Ben Grynol, Head of Growth at Levels, offers a counterintuitive approach to commerce: building an entire health category through education rather than conversion-focused marketing. In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Ben walks Bryan through how Levels achieved remarkably low customer acquisition costs ($50-80) for a high-consideration, $400 health device by rejecting traditional performance marketing in favor of deeply researched content. The strategy has produced extraordinary results: a 5:1 LTV:CAC ratio despite 60% of conversions happening after a full year of consideration.
Topics Discussed:
- How Levels built the "metabolic health" category from scratch by becoming the authoritative information source first, creating hundreds of deeply researched articles without immediate conversion pressure.
- Why Levels embraces a 12+ month nurturing process for their high-consideration product, focusing on building trust through value-first content rather than optimizing for quick conversion.
- Levels' approach to evaluating marketing partners beyond last-click attribution, using metrics like website traffic spikes, email capture rates, and conversion patterns to assess true partner value.
- Why Levels deliberately limits Meta ad spend, focusing only on retargeting specific partner traffic with email capture goals rather than bottom-funnel conversion.
- How creating highly specific health content ensures visibility even as search behavior shifts from Google to AI agents by focusing on topics too niche for general summaries.
- Leveraging lab results and health markers to create hyper-relevant lifecycle communications that drive approximately 30% of conversions through content that delivers genuine value.
- Recognizing that their primary customer base (women 45-65+) may interact differently with technology, informing both content approach and platform strategy.
- Ben's prediction that consumers increasingly value high-touch, expert-guided experiences where they pay for clear direction, creating new opportunities for brands to add value beyond products.
- The unique challenges of marketing a product that goes under the skin, requires a prescription, and costs $400, requiring fundamentally different approaches than traditional consumer goods.
- How Levels navigates health and wellness marketing without making medical claims, focusing on user experiences rather than promising specific outcomes.
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