This article is based on the Go-To Wellness Pro Episode 61, How to Get Started with a Marketing Plan for Your Health Business.
If you’re a health and wellness professional looking to strategically grow a thriving and profitable health business, this article is for you. Host Julie Rolston interviews Elizabeth Ruth on the importance of content marketing, particularly for service-based and group program-based businesses.
1. Why Should You Start A Blog?
A blog establishes your authority as a health and wellness professional. It’s going to show people more details about the products and services you sell and some insider tips on how to use or be most successful with them.
From a technical standpoint, a blog also keeps your website current with fresh content. It will also attract your clients based on their specific searches in web browsers such as Google.
Maybe you are talking about diet culture. If you have a program that is helping people break free of that culture, you can create a blog post and target that specific group searching for keywords such as “diet culture” or “break the diet culture.”
2. Using Blogs To Bump Up Your Website
The goal of a search engine is to deliver exactly the answer that the user is requesting. This is why it is important that as health and wellness professionals, you focus on keywords that you know your audience will be searching about.
Search engines will index your website and blogs to identify what it is about based on the keywords you are using. Your website will be higher in the search results when your keywords match what the user is searching for. This is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
3. Taking Note Of Your Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is calculated by the amount of time a person comes and stays on your website.
It’s not good to have a high bounce rate. It shows that the person didn’t find what they need from your website and immediately clicked away.
A low bounce rate will help your SEO because the search engine will see that people love the content on your website and stay on it. This will organically push your article higher up in the search results.
4. Perfect Blog Structure
First, you need to choose whether the blog is going to be a long or short one. Both have their places and specific target audiences.
Longer blogs work to dig in deeper and explore more technical topics. This type of article can be over 2000 words.
Shorter blogs are great for concise messages. Consider linking to another article where the reader can continue exploring the topic. Series or articles can give you an excellent bounce rate as your reader may have multiple tabs to your website or blog open at a time, giving you longer view rates.
If you’re not sure how to set up a blog post, a basic and proven layout we use at ER Marketing Services is an introduction, three main points that you unpack, and a conclusion with a call to action on what they do next.
5. Promoting Your Blog
After you’ve written a blog post, consider how you can drive people there. One strategy is to share it with your email list. You can also chop up the blog post into stand-alone main points and share them on social media.
Consider what your goal is – do you want to share your authority or drive people to your blog? This will help determine your call to action or what you want people to do with what they’ve just read.
6. Why Should You Do Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a powerful thing to add to your marketing because our email list is one of the few things we can own.
A few weeks ago, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down where I was in Canada and everybody was freaking out. Health and wellness professionals who solely use those platforms had no way to communicate with their clients. For those of us who have an email list, it would be very easy to put out an email and let everyone know, “Hey, Facebook and Instagram are currently down, but I’ve got you. Here are today’s updates” or “Here’s today’s blog post, you can click this link to read all about it.”
This way, you don’t need to rely solely on a third-party social media platform since you already have a dedicated fanbase of email subscribers waiting for your updates.
7. How Do You Get Started With Email Marketing?
Consider your business goals first. Make sure you have an objective as to why you’re marketing your health and wellness products or services.
Do you have a sales goal? Do you have a specific number of leads that you’re trying to attract this year? Are you trying to promote a specific program that you want to have members join?
Based on those goals, create a strategy so that you’re attracting subscribers to join your email list as you go.
8. Strategy In Sending Emails
There are many strategies you can use to deliver emails. The first is that you type and send it immediately. This is the most generic way of sending and replying to emails, but not everyone has the luxury to reply to emails at any time of the day.
Another way is to schedule it. Perhaps you email your list once a week on Saturdays at 10:00 AM.
The third way is to automate your emails. For example, if you have a welcome series created, whenever someone joins your list they will receive the emails in order. This way they won’t miss out on the experience you have curated. After they go through the welcome series, that’s when they’re added to your live list where you’re sending out emails in real-time.
