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Building health and wellness brand health

When it comes to our own health and wellbeing, we all try to adapt important practices like eating a healthy diet, participating in regular exercise, getting a good night’s sleep and managing stress levels. The same general playbook holds true as it relates to brands. There are important tried and true practices that you can employ to keep your health and wellness brands functioning at their healthiest (and to help overcome these challenging times).

Keeping your health and wellness brands fit

The five tips below will help health and wellness marketing teams keep their brands as fit as possible during difficult times. While tough for many brands to be performing at their best in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, there are proven practices that can help you weather the storm and come out strong on the other side.

1. Make it easy for customers

The pandemic exposed the fact that many businesses lacked digital marketing strategies to make it easy for customers to do business with them. Suddenly we were in a world where digital channels were the primary, sometimes only, customer-engagement method, which means the entire customer journey was a digital one. Beyond a temporary practice, we see this as a holistic shift businesses need to be equipped to handle – impacting the way they engage, collaborate and support customers now and into the future. Read more here about digital strategy tips for health and wellness marketers in the new normal.

2.  Be all about your customers

The first step in being able to meaningfully connect with customers is by creating empathetic marketing campaigns and actions. Which starts with understanding what they’re thinking, how their behaviors are changing, and how to proactively get in front of their concerns. Customers will choose your brand for the life they want to live – and the life they want to get back. This means your marketing strategies should reflect customer values, so that they can see themselves in your brand. And more importantly, view your brand – beyond its functional benefits – as helping them live the life they’ve imagined. Read more here about marketing with empathy.

3. Leverage your distinctive assets

There’s power in a brand that looks, feels and sounds different. Case in point is Amazon building their smile graphic into a powerful brand property, which has consistently been in use since its launch in 2000. This is a great example of taking a brand asset and activating it across all channels. This consistency builds strong memory structure – and immediately conjures up all the rational and emotional benefits the brand offers. You have this power! Maybe not on the scale of Amazon, but among your specific audiences and across all of your brand touchpoints and marketing channels.

The same can be said for the power of brand voice and brand experience. Consider the distinctive and consistent voices (across all communications) of Innocent Drinks (informal and easy-going), Old Spice (unexpected humor), Dove (human, inspirational and friendly) and Memorial Sloan-Kettering (hope and advancement); as well as the distinctive experiences of Best Buy (for example), with their ‘Geek Squad’ installation & repair service, Apple’s Genius Bar tech support station, Cabela’s in-store experience and Oscar’s “new kind” of online healthcare insurance experience.

4. Take advantage of your owned media

Take control of your brand’s story with a unified approach to owned media. Spread your purpose, point-of-view and promises through multiple social media channels – and let customers help you spread the word about all of the goodness that your health and wellness brand provides. Optimize your website to ensure that it’s getting the ranking and traffic it deserves. Regularly publish fresh, brand-related content (e.g., blog posts, articles, etc) to build your credibility and relevancy. Put in the effort to ensure that your owned media is working hard to help your health and wellness brand rise above the noise.

5. And if need be, revisit your PSP (purpose, story and positioning)

Purpose. Today’s consumers care about more than just what products or services you offer—they care about what kind of impact your brand is making in the world. To take your brand to the next level, you need a sense of purpose—an idea that your audience can truly connect to. While  referred to as your Reason For Being, North Star or Guiding Principle, we at Trajectory refer to purpose as your brand’s Big Energizing Idea. Big in that it transcends your category and Energizing in that it has the power to engage and align both internal and external audiences.

Story. Every business is built on a great brand. And every brand is built on a great story. The mistake too many marketing teams make is thinking that their story is just a driver of marketing campaigns. But it’s really the engine underneath company success. A core story motivates employees, defines company culture, creates strong emotional ties with customers and provides a vision to define future direction.

Positioning. To compel people to sit up and take notice, you need something unique. And this starts with your health and wellness brand positioning.  As one of the critical essentials for any successful business strategy, successful positioning is about elevating your organization, product or service brand to a point where people can’t help but take notice. It’s about finding where you fit in the lives of your target consumers, the unique benefits you deliver, alongside other businesses inside your category.

A strong brand is the ultimate competitive advantage for your health and wellness business. In these difficult times, these five practices can help your brands weather the storm – and be poised for growth when customers are once again ready to buy.

Reach out for a no obligation consultation. Since 1999, New Jersey marketing agency Trajectory has guided the trajectory of brands across the health and wellness continuum. We straddle the space between brand consultancy and creative agency – to help our client’s brands rise above the noise to help their businesses, and their customers, thrive.