How to Develop a Wellness Marketing Strategy in 2024

Undeniably, recent global events have shifted consumer behavior. In today’s world consumers prefer to embrace a slower lifestyle, which is a huge turnaround from even two years ago.

This significant change has brought the importance of holistic healthcare into the forefront. Over the past few years, people around the world have become more aware of health and wellness practices. Of course, this newfound health kick introduced new market trends.

Within the first four months of 2020, approximately 656 million health and fitness apps were downloaded globally. Dietary supplement intake has increased to 74%.

It is safe to say that in 2024, the potential of the health and wellness sector is still on the rise.

Many have come forward to reap the benefits and countless health and wellness brands and organizations have emerged within the industry.

But, have all of them been able to succeed in the rat race?

Is It Really the Right Time to Invest in Wellness Marketing?

Even when considering the best circumstances, thriving isn't easy, given the large shift in consumer mindset. As the world has slowed down, more people have been investing in their healthcare, and they are spending time doing their own research on wellness topics.

That's why an integrated wellness marketing strategy is more important now more than ever.

What is a Marketing Strategy?

Wellness marketing can be pretty tricky since a bigger portion of the audience base is still untapped.

First, what is a marketing strategy?

A marketing strategy is a long-term plan for attaining a business' objectives through an understanding of the clients’ needs and the development of a distinct and long-lasting competitive advantage. It includes everything, from choosing which channels to utilize to contact your customers to figuring out who they are.

Many people confuse marketing strategy with marketing tactics. However, a marketing strategy includes several marketing tactics that allow the business to attain its goals and objectives. This should clear up the marketing strategy vs. marketing tactic debacle for you, right here.

Marketing Strategy for the Wellness Industry: A Comprehensive Guide

1. Audience Research

Your marketing strategy should kick off with customer research.

The goal of audience research is to determine the number, make-up, and traits of a group of people who are, or may become, potential customers.

It's crucial to remember that the overall focus of the marketing strategy is the people who comprise your target audience.

Are other brands attempting to reach the same consumers? How does it work for them? Why? Audience research helps you to find answers to these questions easily.

For audience research, three types of data are usually collected:

• Demographic: age, gender, location, income

• Psychographic: beliefs, life goals, opinions

• Behavioral: how people use your product or service, problems and preferences

2. Industry Research

Industry research or market research is the process of obtaining data on your target market and existing customers to confirm the success of a new product or service, assist your team in refining an already-existing product, or understand brand perception to make sure your company or brand is effectively expressing the value of your organization.

Industry research helps you know what your competitors are doing to stay ahead, where your consumers are, and how to capture their attention through your activities.

To get you started, you can do your industry research in one of these three easy ways:

• Survey: you can circulate online survey forms in different communities or groups where you think your target audience is.

• Interview: You can directly interview people

• Observation: You can look at various newspapers, journals, magazines and even follow your competitors’ website and social media profiles to learn about what others are doing and what consumers are actually expecting.

3. Decide on the target audience

Target audience is the particular demographic of customers most likely to be interested in your product or service and, as a result, the group that should see your advertising efforts.

The target audience may be determined by a variety of characteristics, including age, gender, income, location, and hobbies.

Usually after finalizing the consumer and industry research, it’s time to decide on the target audience.

A few things to consider when deciding on your target audience:

• Product/service interest

• Purchase intention

• Define your ideal customer profile or ICP

• Use analytics such as Google Analytics

• Be open to revision and changes

4. Positioning and gap analysis

The positioning of your brand refers to how your target market should view your brand.

People's associations with your products and services make up your targeted brand image. By using positioning, you may set yourself apart from your rivals and, in some situations, even change how the target market views them.

Gap analysis comes hand in hand with positioning. While positioning helps set you apart from your competitors, gap analysis does the main work.

What is the gap between your target audience’s expectations, and what they are getting from your competitors? By bridging this gap, you can differentiate your products and services, and ultimately, satisfy your customers.

When it comes to effective positioning, there are ‘3 Cs’ to consider:

• Company

• Customer

• Competitors

You position your products or services against all these aspects.

5. Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines is a manual that specifies how a brand should represent itself to the public, including through the use of its logo, font and color choices, photography, and other visual and textual elements.

In other words, it serves as a guide that promotes consistency in the way a brand appears, feels, and sounds. When you use brand guidelines, you can be sure that your brand will always look and feel the same, regardless of who handles customer service, marketing, design, and sales.

How to develop brand guidelines:

• Decide the mission of your brand

• Be clear with the vision of your brand

• Define your brand personality

• Get brand guidelines inspiration

• On the basis of the above steps, decide on the brand colors, create a unique logo, define your photography styles, choose font combinations.

How can you maintain your brand guidelines?

Easiest way to maintain your brand guidelines is to refer to it every time you work on the creative aspects of your brand, such as designing visual content. Furthermore, your brand guidelines should be subject to changes if necessary.

6. SMART Objectives

When establishing future digital marketing goals, such as those included in a digital marketing plan, it’s helpful to take a close look at each step and consider whether they are necessary. Then set clear and measurable objectives to gauge the success of your plan.

To evaluate the effectiveness of measures, you might use the SMART mnemonic as a test or filter.

Here’s how you can set your objectives the SMART way:

• Specific - Are your marketing activities (e.g. email marketing or social advertising), detailed enough for your audience to understand the point you are trying to address?

• Measurable - Can you measure this marketing activity on a quantitative or qualitative basis?

• Actionable - Does your marketing activity provoke any sort of action on the other end e.g. does your Facebook post have a CTA for the audience to follow?

• Time-bound - Does your activity have a time constraint with it e.g. a deadline for a campaign to end?

An example of a SMART objective would be: To increase the number of click-throughs of our weekly email newsletters by 8% within the next six weeks.

Now that your strategy has a clear objective, you can come up with a number of tactics on how to achieve it.

6. Review, Revise, Reiterate

How would you know whether your marketing strategy is working unless you’re tracking it? This is where data analytics come forward. Nowadays, almost all of the established marketing activities have some way of measurement.

It is important to periodically review the performance of your activities, find room for improvement, revise the strategies for the future and reiterate the ones that have been successful in the past.

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There you go, now you have a comprehensive, no-nonsense starter pack to successfully launch your marketing campaigns.

This marketing strategy framework should guide you through any and every situation.

However, if the hectic schedule of your wellness business makes it difficult to focus on your marketing efforts, our focused digital marketing solutions might be able to help.

We assist and empower wellness professionals in the fields of mindfulness, fitness, nutrition and more while they focus on doing what they do best, helping their clients.

Feel free to set up a time to chat with us today.