Digital marketing strategy for health and wellness businesses

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Brands have a golden opportunity to meet consumers where they’re at with targeted marketing that offers valuable content and spot-on solutions. With consumers hopping from page to page, each with a unique need and different approach to personal health, brands need sharp digital marketing strategies to pinpoint and engage this lucrative market. They are already on the search – make sure your brand is top of mind.

Here’s a quick and smart digital marketing strategy that will make a big impact.

Objectives

Your primary marketing objective should support your overall business objective such as to increase market share by gaining qualified leads into your business (leads likely to convert, given the right triggers). Second to that is to build brand awareness and reputation.

Insight: Dealing with direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising restrictions, brands can create informative and engaging community platforms that offer visitors valuable content and support that encourages trust and repeat visits, without mentioning the drug.

Target market

It’s important to understand your consumers and how they search for answers to their most pressing health questions. What are their pain points, what solutions are they seeking and what digital channels are they frequenting?

Divide your customers into segments and create personas for each segment. This will simplify everything as it informs the following:

• Key messaging
• Selected channels
• Key search terms

Insight: Brands with products restricted from direct-to-consumer marketing need to be clear on their target audience and communication goals. Don’t forget about potential gatekeepers to your audience. This important target market segment usually does all online research so make sure your business is on their shortlist.

Website

This should be the centre of your digital strategy. It’s where you’ll convert leads from other digital channels. Don’t be limited to a traditional website – it might be a simple landing page, social media page or a collaborative blog platform that provides ongoing support and information sharing between subscribers. For products restricted from direct-to-consumer marketing, these supportive blogs are highly effective engagement tools and a powerful way to build trust and add value to consumers’ lives.

Whatever form it takes, ensure it’s designed to quickly convert, capturing essential, relevant information and a simple user experience.

Insight: Decide on one conversion and stick to it.

SEO, PPC and web PR

All the acronyms you need to know – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, and web Public Relations (PR).

• SEO will enhance organic rankings on Google’s search results page and work hard to drive qualified leads to your site.

• PPC (when executed well) allows your brand to rank high in the search space and create always-on brand awareness. This is an advantage, as always-on search campaigns get more cost effective with time.

• Public Relations (PR) feeds directly into SEO and PPC activities, as articles and news about your business featured on third party sites build awareness, reputation and even more qualified traffic to your site.

Marketing automation
This is digital marketing and sales on rocket fuel. It’s a super-intelligent software embedded onto your website to automatically send out a series of pre-determined emails depending on your user’s behaviour on your site. It also rates leads and alerts (by email and SMS) your sales teams when a lead is hot and when to pounce.

Marketing automation converts leads into customers. A game-changer.

Insight: Marketing automation will not only enhance your website performance, but all your other digital marketing activities – as well as provide more granular reporting to optimise and refine your marketing activities.

Digital matrix

To simplify, your digital marketing strategy should look like this.

The right partner

Don’t feel overwhelmed thinking you’ll never acquire the skills to do all this effectively. Find the right digital marketing partner who takes the time to understand your business, your objectives, your customers – and importantly – what success looks like for you. The right partner strives for compelling and relevant content that is optimised for search and effectively amplified content across social media platforms.