For companies that sell online, it might seem that everything revolves around the product. But the marketing team at Balance of Nature might take exception to that belief.
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What is Balance of Nature?
Balance of Nature is a health company that sells health supplements to help their customers meet their nutritional needs.
Products tend to focus on fruits and vegetable replacements.
What does Balance of Nature do differently?
Balance of Nature takes in nine figures in revenue per year by advertising on only one channel.
This isn’t the old stalwarts like Google or Facebook, or even something new like Snapchat or TikTok.
Instead, they only advertise on Fox News TV ads.
Their website receives hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, and it has two main sources:
1. Over half of the traffic is direct
This means that people are typing the Balance of Nature website into the search bar after hearing about it.
2. 43 percent comes from organic search.
This means that people are seeing the TV ads and they either type in the website, search for it on Google, or they call directly based on what they see in the television ad.
TV ads still obviously work. After all, Fox News is a huge audience.
This doesn’t either take into account phone calls, which is mainly what they’re trying to get people to do based on the TV ads they run.
What is Balance of Nature’s advertising budget?
They are racking up north of $100 million per year through one channel, so we can infer that they’re spending in the tens of millions of dollars on Fox News TV ads each year.
Why are Balance of Nature’s tactics unique?
Balance of Nature is unique in the marketing and DTC world in that you can get success in e-commerce by focusing on your audience before your product.
In other words, find an audience, engage your audience, then create a product for them.
Balance of Nature was able to find a very specific audience, which happens to be Americans that skew toward political conservatism. Then they sold them a product they would respond to.
Ads on Fox News are a great way to reach a certain demographic.
And Balance of Nature is taking advantage of it.
Disadvantages
This type of tactic can have disadvantages:
1. Anything that works attracts competition. New competitors might do the same thing.
2. You could depend too much on one marketing platform and not having enough diversification in your stream of leads. If going that route is no longer an option, that’s a big blow to your business.
LittleThings is an example of overdependence on one channel.
They depended heavily on Facebook, and when Facebook changed their algorithm that was sadly the end of their business:
LittleThings – A Case Study in Avoiding Dependence on 1 Marketing Channel
Final word
There are multiple ways to do marketing.
Most start with a product then they think about how to market it.
You can also do the opposite where you focus on an audience first then think about how to monetize the audience with a product.
Online celebrities in the attention economy are making the ‘audience first, product second’ tactic more common.
Bloggers, influencers, and YouTubers are making this popular.
Many built on audience using social channels before trying to convert them into private products.
The general idea is to find out where an audience is then go after them.
But it can be a profitable strategy to start out or expand your sales.
Figure out what works and really master it.
Every product has an ideal audience, which of Balance of Nature found with Fox News, and there’s nothing wrong with riding that wave when you really tap into what’s clicking.