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For many health and wellness brands, 2020 is an all-out effort to survive the extreme business slowdown. For the better part of the year, leaders have been focused on protecting the bottom line while adapting to customers’ constraints, concerns and shifts in behavior. Next year will be about growing or growing back in a changed landscape. Regardless of specific health and wellness industry segment, digital branding and digital branding strategy will be front and center.

Rekindling Brand Love

Old (pre-pandemic) brand marketing strategies aren’t going to work for a new normal consumer. One of the more immediate lessons learned from the Pandemic is for brands to reconsider the customer journey with a view to create the most seamless experience possible in order to rebuild business, maximize revenue and rekindle brand love. How you design and build your brand’s presence online is integral to this effort.

Underscoring this point is this quote from McKinsey & Company’s report on consumer behavior: “we have covered decades in days in the adaption of digital.” In this same report, McKinsey notes how new behaviors are emerging across eight areas of life, including Health and wellbeing. Two of these impacts include a surge in e-commerce and a changing of brand preferences.

With More Choice, Brand Becomes More Important

The more choice consumers have, and the more willing they are to explore those choices, the more important differentiated, compelling and trusted brands are to landing and keeping those consumers. If this means revisiting brand strategy in light of changing consumer needs and behaviors – including your brand story, positioning,  messaging and omni-channel brand expression – now is the time.

Reevaluating Your Digital Experience

Consumers have shown that they are open to new brands and behaving in new ways. As such, you should consider what you need to do to pull them closer to your brand through a distinguishing and effective digital experience.

Engaging content marketing, interactive augmented reality experiences (replacing in-person engagement), educational offerings, reviews and testimonials, a supporting customer relationship management system and the use of micro-influencers and social media, are all ways to try and pull a consumer from someone else’s funnel into yours.

Optimizing Digital Branding Strategy in 2021

The challenges we’ve collectively faced across each of our health and wellness brand categories have made one thing abundantly clear. Digital brand experiences are your business’s lifeblood. In these times of deep uncertainty and change, they’ve provided an essential connection between your company and customer.

This will stay true in 2021. Brands need to make sure this connection, determined by the quality and effectiveness of the user experience, is as strong as possible.

Three considerations

Here are three considerations for ensuring your digital branding is strong and that your digital marketing becomes both a brand builder and a key revenue generator in 2021.

Begin With A UX Audit

Conduct a digital audit of your brand’s current UX, going under the hood of your digital touchpoints to identify and implement tactical optimizations and conversion boosting enhancements. This is exactly what we’re doing right now for multiple Trajectory clients – from physician medical practices to B2B beauty devices.

These UX Audits help us to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and actionable recommendations to create a path forward for subsequent brand refreshes and to revitalize client websites – from a user experience, content and brand/business-building perspective.

The most useful digital audits involve not only evaluating the current website user data, structure, design and content, but also garnering user input as well as looking outside at the competitive landscape and possible role models for key insights and learning to take forward.

Think Beyond Products and Transactions

What do customers truly value? We know the differences from the beginning of the year to now are profound. Understanding these drivers can have big benefits in terms of delivering a more meaningful and personalized experience beyond a (table stakes) transaction.

If you can create something bigger than your products, a reason for people to want to be connected with your brand, then the experience trumps a simple and replaceable product purchase transaction. Key is to blend functional reasons to get your products or services invited in, while also adding emotional reasons to unlock brand love.

Health and wellness brands should do this naturally because they offer physical (and increasingly mental, social, and spiritual) transformation for something that is deeply and personally meaningful: our health and wellbeing.

A few examples include Tata Harper and Lush Cosmetics in Beauty & Body. The Class and Therabody in Fitness. Thriva and Parsley Health in Empowered Health.

Foster Community

You can take this one step further. One of the interesting outcomes of this crisis is that we’ve never been more alone and yet also more united.  This represents an opportunity for brands to bring people together and unite us around shared values, interests and passions. Uniting us around both the profound but also much needed moments of relief.

A few examples include Spartan in the Events space, Peloton and SoulCycle in Fitness, Goop in E-Tailing and Novo Nordisk in the pharma space.

In Summary

Consumers want to feel understood, empowered to create peak moments, and where possible, to connect with a like-minded community. If you can take small steps in these directions through your digital branding, it will ultimately pay dividends in your customer retention and bottom line.

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Since 1999, New Jersey marketing agency Trajectory has helped B2C and B2B health and wellness brands to rise above the noise to move business and customers forward. Reach out for a no-obligation consultation.