Women’s Best founder offers tips for successful marketing
Four years ago, three Austrians—Lukas Kurzmann, his brother David Kurzmann, and their friend Thomas Mark—decided it was time to shake up the traditional audience in fitness. They founded a nutrition company called Women’s Best that was solely marketed toward women, and within just three years, it went from an utterly unknown entity to a multimillion-dollar business.
Today, Women’s Best is globally recognized as a top fitness brand for women with the highest quality sports nutrition and sportswear products formulated for the female population. The startup now boasts 900,000 customers in more than 150 countries. Their social media following has surpassed 3.8 million followers, with a total of 1.3 billion reached each year.
Lukas Kurzmann, co-founder and CEO, has helped make Women’s Best one of the leading brands in women’s health.
“The company has gone far beyond just selling products – it aims to change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide by motivating and inspiring women around the globe to lead healthier lifestyles,” co-founder Lukas Kurzmann said in an interview.
Four years ago, Lukas was a nobody and Women’s Best was just an idea. How did he develop a multi-million-dollar global company in such a short amount of time?
3 Growth Hacks That Worked
Understandably, the world is curious about the incredible success of Women’s Best and the people behind it. In a recent interview, Lukas Kurzmann shared the top three growth hacks that spurred this triumph.
- Content, Content, Content
“Content is king,” Kurzmann said.
This is a concept business owners and marketers have heard countless times, and those who have applied it appropriately know it’s true. When you have the right content urging your business forward, the growth rate is exponential.
For Kurzmann, the solution was found in high-value content that didn’t focus so much on the products themselves.
“Rather than just selling a product, we sell a lifestyle,” he explained. “We focused on creating a community of women supporting each other and striving to reach their fitness goals.” This naturally encouraged competition and support from women who wanted the same results for themselves.
- Product Quality
Word of mouth marketing is the greatest tool a company has. It’s the concept that if customers like a product enough, they’ll share it with others. It will spread like wildfire, making your brand a household name that people love and respect.
“The quality of our products drove our customers to share the word with people they care about,” said Lukas. The company had a massive surge of interest on social media, forums, and other online sources that brought more customers to their virtual door.
- Inspiring Influencers
When it comes to social media marketing, there are few things as powerful as a good influencer campaign. Kurzmann and The Women’s Best team were skilled at finding the perfect influencers for the brand. He points out while most people are focused on the stats of influencers, community is the most important factor. He says that the reason behind this is simple: the more engaged an influencer is with its community, the more value he has.
“We were inspired by sports brands like Nike or tech companies like Apple, and how they focus on the message and quality they represent to their customers,” he said.
Then, they found athletes and fitness brands on social media who loved the quality of their products and happily endorsed them.
The Three Enemies to Progress
Of course, every brand will also experience setbacks that can slow their progress. For Women’s Best, there were three things they wanted to avoid at all costs.
- Ignoring Customer Expectations
Kurzmann said that their success would not have been possible if they failed to put the customer first or to satisfy their expectations.
“Since its early start in August 2015, Women’s Best has adopted the idea of creating a unique line that suits and focuses on the needs of the female body,” Lukas said. “This made the brand stand out and receive an exponential growth within an amazing community of women aiming to be the best version of themselves.”
Understanding the customer persona so clearly allowed Kurzmann’s team to successfully create products and market them to the people most likely to buy.
“We’ve had a revenue growth of over 800% within the first 2 years of operation,” he said. You certainly won’t see results like that by ignoring paying customers.
- The Wrong Team
Not every influencer will be right for spreading the word about a brand. Lukas hinted at having worked with a few influencers that did very little for them.
He also stressed the importance of hiring employees that totally support your message or vision. Without the support of employees who love the company almost as much as you do, you’ll struggle to move forward as a dedicated team.
- High Investment, Low ROI
At the very beginning, money is among your most valuable assets. If you can spend it on the right marketing tactics, your investment can multiply overnight. But if you put your money into the wrong marketing tactics, you’re just wasting it.
“Non-valuable or non-targeted virility is a huge enemy to progress,” Lukas says. “It does no good to spend a lot of money to reach a lot of people if it has no effect.”
Accurately targeted ad spending has the best ROI and is therefore the only way to generate rapid, sustainable growth for your business.
As a bonus, Kurzmann adds that growth that’s too rapid can, ironically, slow down progress.
“When growing too fast, structures get partly lost within the company,” he says. “At some point you have to manually slow it down, structure everything again, and then keep going.”
Kurzmann has keenly addressed a problem that many new startups face. Having to re-group doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to spiral downward, though. It just means you need leadership that’s prepared to handle the adjustments.
“A company’s leaders should be ready to face the resulting challenges for healthy growth,” he concludes.
Leave a Reply