The wellness industry is booming. It is valued at $4.5 trillion, and in 2020 alone, it generated $639 billion — double the amount of the tourism sector. The amalgamation of increased consumer health awareness, the mental health reckoning crystallized by the pandemic, and the convenience of technology have led to consumers adopting a holistic approach to wellness that entails more than dietary supplements and fad workouts.
Nutrition, mindfulness, physical fitness, and appearance are at the forefront of many consumers’ minds. Renewed emphasis on mental health along with the proliferation of health-related products calls for health and wellness marketing improvements as competition grows in the wellness space. For example, according to the Pew Research Center, 1 in 5 Americans wears a smartwatch fitness tracker. Watch trackers, as well as apps, offer an immense amount of granular health data, leading to greater connections with online communities and customization.
Changing consumer habits and expectations offer unique opportunities for innovative health and wellness digital marketing to attract the right audience in multiple sectors. While competition is fierce, direct targeting enables customization and agility to respond to the shifting needs of your target audience. Let’s look at the latest trends influencing marketing for wellness and how they can boost brand awareness for businesses in the health and wellness space.
What Is the Focus of Wellness Marketing Campaigns?
Online counseling, gyms and studios, apps to track physical fitness and diet, as well as health products from attire to foods, performance enhancers, and workout equipment encompass a massive industry. At its core, the aim of online marketing for wellness campaigns is to increase brand awareness and drive sales. However, the methods and tactics of health and wellness marketing have changed. Personalization and community building are now key components of brands that are relevant and retain a loyal customer base.
The innovative training app by Nike or Adidas provides excellent case studies in how strategic content marketing offers real value for customers in the fitness business. Providing personalized workout plans and being part of a community makes consumers feel like they belong to something greater than themselves and indirectly markets the brand’s products. It is also an excellent lead generation strategy; customers who sign up for these apps provide their contact details to brands who can target them through email campaigns and newsletters.
…makes consumers feel like they belong to something greater than themselves and indirectly markets the brand’s products.
Both Adidas and Nike have built global branded communities of customers who are emotionally invested in their brands beyond purchasing their fitness products. While not all wellness brands and fitness businesses require a global community, every company in the health and wellness industry can benefit by incorporating community building into its wellness digital marketing strategies.
How Do You Build a Wellness Marketing Strategy?
When you’ve got search engine optimization, market segmentation, and targeted messaging in place, you have to figure out how to leverage tried-and-trusted strategies to outdo your competitors and build a bigger brand following.
1. Analyze the Competition
Conducting a high-level competitor analysis is critical for businesses to thrive in the wellness world. HubSpot defines it as “a strategy where you identify major competitors and research their product, sales, and marketing strategies. By doing this, you can create solid business strategies that improve upon your competitors.”
Essentially, you figure out what your competitors are doing, how you can improve upon their execution, and differentiate your unique selling point. A competitor analysis will help you determine what wellness brands are getting right and where they fall short, providing a benchmark for your online marketing for health and wellness efforts.
Shopify has a great competitive analysis template and step-by-step outline. Common things to compare include price points, service offerings, additional perks, customer reviews, and the use of marketing channels to distribute content marketing materials. Take note of their content strategy and analyze levels of customer engagement to get a comprehensive overview of their online marketing strategy.
A competitor analysis will help you determine what wellness brands are getting right and where they fall short, providing a benchmark for your marketing efforts.
A vigorous competitive analysis enables your company to identify gaps in the market, develop new wellness products and services, uncover wellness market trends and sell your products more effectively to potential customers. Executing an analysis requires planning, research, and honest introspection. You may make some surprising discoveries about potential clients and uncover new opportunities in the health and wellness industry.
2. Write Engaging Content
Pay-per-click advertising that persuasively communicates your product or service is valid and necessary, but not enough. Wellness marketers know providing outstanding content establishes a business as a credible industry leader. It also builds trust and generates new leads. Content marketing is an incredibly powerful tactic that can help you reach your target audience.
The point of health and wellness content marketing is to meet your customers at every stage of the buyers’ journey and influence them to purchase your products and services. Let’s take the CBD industry, for example. How does a company send out the right message to skeptics and educate potential customers that these calming products can enhance wellbeing and mental health? How might they promote their products in a positive light?
Engaging content keeps audiences interested in your brand and boosts your ranking on Google search engine results (SERPs) too.
As most of the public is uneducated about CBD’s properties, they could use content marketing in the form of blogs, videos, and podcasts, for instance, to educate their audience. This provides much-needed and valuable information that forms part of the company’s broader marketing campaign. In the case of CBD products, content marketing is vital, not only to boost online presence but also to build credibility and customer bases.
Engaging content keeps audiences interested in your brand and boosts your ranking on Google search engine results (SERPs) too. For wellness marketers, targeted content marketing is by and large the holy grail of online business success. To build a loyal customer base, the content needs to be relevant to audience segments, so customer research is vital to ensure your content marketing strategy retains a high ROI.
Delivering Business Results: Our Digital Marketing Case Studies
3. Build a Social Media Presence
Social media platforms are important because they are designed to promote engagement, and active engagement brings target audiences closer to your brand. As it is, 72% of Americans use social media, providing access to more than half of your target market by just logging into relevant platforms. Of course, building a social media presence requires more than just setting up business user profiles and can feel like a daunting task if you don’t have digital marketing expertise.
72% of Americans use social media, providing access to more than half of your target market by just logging into relevant platforms.
