The health and wellness industry has boomed over the past few years. But this has only led to more competition and customers expecting higher standards. There are certain niches within the health and wellness umbrella that just thinking about them is incredibly daunting.
So how do businesses break the mould and stand out from the rest?
Here are sevent marketing tips for health and wellness businesses to attract new customers and keep their attention in order to generate sales.
#1. Create Unique Content
From convincing newcomers to take care of themselves to encouraging experienced health and wellness veterans to invest in you, creating unique content is vital to any marketing strategy.
Stick to your strengths.
For example, if you prefer writing then create blog posts and articles for your customers to read. Include images and videos to make them more engaging.
If you prefer to speak then creating YouTube videos could be a better option. Extend these videos to Facebook and Instagram to reach a wider audience. For example, create small snippets from the longer YouTube videos and post each of them to your Instagram.
All content should have some authority. Combine your own experience in the industry to recent advancements. Just ensure that you understand the research around your product or service to support any claims you make.
Post your content to your own website. This should be a hub for all your content marketing efforts, but you can also post on other platforms, like YouTube mentioned above, to get your content in front of the right eyes. Medium is another great platform primarily for written content – use it as a blog for your future self.
#2. Be Active On Social Media
This is so generic that it’s borderline cliche but it’s really important for people and businesses in the health and wellness sector. You must use social media to show people your practices are positive for the community and you take your own advice.
Take lots of photos and videos and post them to your social accounts that exemplify the kind of lifestyle you’re selling. For example, if you’re selling protein supplements, then make sure your followers see you using the same products.
Preparing content in advance is great but don’t forget to engage with your followers in the moment too through the comments. This is a great opportunity to build loyalty and trust by answering questions. It can also give you extra ideas for future content.
Another tip: don’t be limited to posting your own content. Share useful information from other trustworthy sources that you respect and give inspiration. Again, this will build trust in you and will help to build your following.
#3. Build Your Email List
An email list may not be near the top of your priority list if you’re running an offline health and wellness business. But if you have an eye on the long-term, certain marketing activities are very important to your success – and email lists are one such of these things.
This is because email builds trust and empathy with your audience. Those that sign up for email are looking for more intimate content that what you post for everyone to see on social media. It opens the door to educate, entertain and receive feedback.
Your website is the best place to start building your email list, but they aren’t vital. You can use tools like Mailchimp to build a specific landing page and signup form within your social media pages.
Now, building an email list is a great idea in theory, but you need to encourage them to sign up in the first place. This requires a lead magnet ie something worth exchanging their personal email for. Whatever you decide it to be, make sure it provides a lot of value.
#4. Grow Your Community
Facebook pages are great for getting more engagement from your business’ Facebook page. Groups can be a great way to get a feel for your audience, particularly if you plan on creating a membership program in the future. Plus, you can still continue to share content and gain feedback from fans.
Of course, your community isn’t just limited to Facebook.
With this in mind, you could create a membership program anyway. It could be as simple as exclusive email updates that can only be accessed with paid subscription. Use the Facebook group and other social channels to find out what your audience wouldn’t mind paying for. You should find the data to be quite actionable.
Another way to grow your own community is using Patreon. They take a cut of the contributions made to your account in exchange for providing a platform that you can use to post updates, release videos, etc for your paying audience. You can even set up different tiers to create more exclusivity for hardcore fans.
#5. Collaborate With Your Peers
The final marketing tip for health and wellness business is collaboration. Build a presence in places, whether it’s online or in-person, where your competitors hand out. Pay compliments to the people that inspire you and request to connect with them on social media. At the very least, you’ll be gaining a new follower, but they can become a whole lot more than that.
Collaborating with the competition is a great way to come up with new ideas.
Start with Facebook and LinkedIn groups along with Reddit forums. The YouTube comment section can also throw up some interesting opportunities.
Making a good impression can lead to a better relationship to a point where you could be invited to write a guest post on their site or appear on their podcast.
The ultimate in professional collaboration is affiliation. If you can’t fulfil a service or are out of stock for a popular product, you could refer them to a competitor. There’s no limit to what you can get in return; it could range from sincere gratitude to even a check in the mail.
Sure, referring your customers to the competition should not be the focus of your marketing efforts, but in the event your funnel overflows, at least you’re still benefiting. It’s better to be in this situation than not offering anything.
#6. Do Short Videos Online
Gone are the days where the written word was the only way to make yourself known online. Platforms like Linkedin, Facebook and, to a lesser extent, even Twitter have transitioned towards encouraging users to post short videos online.
People are ten times more likely to interact with video content than they are with a regular social media post or an image.
So take advantage of this trend. Try to make videos which are 2 minutes long or less, cover a topic that’s relevant to your health customers and say something new. Make sure you include a clear call to action in the video, such as “Do you agree with me, let me know in the comments below.”
One of the biggest myths out there is that you need to have a professional setting or special tools to do a good job at online videos. That’s not true.
Most smartphones nowadays can take great videos. At the most, you may need to invest in a tripod if you want to do it properly. And finally, use a platform like Fiverr or Upwork and find an affordable video editor (usually, they cost around $20-$30 dollars for a 2 minute video) who can add an intro/ outro to your video and remove the ums and uhs from your video. That way your video looks professional.
This is much simpler than you’d think and you can easily get a positive ROI within 2-3 months of doing this consistently.
#7. Feature Current Clients On Your Site Through Interactive Media
Another great way to attract new clients is by doing short interviews/ podcasts/ videos with your current clients. This is another great strategy which is cost effective and can really help your healthcare brand improve its online visibility.
There are two main benefits of featuring your own clients either on your own site or via social media platforms (preferably both!).
First, there’s a great SEO benefit to it. If you use your own blog to post a client feature, reach out to that person and ask them to link back to the interview from their site. Google will treat this as a signal of authority for your own platform. And in turn, this will help you rank higher in Google search results for your own health and wellness website.
Secondly, when your clients post about your engagement online to their own connections and followers, you are more likely to get some of the people in their network to visit your website and check out your health products and services. That means free advertising and exposure to a new audience. This is great, because it will lead to new customers without you actually investing significantly in this strategy.
These are our top seven strategies for health and wellness companies to attract new business. We recognize that some of them are more time-intensive than others. But we want to assure you that if you do some or all of these, it will be time well spent.
About the Author!
Marina Turea works as content manager at Digital Authority Partners to take brands to market and bring their stories to life.