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Earlier, health and wellness meant exercising and following tasteless diets. But since the covid-19 pandemic, consumers, especially the millennials and Gen Z, have made it a part of their lifestyle. 70% of the consumers say they actively take steps to improve their health.
Products that help consumers manage fitness, mental health, nutrition, appearance(fashion), medical health, and sleep are winning the health and wellness market.
Seeing this shift in consumer wants and behaviour, several D2C brands like Healthspace, Oziva, and Birchbox, have developed products like meditation apps, multivitamin supplements, organic protein powder etc.
But when it comes to using them, customers often trust those who have used the product and seen some impact after using it. To build this trust, D2C brands resort to health and wellness influencer marketing to connect with niche influencers who can persuade the target audience.
D2C brands leverage influencer content to increase brand awareness and customer reach.
In this article, you'll understand how influencer marketing helps health and wellness brands, its benefits, and how you can run a successful campaign. Above this, we have added case studies on health and wellness influencer marketing and a list of the top content creators in the sector.
Let's get started!
Influencer marketing can help you scale your business and achieve your business goals like brand awareness, better engagement, and increased traffic or sales. Many brands in the health and wellness industry have used this strategy to position themselves at the top.
Here's why health and wellness influencer marketing is crucial for your brand:
1. To educate your audience
Consumers in the health and wellness sector like to gather all the information about a product through reviews, articles, and social media posts. To reach this audience, you can use health and wellness influencers to create educational content giving insights about your product, tutorial videos, or personal opinions on the industry. As a result, the audience sees you as an industry expert and chooses you over competing brands.
For example, Healthspace, an app that helps people meditate and maintain their overall mental health, asked top health influencers to try out the app and share their views with the audience. It allowed the company to target the audience's emotions closely.
Are you struggling to find the right health and wellness influencer? Try affable.ai marketing tool.
2. To build social proof
Health and wellness consumers need social proof to know whether a product is safe and reliable. You can get top health influencers like athletes, diet and nutrition experts, and yoga practitioners to review your product on their social media channels, blogs, or your website to build quality social proof.
3. To drive genuine engagement and inspire action
Influencers can create necessary touchpoints before a consumer decides to buy a product. You can arouse curiosity in your audience's minds through health and wellness influencers and convince them to try your product. Content like image carousels, explainer videos, educating memes, workout videos, etc., are popular among the target audience.
Now that you know how health and wellness influencer marketing is essential for your brand, let's see the top benefits of running an influencer campaign.
1. More quality leads
Influencers create a positive buzz for your product, encouraging consumers to visit your website and check out your product. It can generate quality leads that can be converted into buying customers.
2. Increased trust and loyalty
Health and wellness influencers make your brand look trustworthy and authentic with the help of positive product reviews. It enables you to attract and retain new and existing customers.
3. Time-saving and cost-effective
Influencers spend several hours and efforts building a loyal audience with the help of relevant content. By leveraging them, you gain access to their audience and save countless man-hours and other resources spent creating your content and running the ads.
4. Unlimited access to authentic content
Collaborating with influencers gives you unlimited access to original and fresh content that you can use for your business. When writing the contract, you can reserve the right to the content and then repurpose the content on other platforms and ad campaigns. For example, convert blogs into Linkedin posts and YouTube videos into Instagram posts.
5. Effortless community building
A community means you always have loyal fans who have an emotional connection with your brand. By recruiting the right influencers, you can easily outreach their dedicated audience and build a community.
6. Higher ROI
For every $1 spent on influencer campaigns, you get a USD 6.50 return. If done right, influencer marketing can drive more sales, increase traffic, and bring engagement, increasing your ROI.
1. Identify your target audience
A crucial step to running successful health and wellness influencer campaigns is to know your target audience; otherwise, you create vague content that doesn't appeal to anybody.
Create an audience persona by studying their demographics (age, gender, location, income, marital status); understand their pain points, interests, purchasing behaviour, and other details to create the right content.
Here's a step by step process to figure out your target audience:
2. Pick the right social platform
Every social media platform has a distinct audience. For example, Linkedin is often used to target B2B marketers, and Instagram and Facebook target B2C and D2C audiences. Picking the right social media platform helps you reach your target audience. You can create content by making videos or writing reviews based on the USP of that particular social channel.
For instance, if you're going to make workout videos or tutorials for your product, it is best to choose YouTube for your campaign.
3. Find the right influencers
Earlier, celebrities and experts like doctors and physicians dominated health and wellness influencer marketing. Brands have shifted to macro, micro, and nano social media influencers, such as trekkers, mountaineers, sports lovers, trainers, or even millennial moms. Their followers show a genuine interest in their content and see them as experts in the niche. You can also opt for key opinion leaders like people who have been vocal about healthcare.
Brands today rely on influencer outreach tools like affable.ai to find the right influencer. It is a SaaS platform that enables you to pick influencers from a database of 6M+ creator profiles by applying over 20 search filters. It also helps you run end-to-end campaigns with AI-powered influencer relationship management software (IRM).
Read about how affable.ai has empowered 100+ brands worldwide.
3. Define your content strategy
Before you begin with content strategising, keep in mind the government regulations imposed on advertising and content creation in the region of your campaign. Each country has its own set of content guidelines that businesses and content creators need to follow.
For example, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the USA requires you to disclose' sponsored' posts under 'paid partnerships'. Similarly, some of the guidelines state that the content you post should be authentic and shouldn't mislead the consumers. It will help you or the influencer create legitimate content.
