When it comes to standing out from the crowd in the health and wellness sector, your marketing and branding are key. How you position your health and wellness products marketing and services makes all the difference, especially when consumers have so many options to choose from.
Without it, consumers have no reason to choose you. So it’s all about making that connection. And if you’re invested in creating a high-value customer experience, your branding matters even more.
What is health branding and marketing?
To craft a winning healthcare branding strategy, consider what it is that makes your brand unique and what value proposition you can offer patients that are over and above your competitors. For example, your health products may make managing patient health easier. Or, your wellness services may help reduce symptoms related to a chronic disease or illness. Another point of differentiation might be the specific market segment you serve, or it could be your reason for doing business — your unique mission. Whatever it is that your health brand can offer patients that are limited or nonexistent in the market, you’ll want to make those components a prominent part of both your health branding and your marketing message.
Why do you need to market your health brand?
Without marketing campaigns, prospective customers won’t know that your health brand exists.
Breaking through the noise of the market requires you to take a strategic marketing approach that involves highlighting what makes your health brand stand out and why customers should choose your health and wellness services or products over your competitors. The key to how to get new customers ultimately comes down to how well you can create marketing messages that truly resonate with your target audience — and making sure those messages reach your audience. Health and wellness marketing should always be rooted in speaking your customer’s language and providing the key benefits that your brand offers so that customers find your brand irresistible.
To get you started with a solid health and wellness marketing plan, here are the 10 strategies to put into motion now.
Top 10 Health Marketing Strategies of 2021
Understand your target audience
The success (or failure) of your wellness marketing ultimately rests on how well you can use your marketing message to connect with your target audience.
Doing this effectively, requires some research into what your target customer is looking for, their pain points, and their preferences. By knowing these components, you can weave them into your health and wellness marketing so you can immediately stand out and compel them to buy.
Evaluate the online patient experience
When it comes to attracting new customers, convenience and selection are kings.
Consumers want to have as many options as possible, at their fingertips, on their own terms. This includes how and when they interact with your website or online portals. To ensure the best possible experience, you will want to reduce wait times as much as possible and create a memorable online patient experience that will immediately “wow” them. When it comes to a “white glove” experience, it’s important to make these interactions easy, streamlined, and attractive.
Build a responsive healthcare website
The fastest way to destroy your health brand is to have a slow or poorly designed website.
In fact, 40% of customers will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Additionally, with most consumers using their mobile device to search the internet, 57% of consumers will not recommend a brand that has a poorly designed mobile website.
Your website serves as your brand’s “first impression” for new visitors. True, they may have heard about you from social media or a review platform. But once they’ve gotten past those gatekeepers, your website is your customer service representative from the moment the user lands on the page.
Take the time and invest in creating an easy-to-use and highly dynamic website for both desktop and mobile devices. It’s one of the best ways to position your health and wellness brand.
Invest in healthcare SEO (specifically local SEO)
If you don’t know what keywords your target audience is using to search for products and services like yours, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity.
In any online content, you create, including website text, social media posts, and paid ads, you’ll want to include any relevant keywords that will help to put you at the top of search engine search queries. In addition, if you offer local services or have a specific location that customers can visit, leveraging location-specific language can be highly effective to get local traffic that may be ready to buy. For example, using “Handheld fitness devices in Miami” versus “Handheld fitness devices” could serve to get more foot traffic into your retail locations.
Use paid media and PPC search ads
Having your health and wellness brand stand out is often a numbers game.
To increase your funnel and get more eyes on your messaging, going the paid advertisement route can be a viable option. It will be important to do your due diligence first, to ensure that the platform you choose to advertise on, is where your target audience frequents. It’s also equally important to continuously track your advertising spend and key metrics, such as customer acquisition cost to determine what campaigns may be performing well and which may need to be adjusted.
Social media Marketing
In today’s hyper-social environment, 45% of the world’s population is on at least one social media platform.
This represents a lucrative opportunity to leverage social media to reach a massive (and eager-to-buy) audience. The key to health and wellness social media marketing is crafting highly visual content. That will get users to stop scrolling to read and act on your content. Also creating a consistent posting schedule that highlights components of your brand is important so that your followers will have lots of content to interact with.
Lastly, make sure your social creatives match your brand to create that lasting consistency that is key for a high-touch experience.
Ask for reviews from patients
The power of word-of-mouth advertising should never be underestimated.
Nor should the influencing power of online reviews. It has been found that 89% of consumers read at least one online review before deciding to purchase from a brand.
One of the keystones of a high-class brand is social proof. It’s nearly impossible to be a luxury commodity in the health space without a reputation for an exceptional experience.
The key to winning the online review game is to have recent reviews. To do this, you’ll want to ask customers for reviews as often as possible. Many health and wellness brands offer incentives for customer testimonials, whether it be a free product or exclusive discounts.
Create videos for video marketing
Do not neglect video.
As video consumption explodes, with the rollout of 5G. Video marketing is quickly becoming one of the most important avenues to explore. It is estimated that 1 billion hours of video are watched each day, which opens up the opportunity for health and wellness brands to consistently stay in front of their target audiences. As with social media marketing, it will be critical to have a detailed content schedule. And to create video content that is both compelling and is on topics that your target audience cares about or wants to watch. Ending each video with a specific call to action is also key to leverage your video content as an additional channel to drive traffic to your website.
Take your video content up a notch to the premium. White-glove status by investing in some quality editing, adding captions, and optimizing the formats for each platform. So that your brand always looks on-point.
Establish an email plan
No, email is not dead.
While social media and video content have been consistently performing well, this does not detract from the value of email. In fact, 73% of Millennial consumers prefer to interact with a brand via email than any other platform. To effectively execute an email marketing strategy, it will be important to study how your customers are using emails. They may be more likely to open emails from your health and wellness brand. If they contain a promotional code, or you may find that emails that provide new ways to use your product may perform better. The key is to analyze how to create content that your target audience will read and act on.
Build doctor referrals into your marketing plans
This one is a no-brainer, but it bears repeating: generating referrals is a high-value marketing focus.
Getting endorsements or referrals from medical professionals is a surefire way to instantly increase the irresistibility. And also for the credibility of your health brand. Marketing analysts estimate that 60% of consumers acknowledge being more likely to buy a product or service when it is recommended by a medical professional. Therefore, doctor referral marketing should be a portion of how you position your health and wellness brand. In order to stand out from the already oversaturated crowd.
Final Words
With consumers having greater access to performance health and wellness brands than ever before. Finding ways to differentiate your health brand is paramount. How to attract new customers can be challenging. However, leveraging the ten strategies mentioned above and being both consistent and intentional about how you execute them. They can help to create a competitive advantage for your brand.
If you’d like expert guidance and support in crafting a winning health and wellness marketing plan. I am happy to help. I am currently offering a limited number of short consultation sessions. As well as a VIP half-day session with me and my team for a deeper dive. If you’d like to set that up or have any questions, just send me a quick email.