9. Curating An Email Series
An email series is a great way for health and wellness professionals to let your subscribers get to know more about you, your services or products, and to decide if they’d like to hire you now or in the future.
Before sending out the emails, you must have a plan in mind. What is the series about? Do you think your subscribers will appreciate the content?
The first email could be a “Yay! You’re here! I’m so excited for you to learn more about [insert topic here] for the next couple of weeks!” something like that. Then you slowly ease them in week by week with additional info on what the series is about.
Pay attention to your analytics. A great email series can be determined by your open and click rates, which show if your subscribers are reading and engaging with your articles or not.
10. Just How Valuable Is Email Marketing?
What makes email marketing valuable is how it is a direct way of interacting with your subscribers. In health and wellness marketing, you already have a dedicated fanbase waiting for your updates.
You can use emails in promoting anything and everything. Do you have a new freebie? You can insert it in your email. Do you have a new blog post or podcast episode? Are you an affiliate of a program or service you recommend your clients try? Advertise it to your email list.
Continue to give further value and nurture people on your list so they can get to know you better and see you as their “go-to” person in your industry.
11. Interacting With Your Audience
Focus on quality and consistency over quantity. Remember, value is the most important thing you could provide your audience as a health and wellness professional.
We have some clients whose whole email strategy is to promote their blog posts, and they only blog once a month, which means they also email only once a month. It is what feels right to them and what they can manage.
But of course, there’s no one fixed strategy you can use because your subscribers are not computers with a fixed code, they are people – and people are unpredictable.
Obviously, the more you put out, the more results or the more testing your strategy you’ll be able to do. You can validate what works and what doesn’t.
A concrete example would be when I started using TikTok as part of my marketing strategy. I began by only doing a marketing tip. Then a few weeks in, I increased the frequency to see if it will also increase my analytics. I did three videos a day, and this lasted for a week. There was no difference in terms of followers, comments or any kind of engagement. I was getting the same views and it was getting difficult to maintain. So I decided to revert to doing one video a day to test if consistency is the key.
12. Do Not Overwhelm Yourself
In creating your marketing plan, you mustn’t overwhelm yourself. You’ll burn yourself out and it could lead to failure because you’re not going to be able to stick with it.
This goes back to quality and consistency over quantity. Think about what you’re passionate about as a health and wellness professional. Your passion is what translates into your work.
When you do something just to check it off a list, the quality will show and might even affect the way your audience perceives you. Whereas if you only did it once a week, you can put a lot more into it and make sure the content is the best you’re putting it. It will impact people more and your audience will want to engage with you because your content resonates with them.
This increases your engagement in the long run as well as gives you the needed feedback or likes and comments from them.
13. Where Do You Find Inspiration For Content?
As a health and wellness professional, pretend that you are your ideal client looking for the service you are offering. Go on Google, Pinterest, or even Youtube and search. As you are slowly typing, let’s use “diet culture” as an example, all three of the platforms mentioned automatically fill in the rest of the statement based on popular requests. It’s an easy and amazing way to see what people are interested in and search for things that are related to your field.
Another website is called AnswerThePublic. You input a topic and it’ll give you a list of hundreds of phrases or sentences related to the topic that people are searching about.
One resource that I think people overlook is big leaders in your industry that are on the same platform that you are using. Go to their page and study them. What is making them successful? Is it the hashtags they are using? The time they are putting out content? The message they’re writing? Or is it a mix of everything?
As you do all of this, remember the very big rule, DO NOT COPY THEM. Use these as resources that you can deliver with your own spin, method, or values.
I am a big believer in authenticity and uniqueness, and this also translates to the content you’re putting out. Think of what can set you apart from other competitors because it’ll also help people decide on why they think you are their right choice.
Where Do You Go Next?
Still unsure of the path to take in marketing your health and wellness business? Take our fun and quick Quiz: What Digital Marketing Should You Do Next For Your Business?
