like “supports immune health.”
Choose the Manufacturing Partners
The most crucial that holds the key to product quality and brand credibility is choosing the right manufacturing partner. First of all, shortlist some supplement contract manufacturing companies with Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP). For further shortlisting the choices consider companies capable of manufacturing custom formulations. Evaluate their capacity to handle small and large orders while maintaining consistent quality control. You can also consider visiting online platforms and directories like Find My Manufacturer and Alibaba.
Plan Logistics
After finalizing the manufacturing partner, create a full-proof logistics plan ensuring streamlined inventory management and shipping. To make things more efficient you should choose reputed third-party logistics providers (3PLs) with robust warehousing infrastructure and expertise in last-mile delivery.
Align Label Design with Brand
While you get the products produced by private label supplement manufacturers you need to create the labels and packaging. The labels and packages must be attention-grabbing, they should be consistent with your brand color and design scheme. Give attention to using readable and synergic fonts, use vibrant colors and maintain the right contrast, and lastly, use eco-friendly materials for packaging to showcase your commitment to sustainability.
Develop Brand Guidelines
Since you are starting a business that would appear across different platforms over time, make sure all design elements remain consistent throughout the product life cycle. Create a detailed brand guide with clear direction for color scheme and tone, visual cues, and messaging patterns. All these branding elements should appear across all touchpoints, ranging from websites to social media channels.
E-commerce Website Development
You need to create a digital storefront for your new supplement brand through a functional e-commerce website. While building this, give priority to making the user journey seamless by making navigation intuitive. Use search functionality and different filters to help customers search and access products with ease. At the same time make sure that the website is optimized for smartphone and tablet users.
Integrate Payment Gateways
Modern shopping experience is more about ease of purchasing and freedom of choice. Keeping this principle in mind you should offer customers multiple payment gateways, wallets, and traditional payment modes. For payment offer options like credit cards, digital wallets, net banking, and cash on delivery options. Last but not least, always make sure that the payment gateways are secure enough to safeguard customer data and transaction information.
Digital Marketing
For starting a supplement business you need to adopt a multi-channel marketing strategy focusing on customer engagement. Start with content marketing instead of directly promoting products, educate and inform customers about supplements. You can run paid ad campaigns on various platforms to target supplement specific audience groups.
Partner Influencers
Health Influencers can create hype around a new supplement brand and help establish their credibility. Don’t just stop by approaching top supplements or health industry influencers. Instead, reach out to micro-influencers as well. Sometimes multiple micro influencers with a few thousand followers can create more buzz around a supplement brand than a single macro influencer.
Pre-Launch Campaigns
Before establishing your new supplement brand you need a robust launch plan for products. You must create enough buzz to generate interest in your target audience. This requires leveraging a well-articulated pre-launch strategy involving announcements with countdowns, teaser videos, and early-bird discounts. From the pre-launch campaign, collect potential customer emails by using lead magnets and keep them in the customer database for future reach-out.
Launch Event
Make the launch event of your supplement brand special and memorable whether it is virtual or physical. Try to bring some influencer celebrities from the sports or health and fitness world with a good following among your target audience. The launch event includes product supplements demonstrations and Q&A sessions.
Customer Support
Satisfactory customer experience is guaranteed by the way you address their queries and concerns. This is why establishing responsive customer service channels is imperative. Leverage live chat and chatbots for quick response time, social media comments, and interactions to showcase your commitment and email and phone support for resolving critical issues.
Feedback Loop
Whether in your blogs or social media posts, always encourage customers to leave comments, reviews, and testimonials. Maintain a persuasive tone in all conversations and take negative feedback positively to refine products and address pain points. Ensure a quick turnaround time for addressing all customer complaints to maintain your supplement brand reputation.
Track Key Performance Metrics (KPIs)
Now when the business is up and running, you need to leverage analytics to track metrics like conversion rates, customer retention, and average order value. For KPI tracking you have multiple tools like Google Analytics, Salesforce CRM software, and many others.
Continuous Improvement
You cannot launch a product line, put all the above do’s and don’ts in place, and keep repeating the same. In the dynamic business landscape, you need to keep your ears open to new trends and market demands. Based on market feedback and actionable insights offered by analytics tools you may need to launch new products, rebrand old products, leverage new marketing techniques, and make changes in operation to address customer issues.
As the growth curve in market demand indicates, the supplement business is going to thrive for years to come. Even a tiny slice of this market size can convert into a multi-billion dollar enterprise. But what’s really at stake here is a well-rounded and no-holds-barred approach, starting from the initial research and brainstorming to nurturing the growth your supplement company has already achieved.
