Content Marketing in the Health & Wellness Industry

Branding

More than 8 in 10 people factor in a brand’s authenticity when deciding whether to support them. The same number of people say they need to trust a brand before they buy. These numbers are averaged across industries, but in the health and wellness industry, authenticity and trust are even more critical.

So, when it comes to who your company is as a brand, how do you weave trust and authenticity into your brand? A consistent image that your customers resonate with is fundamental. For those just starting out, this means reviewing the 12 primary brand archetypes and beginning to define your brand identity.

From there, companies need to lay out a brand book. A brand book is a critical company resource as it is able to consistently explain who your brand is to employees, outsourced labor, and anyone representing your company.

Brand books are great for any founder who wants to put their ideas on paper, and even better for a brand that has loosely defined principles that need to be narrowed down, tightened up, and clearly communicated.

Your Next Move: Create a brand book that explains who your brand is, who your audience is, and how your brand connects with your audience.

Choose Your Formats

The first step of assembling your content plan is determining what types of content you want to offer.

• Written Content: The basis of your SEO, written content is featured on many platforms — including on your blog, in your FAQ pages, across social media, and as downloadable materials, such as lead magnets.


• Video Content: While it can greatly boost engagement, it generally makes sense to wait to produce video content until you can afford the investment. High-quality video content takes time and equipment, along with professionals able to represent your brand confidently on camera.


• Audio Content: Podcasts seem to be everywhere these days, but you should only host one if you believe you can deliver unique insight. After all, content marketing is all about providing real value that customers can’t get anywhere else.


• Image Content: Often overlooked when planning out a content strategy, image content is easily the second most important format next to written content. After all, relevant imagery should accompany all of your writing, whether it’s on your blog, on Facebook, or on Instagram where images are the heart of your content offering.

Select Your Platforms

As a brand, it can be simply overwhelming to consider how many platforms are out there where you might potentially have or need a presence. Fortunately, you don’t need to be everywhere to connect with your audience. Your brand should only be on the platforms where your audience hangs out the most.

Many businesses choose Facebook as their go-to social media platform, sheerly because it’s the largest platform in the world and, out of 2.7 billion users, you’re bound to find a segment of your customer base online. However, just because it covers all the bases, that doesn’t mean it should be your only platform or even on your list.

When building your customer personas, you learned a lot about them — including where they prefer to consume information. If Facebook isn’t one of their top networks, it shouldn’t be yours, either. Focus your efforts on the platforms where your audience is already most active.

You should also start by focusing on just 1-2 social media platforms (i.e., Instagram and Snapchat). Don’t spread yourself too thin. You want to get into a routine so that you can build up an engaged following on the platforms you are active on, and then maybe you can expand down the line if your audience warrants it.

Plan a Content Calendar

With the preliminaries sorted, you can finally see your content strategy come together. This is where all of your research will pay off. Your content calendar doesn’t define what you’ll post as far as topics go (we’ll do that in the next step), but it does provide you with a schedule as to when and where you’ll post your content.

For example, if you decide you’re going to publish a blog post once a week, your content calendar will say what day of the week it goes live. Since a consistent posting schedule is paramount to loyal readers and ongoing engagement, sticking to your content schedule is a must.

Beyond your blog posts, your content calendar should also have empty slots for your Instagram post, your Facebook videos, your podcast, and any other content formats/platforms you’re working into your strategy. A good rule of thumb is to lay out your content calendar for a full calendar year (January through December), as this allows your schedule to account for things like holiday promotions, seasonal content, brand milestones, and so on.

Put Your Keywords to Work

It will take a little bit of time to put all of the empty slots into your content calendar, but once you have a schedule in front of you, you’re ready for the fun part: Filling it in! Fortunately, while this can seem like a daunting endeavor, much of the work has already been done.

When you created your keyword plan, you discovered all sorts of content ideas. Your most basic ideas will target keywords directly (i.e., “What is a foam roller?”), but you’ll gradually expand on these ideas accordingly, like with comparison content, “top X” lists, and so on.

Some of your content will also be relatively unrelated to keywords, and that would include the branded content you publish that helps introduce people to your backstory and values. Think behind-the-scenes style posts and articles like “Meet The Team” that interview your key employees.

While it’d be great to fill in your entire content calendar for the whole year, most brands look just a few months ahead. However, to make sure that you stay ahead, it’s a good idea to keep an idea bank so that you can constantly be adding topics to your content calendar and never scrambling to find something last minute.