While picking health and wellness influencers, analyse influencers using analytics tools to get insights into the content they published in the past or a negative sentiment drawn by them for a particular post.
4. Monitor influencer-generated content
For a successful campaign, spotting suspicious content is critical to avoid reputational damage. Ensure that the published content is in sync with the government regulations to avoid legal issues. Regular monitoring allows you to tweak your content to suit your campaign goals.
5. Evaluate campaign performance
Metrics like content quality, cost-effectiveness, engagement rate, and reach help you understand the impact of your campaign. Analyse the website traffic, likes, comments, shares, sales, etc., driven by the influencer content to get an idea about their individual and aggregated performance.
Source: Images under #mealtimereimagined on Instagram
Youfoodz, an Australian D2C brand that delivers nutritious ready-made meals to the customers' doorstep, reached over 1.5 million consumers and generated 70K likes, shares, and comments with health and wellness influencer marketing.
The company launched a campaign in 2017, hiring 81 micro-influencers on Instagram. These health and wellness influencers created 162 posts and shared 167 stories under the hashtag #mealtimereimagined. The influencers posted content containing images of them holding the meal boxes. The campaign was a massive success as it bagged 500,000 impressions across Facebook (Meta) and Instagram.
Youfoodz even partners with bloggers and publishing companies like Urban List, who share articles telling their experiences with the company's services.
Source: Bob's Red Mill Instagram Account
Bob's Red Mill is an American natural foods company thriving in the D2C sector. Founded in 1978, they deliver more than 400 products to customers.
The company took the help of top health influencers to promote its Non-Genetically Modified Organisms(GMO) products, such as oats, flour, and cereal. They hired food bloggers to create content around it. The company made sure that these bloggers had an audience passionate about fitness, nutrition, and healthy lifestyle practices.
As part of the campaign, selected bloggers came up with healthy recipes using the company's ingredients. This campaign helped the company reach more than 50 million impressions on social media and won 2200 landing page clicks. The strategy successfully boosted brand awareness and encouraged the customers to try out the recipes using their products.
Source: Gymshark's Instagram Account
Gymshark is one of the known names in the fitness clothing sector. Founded in 2012, this British apparel company knew how to attract the audience's attention, and it experimented with health and wellness influencer marketing before it was even popular.
As a part of their 2013 brand awareness campaign, the company sent free apparel to a few fitness youtube influencers. These health and wellness influencers created workout videos while wearing the clothing, which fueled the brand's popularity.
Moreover, as Instagram and Facebook gained prominence, they started recruiting fitness micro-influencers, including Nikki Blackketter, David Laid, and Whitney Simmons, to promote their product. Soon these health and wellness influencers became Gymshark brand ambassadors who are also a part of the brand's athlete community. This athlete community has helped the brand reach 20 million consumers.
In 2018 Gymshark collaborated with TikTok fitness influencers to launch a campaign, #Gymshark66, encouraging the audience to take a 66-day fitness challenge and upload their photos under the hashtag. The strategy was a clever way to leverage the user-generated content to expand their reach.
Melissa Wood is an American health and wellness influencer on Instagram. She's a yoga and pilates trainer that posts workout videos, meditation tips, healthy food recipes, and fitness motivational posts. Besides Instagram, she also creates content for her youtube channel and website, which are excellent sources for stocking up on fitness content.
Based in California, Crosby Tailor is one of the top health influencers on Instagram. His Instagram feed has recipes, workout videos, and healthy eating tips. The influencer has also launched his book, 'The Fit Baker', consisting of over 50 dessert recipes for health-conscious consumers. He has collaborated with brands like Just Thrive, Livonlabs, and even H&M.
Founder of the YOGA with Adriene company, Adriene Mishler is a popular US-based health and wellness influencer on YouTube. She creates workout videos for the audience who values fitness and yoga. Mishler has 11.1 million followers on YouTube and uses her Instagram account to share snippets from her personal life. She has been one of the top health influencers for Adidas Women since 2015.
Known as the 'Optimism Doctor', Dr Deepika Chopra is an Indian wellness influencer in the mental health space. She helps people follow better mental health practices with a doctorate in clinical psychology. Chopra also creates content for her website, 'Things are looking Up' and hosts a podcast. She shares image carousels and videos around mental health and psychology for her social media content.
Kayla Itsines is a well-known Australian health and wellness influencer creating content around healthy food recipes, workout tips, and more. She is an established influencer, trainer, and co-founder of the 'Sweat' app. She also creates meal planning content for audiences who prefer healthy food options. Her target audience is health-conscious women. She also launched her ebook, 'Bikini Body', which gives fitness tips.
Read more: Top 1000 Wellness Instagram Influencers in the USA.
Influencer marketing for health and wellness brands can be tricky, and if not followed correctly, you can risk damaging your brand reputation. For an influencer, it is easy to build up their image again, but for a brand, it isn't easy to re-establish faith or relation with its customers.
For this reason, many health and wellness brands rely on influencer marketing platforms to run safe and successful campaigns. With the right platform, you access influencer profiles to spot fake followers, see their content, and analyse their past performance to know the level of authenticity they will bring to your brand. Besides this, you can carry out bulk outreach and payments and measure the campaign's success.
Affable.ai is an influencer marketing platform that helps you run engaging campaigns for your target audience.
Get a free trial today to learn more about how affable.ai helps brands like you!
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