Five Obstacles between Internet Marketing JV partners and Health and wellness Product Owners
Recognizing the challenges involved in forming joint venture partnerships (JVP) in the Health & Wellness (H&W) niche is critical to developing a successful strategy for a product launch. It is challenging enough to get any JV partner to support your product, but the challenge becomes even greater, when trying to bring JV partners who are experts in the internet marketing (IM) niche on board. The main reason for this really stems from the greater level of control JV IMmers have over the marketing and distribution of digital products to their lists as opposed to typical H&W products.
There are several key issues that make H&W JV’s unattractive to strong IM based JV partners. Let us look at five of the more critical issues.
1. Health and Wellness niche products require a different mechanism for establishing validity and credibility to make them successful. In other words, if the digital products are backed by established physicians or heavily credentialed health care professionals, fitness trainers, dietitians, nutritionists etc, coupled with high profile endorsements such as Opera with acai berry juice, they are more likely to be successful or at least attractive more interest. This is very true of digital products in the fitness and weight loss niches, the two areas that find the most activity with JV partners. Using video marketing strategies is one of the more powerfuls tool that not only increases SEO and builds page rank, but also can be used to demonstrate credibility through video testimonials. As a rule, however it seems that prevention doesn’t really sell, unless you either are forced to have it i.e. car insurance or a deep need was created for you to have to have it!
2. In many cases, products that are successful in the Health & Wellness niche are physical not digital products. These include supplements (of all forms), alternative medicine practices like reiki, acupuncture etc or beauty products. There is an extremely large number of readily accessible and free medical web sites that individuals can find information on practically any disease, condition or treatment approach whether traditional or alternative. Developing a successful information product that will do very well through a IM JV partnership will require creativity, lots of re-purposing and testimonials.
3. Supplements, health juices, organic foods, personal care products etc are sold to consumers through either traditional marketing or multi-level-marketing (MLM) platforms. The distribution through traditional marketing channels make these types of products best sold through websites such as eBay, amazon etc – warehousing becomes the main issue here, the very thing that IM JV partners seem to want to avoid like the plague in their business models! Reviews are mixed on MLM approaches, but from the JV partners I’ve spoken to they won’t touch these models, mainly because of the legal and ethical issues surrounding this form of marketing.
4. Health care systems or membership sites are far more attractive as a business model for IM JV partners because of the recurring income potential. The only challenge here is to keep members coming back. The question that has to be asked about membership websites revolves heavily around the exclusivity of the content and how do you charge for that if there are so many free competing sources of the information? Mike Merz JVNotifypro or Willie Crawford’s membership web sites are good examples of what can work, but for JV partners these types of sites would not generate immediate income. There are obvious benefits down stream, as a list building tool etc, but in the context of a health & Wellness membership site there will be challenges to penetrating the market and keeping membership growing. We already know that membership sites generally keep patrons for about 3 months, so the e-marketing plan would have to bear this in mind.
5. JV partners simply don’t understanding, what the product does, how it provides a benefit or who the target customers are. This is probably the biggest concern for IM JV partners. Their lists, will be unaccustomed to this type of product and would be less likely to buy, partcularly if the communication lines are confused! No JV partner will risk losing their customer base because of this type of mis-communication.
These are just a few ideas to bear in mind when approaching IM JV partners with a H&W digital products or services you wish marketed through their channels. Building crediblity, however through video testimonials and video marketing, written testimonials and expert or high profile product endorsements can go a far way in winning over the toughest of IM JV partner.
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