How Customer Personas Can Help Market Your Health or Nutrition Brand

Brand Persona

Health and nutrition companies that want to connect with their target customers must stop generalizing about who their audience is and get real. Learning to define comprehensive Customer Personas is the first step.

Customer Personas are fictionalized characters that marketers use to bring audience segments to life. Personas dig deeper than traditional customer profiles, because they are based on research, industry insights and core customer values. For instance, rather than marketing to a woman in her 40’s, a health or nutrition brand that uses customer personas would market to Janelle, a 40-year-old office professional that works out 3 times a week, supports environmental causes and prefers cooking her own meals to dining out.
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Keeping Your Health Nutrition Marketing Ahead of Trends

digital world

3 new ways to market in the digital world

After recently attending the Direct Marketing Association in San Diego, I found out that not only am I not behind on current trends, I actually know much more than I even thought. I left breathing a very big a sigh of relief. These days it’s hard to know what we know, so moments like these are priceless.

As always, marketers are searching for their niche in an increasingly overcrowded, noisy market. What I discovered is too many brands are trying to be everything to everyone. A better approach is to simplify your Health Nutrition brand’s main marketing message and share it more effectively in the digital world. Here are 3 ways to do that:

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Marketing Sports Nutrition Products to Everyday People

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Is broadening the scope of your health nutrition brand a good idea?

The majority of sports nutrition companies that market products like energy bars, powdered supplements and sports drinks have traditionally, and almost exclusively, targeted professional athletes. That trend seems to be changing.

According to an article by Stephen Daniells of nutraingredients-usa-com, leading OTC company, Swisse Wellness is now focusing on what they term  “a premium quality sports nutrition range designed for everyday men and women who lead busy, active lifestyles.”

The article also cited a 2013  report by Packaged Facts that suggested sports brands could improve profits by focusing on casual athletes such as fitness walkers and yoga buffs.

I  can appreciate the need for companies to expand their offering to keep growing. However, as a professional athlete and a veteran marketer, I can’t help but wonder
if some of the brands that follow suit will run the risk of diluting their marketing messages. And will the added sales be worth that cost?

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Take Your Health Nutrition Marketing Back to the Basics

Grassroots Marketing5 grassroots tactics that can refresh your brand 

Many Health Nutrition marketers (including myself) have been so focused on digital engagement strategies lately that they may be forgetting the obvious: Health-conscious consumers respond to brands that are genuine, honest, and community-focused. These are all qualities that you can talk about online, but when it is time to demonstrate those qualities, it is time to go offline.

Lately, I’ve been considering the impact Grassroots Marketing can have for Health Nutrition brands. Grassroots Marketing is true engagement marketing because it challenges you to simply and directly connect with your target audience in the places where they work, eat, shop and relax. I’m convinced that now is the time to refocus on strategies such as this. Marketing at a street level will help build interest and trust in your brand, and it will give you even more to talk about online. How can you lose?

Here are 5 ideas for getting back to basics with Grassroots Marketing:

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The Importance of Content Marketing in Health Nutrition Marketing

4 tips for creating content that will bolster your brand

Content marketing is an idea most marketers are beginning to feel comfortable with, but what many brand managers don’t realize is that there is a lot more to it than a couple of generic blog posts and social media status updates. Content marketing efforts need to be consistent, focused and most of all engaging.

What is exactly the purpose of content marketing? The main goal is to connect with your customers outside of traditional selling tactics. In the past, marketers blasted their customers with messages that told them what to think and what to buy, and sometimes it backfired. Content marketing strives to position your brand as an expert in its industry, and offers your customers something for interacting with your brand—relevant, engaging content.

Consumers now spend as much time consuming content as they do sleeping or working, so providing that content is a smart way to connect with them and build trust for your Health Nutrition Marketing brand. The idea is to win customers without pitching your brand. Here are 4 tips that can make your content marketing efforts more successful:

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Using the Principles of Health Nutrition Marketing to Sell Natural Beauty Products

How to use ingredient-focused keywords to boost sales

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Marketing natural beauty products in the same way as general cosmetics will be largely ineffective, because the competition for beauty-related keywords is so fierce. Consumers who are interested in health and health-related beauty products speak a different language. If you really want to drive sales, you’ll want to be sure you are speaking that language, too. My suggestion is to think like a health nutrition brand, and focus on ingredients.

Most natural beauty brands will rely on the keywords general keywords like “organic”, “all-natural”, “plant-derived” or even “chemical-free”. This is an approach that will keep you on par with the competition, but not help you pull ahead. To rise to the top in search results, you will want to consider adding keywords that are more specific to your product or brand. Usually, this means focusing on a trendy ingredient.

Leveraging a trendy ingredient will help carve out a niché for your product. If you sell multiple products, you’ll want to isolate one ingredient for each item. Some examples might be a beauty product that contains hemp. Google “hemp beauty products” right now; I’ll wait…

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Challenging Consumer Assumptions with Health Nutrition Marketing

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3 reasons to tell customers what your brand isn’t

Conventional advertising wisdom dictates that brands should stay positive by talking about what they are, not about what they aren’t. Lately, I’m finding very good reasons to do just the opposite. In a marketplace brimming with gluten-free, fat-free, sugar-free (and the list goes on) options that contain unnatural substitutes, consumers are becoming VERY interested in what isn’t in their Health Nutrition products.

Health-conscious consumers have had to learn to read between the lines, so when they see a product advertised as “sugar-free”, for instance, they no longer take that at face value. Instead, they mentally substitute the artificial ingredient they know is there: sugar-free = aspartame, Fat-free = more sugar, etc. Continue reading

Keeping Health Nutrition Marketing Simple

Apple Planet

3 reasons simplifying your message can bolster your brand

It’s marketing 101: Find one unique selling point and commit to it. Keeping it simple makes sense for every brand, whether a large coffee chain or a major retailer. But it’s even more important for your Health Nutrition brand, and here’s why: Continue reading

Social Media Platforms for Health Nutrition Marketing

A comprehensive cheat sheet for extending your social network

Social media provides Health Nutrition marketers a unique opportunity to interact with customers in a more authentic way than traditional advertising allows. Unfortunately, there are so many social media platforms to choose from that it can be difficult to know how to get started, which platforms are critical, and which ones aren’t worth the time or investment.

As a Heath Nutrition Marketing and Social Media Expert, I believe in keeping it simple from the start. You can always add platforms once you’ve solidified your overall strategy, but if you start by creating too many consumer touchpoints, you won’t manage any of them well.

The best place to start is by understanding the function and uses of social media tools. So here is the Jessica Clay cheat sheet for building a social media strategy: Continue reading