Top Marketing Ideas for Health and Wellness Businesses

The new year is an exciting time for many of us, but it’s an especially good time for health and wellness professionals. Those who work in the health and wellness industry are used to the surge of clients looking to start the year off with healthier habits. The new year also means the search for marketing ideas for health and wellness businesses.

You’re in the business of helping people feel good about themselves. But what about you? What’s your plan to boost the health of your business in the upcoming year?

If you haven’t had a chance to stop and think about it yet, that’s okay. We’ve put together a list of the top marketing ideas for your health and wellness business.

Read on for some great tips on how you can ride the wave of client resolutions beyond January and make this year one of your strongest to date.

Clean Up Your Email Database

Your email list is only as good as its accuracy. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a monster size address book if only 30 percent of your contacts are valid. When we say clean up your database, we mean that you should regularly sweep your list and remove undeliverable, duplicate and incorrect email addresses. If your emails get flagged with excessive spam reports and unsubscribes, you run the risk of having your account suspended.

A clean email database isn’t just important for email deliverability, it also plays a major role in list segmentation, which in turn affects your marketing efforts on social media. If you want to expand your reach in a targeted fashion, you have to keep your email list up to date. We suggest updating your list on a regular basis to remove any bad data and unsubscribe requests.

With an email list that passes the test, you’re ready to use it to your own advantage to grow your business, which brings us to our next tip.

Use Email to Stay in Front of Clients

Coming up with enough content for your email and social media marketing is no easy task. Just keeping up with a monthly newsletter can be tough, but toss in blogging, reviews, and social media, and suddenly it’s overwhelming! Hiring a third party to handle your content creation might help, but it won’t solve your problem entirely. You will still have to design email templates, handle the database and schedule sends on a regular basis.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just hand the whole thing off to someone else? Good news—you can! That’s what we do. We write, design and send email content so you don’t have to. (And social media too, but we’ll get to that.) Here’s an example of an email newsletter we sent for our wellness clients:

Email is still the most effective channel for staying in front of clients, but it takes a lot of work. With email automation, you get the benefit of clean data, custom content and automated software without the extra hassle. And you stay top of mind with your past clients and future prospects thanks to a consistent and thoughtfully crafted email presence.

Stay Active on Social Media

Maintaining an active presence on social media helps keep you top of mind and accessible to clients.

As you move into the new year, you should double-check to make sure that your pages are updated with the most relevant information about your business, including hours, location and services offered. You should also consider refreshing your cover photos consistently across all platforms—particularly Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn—to give yourself a fresh look.

Just as important as maintaining up-to-date information is taking the time to keep up with a consistent schedule for posts, tweets, and shares across social platforms. If it seems like a lot of work to manage your social accounts in real-time, it most certainly is! If you need some posting inspiration, here’s a list of Pinterest boards to peruse.

Once the creative juices are flowing, consider trying out a social scheduling tool. Buffer lets you schedule posts to publish at a future date, so you can keep your audience engaged without spending too much time behind a screen.

Embrace Mobile

Mobile-friendly websites are a must-have for your business going forward. Here’s why:

• Mobile devices account for 66 percent of email opens.
• 96% of active user accounts worldwide access Facebook via mobile devices.
• 51% of global online traffic is generated via mobile devices.

If that doesn’t convince you, know that Google also ranks mobile-optimized sites higher in search results. This site is where you can test mobile-friendliness and see how your website appears from mobile devices.

Test your site by entering your URL. If everything checks out, you’ll see the following:

If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll want to make it a priority to update your website. More and more internet usage and traffic are coming from mobile devices, so your website needs to be ready. Whether it’s to find your website or reviews, clients are searching for your business from their mobile devices.

Tune In to Online Reviews

Where do you turn when you’re looking for a new acupuncturist or massage therapist? You ask a friend.

If you don’t have someone to ask, then you ask Google. And where will a Google search lead you? To online reviews.

And did you know 88 percent of clients trust online reviews just as much as recommendations from friends and family? Needless to say, word of mouth is vital.

If you’re not monitoring your Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google pages, you’re missing valuable opportunities to build relationships with your clients, learn what’s wowing them and where you can improve your services.

Online reviews don’t have to be a scary thing. Rather than neglecting reviews pages, take the reins of your online reputation by claiming your accounts, being responsive and asking satisfied clients to put in a good word for you.

When you manage your pages proactively and approach those not-so-stellar reviews as a learning opportunity, you can improve your business and gain the respect of onlookers. That’s when online reviews will start to work in your favor.

Wrap-Up

Marketing ideas for health and wellness should focus on staying in front of your clients to generate repeat business and referrals. A balanced strategy will no doubt include email, mobile, and social media marketing. If you need help with any of these aspects, remember that we’re always here to lend a hand.