Video content marketing, app development, native ads, and influencer marketing are common ways to build a social media presence. And remember, the emphasis is on “presence.” Advertising on social media in the form of targeted advertising does exist, but the main advantage of social platforms is to build community, not to sell products. Why? Well, a community that trusts wellness brands will automatically buy from them.
main advantage of social platforms is to build community, not to sell products
The concept of SMART goals has been around for decades and can help you streamline your social media strategy. In the same way that no athlete trains without a goal, no wellness business should use social media with clear objectives. SMART stands for:
- Specific: Choose your target audience and social media channels
- Measurable: Decide what your metrics are. Will it be to gain new followers? Or do you want to measure click-through rates to your website?
- Achievable: Are your goals realistic?
- Relevant: How do your social media goals align with your wellness business goals?
- Time: What is the time frame by which you need to achieve your objectives?
Assigning a concrete purpose to your social media efforts avoids the trap of publishing aimless posts with thin content. Each platform offers unique possibilities from stories to posts, podcasts, polls, quizzes, and more, to help build your presence. Take a look at the tongue-in-cheek fit influencer campaign by Planet Fitness that parodies influencers to make consumers aware of wellness trends that are inaccurate while simultaneously promoting the well-known gym to a younger, Gen-Z market.
Build a strong social media presence for your wellness business with Comrade Digital Marketing Agency. Schedule a free consultation.
4. Collaborate with Influencers
Influencer marketing is no longer a buzzword. In fact, 72.5% of US wellness marketers are expected to collaborate with influencers come 2024. Fitness and health influencers play a key part in connecting brands with new customers and influence audience purchasing decisions. In comparison to other health and wellness social media marketing strategies, influencers offer an unobtrusive way to communicate with customers that bypass ad blockers.
They are already experts in their field, so their opinions and recommendations have influence and don’t make your marketing efforts feel cheap. According to Think With Google, six out of ten subscribers follow advice on what to buy from their favorite content creators. And influencer marketing is suitable for any wellness business.
For example, an optimized, low-cost strategy with micro-influencers for a small business can have an excellent ROI and help build long-term partnerships. Similarly, a comprehensive plan which requires higher investment to work with celebrities and roll out video content with quality production value will need greater expertise and a bigger budget. The great thing about influencers is that wellness brands can reach untapped audiences with as much or as little effort as necessary, depending on the scale of the campaign.
low-cost strategy with micro-influencers for a small business can have an excellent ROI and help build long-term partnerships.
Take a look at this excellent campaign by Nike shared by Tiger Woods on Instagram to promote staying at home during the height of Covid-19. All the brand had to do was create the copy, design a simple ad and pay Tiger Woods to promote their message. Of course, he is a famous sportsman, so the fee wouldn’t have been cheap, but the same strategy can be applied to businesses with smaller budgets.
5. Engage with Your Community
Customer engagement builds wellness businesses faster because engaged customers are loyal and recommend products and services to others. Loyal customers stick with brands for a long time and improve retention rates, which begs the question: What kind of messaging do customers need to stay engaged?
- They need to understand your product or service has great value
- They should feel like your company cares about their wellbeing
- They need to be convinced that your brand is the best option for them
Customer engagement and retention go hand in hand. Online acquisition strategies alone are not sustainable for business growth. Finding novel and long-term ways to engage with customers solidifies their emotional connection to your brand in a meaningful way.
The single best way to engage with your community is to build positive brand experiences at every single touchpoint, from the moment they click onto your website to making a purchase. This takes a comprehensive digital marketing approach that gets the basics right, so there’s room to develop truly innovative approaches. Often this requires the expertise of a digital marketing agency that can partner up with your business to guarantee your health and wellness business flourishes in the online space.
6. Reach Out to Complementary Brands
When multiple brands work together for mutual gain, they create a unique offering that appeals to a wider, overlapping audience. Limited product editions, events, and service integrations are common brand collaborations that generate wide-scale interest, positive brand association, and innovation. It’s low-risk, and high reward as collaborations can be executed in a brand-safe environment, where you still have a high level of quality control.
Collaborating with personal brands is also a fantastic way to increase impressions.
Like-mindedness, complementary product and marketing goals, and similar target markets help determine which businesses are best to create these campaigns with. For new businesses, collaborative marketing helps build trust and long-term brand advocacy. For older businesses, it presents the opportunity to expand and develop connections.
Collaborating with personal brands is also a fantastic way to increase impressions. Options like affiliate marketing for wellness, referral schemes, and creator-led content pieces are easily achievable for smaller brands that may not have large marketing budgets. In this case, it’s advantageous to think about mutual benefit as opposed to cash exchange. Having a large social media following or well-received newsletter that’s read by a sizeable audience are assets that other companies can benefit from too.
Conclusion
Thinking about digital marketing for health and wellness as a strategy to build community rather than blatantly advertise products and services is a surefire way to improve your health and wellness digital marketing strategy. If you’re looking to finesse or innovate your current marketing strategies, then why not talk to us at Comrade Digital Marketing? We’re a full-service eCommerce digital agency with turnkey solutions that will give your wellness business a competitive edge. Contact us to improve the well-being of your business online.
Frequently Asked Questions
-
Who is the target market for health and wellness?
It is possible for anyone to be health-conscious, but the majority of your audience will be between the ages of 18 and 34. In general, they are well educated. Those who are health-conscious take their health seriously and do their research. Sensational messages do not hold their attention.
