5 Marketing Tactics For Health and Wellness Agency & Dirtea Case Study (Plus 11 Trends To Watch In 2024)
Joy Sharma
Since the onset of the global pandemic, consumers have taken their own health and well-being more seriously than ever before, resulting in a massive boom for eCommerce wellness brands. Sounds pretty exciting, right?
Unfortunately, this spike in new wellness products entering the marketplace also results in more competition, especially amongst small and medium-sized businesses.
So, how can you be sure that your health and wellness marketing strategies are enough to make you stand out from the overwhelming amount of options in the wellness space?
As a full-service social media marketing agency specializing in eCommerce, we’ve helped wellness brands like Dirtea grow by up to 1,017% in less than five months using a systematic marketing approach designed to scale your operation fast.
Today, we’re taking a look at the biggest factors your wellness company needs to consider when creating your marketing strategy.
Overview
Part 1: 11 Wellness Industry Trends
Just because the health and wellness industry is a steadfast source of revenue doesn’t mean it isn’t subject to new trends.
We’ll dive into the 11 trends you need to watch in 2024, plus how you can make them work to your advantage.
Part 2: Our Dirtea Case Study
One of our most notable case studies involved Dirtea, a holistic healthcare brand that creates powerful wellness products using mushrooms.
In just five months, we increased their revenue by 1,017%. Now, we’re showing you the exact steps we followed so that you can leverage these methods for your own wellness business.
Part 3: 5 Hacks For Wellness Marketing
Reaching your target audience means having the right marketing strategies at your disposal.
Here, we’ll walk you through our top 5 hacks for CPG companies, including specially tailored strategies unique to the health and wellness space. So, let’s dive in!
Table of Contents
Part 1: 11 Wellness Industry Trends For 2023
Much like the range of wellness products on the market, health, and wellness marketing trends are constantly evolving.
So, if you want to keep up with the needs of your target audience, you have to stay on top of your marketing strategies and be prepared to adjust your approach based on the latest trends.
Thankfully, we’ve done the leg work by curating the Top 11 trends you need to watch in 2024 so you can plan your marketing efforts accordingly.
1. Historic Valuation Growth
When we say the health and wellness industry is growing rapidly, we’re not exaggerating.
According to recent reports, the wellness business is valued at $4.5 trillion globally and is forecast to grow drastically over the next few years.
2. Major Growth Forecasts
According to the Global Wellness Institute, the physical activity, including gyms, sector alone is set to reach $11.1 trillion by the end of 2024.
And since there’s an increased focus on the correlation between physical activity and mental health, the mindful movement space is expected to become the fastest-growing sector and is forecast to jump from $29 billion to $52 billion within the next year.
Interestingly, the Asian-Pacific marketplace is also expected to surpass North America in terms of global growth, making international eCommerce strategies more valuable than ever.
3. More Market Value
As for the overall market value of the wellness space, forecasts also predict substantial growth in the coming years.
For instance, the Health and Wellness Market by Product and Geography Forecast & Analysis shows that the market size is expected to grow by USD 1,299.84 billion between 2020 – 2024, with a CAGR of 6.37%.
4. Emphasis on Customization & Connection
So, what do these stats mean for the demands of your consumers?
Well, according to New York’s industry-leading business advisor, McKinsey & Company, it’s all about customization and connectivity.
In other words, your customers want more wellness products tailored to their needs and goals rather than options that aren’t aligned with them. One great example of this is the rise in wearable wellness tech.
Some of the most popular products in this category include jewelry-based fitness trackers like watches, rings, and even bracelets. These products give users the freedom to connect their health and wellness tracker with their existing technology, creating a fully integrated user experience.
Despite ongoing concerns over data privacy, consumers have made it clear that they value more customization in their wellness routine, giving brands more opportunities for growth with these products.
5. More Personalization Options
Even if your wellness company doesn’t have the resources needed to develop wearable products, there’s still plenty of room for personalization in your business.
New reports indicate that consumers are gravitating more towards health and wellness tools that can be personalized to meet their needs, especially when it comes to things like exercise plans, nutritional coaching, and dietary supplements.
In fact, 58% of consumers said they were “very interested” in buying supplements or other products that could be personalized to them.
Practically speaking, this can be as simple as creating an interactive quiz for your customers and recommending products based on their results. This way, you can give them the personalized touch they’re after and increase your AOV at the same time.
6. Focus on Authentic Content
It’s no secret that influencers have dominated the digital marketing landscape in recent years, with social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube becoming the go-to sources for product recommendations.
However, the days of mega-influencers pulling in millions of dollars in sponsorship dollars are slowly coming to an end.
The distrust for these products grows as more buyers realize the connection between paid partnerships and influencer wealth.
So instead, many are turning to “micro-influencers” or creators with less than 100,000 for product reviews, including long-form content like podcasts and bite-size platforms like TikTok.
This gives you the opportunity to partner with creators who genuinely love your wellness products, building more trust between you and your consumers.
Simply put, authenticity is the future of influencer marketing.
Of course, there are some aspects of your business that you may need to outsource to other agencies. Working with a digital marketing agencies, for example – can help you build new customer acquisition funnels, improve customer retention, and utilize modern marketing tools like Facebook Ads or influencer marketing.
Typically, these fees range between 4 – 7 %, depending on the scope of their work.
7. High- Volume Creatives with Diversity
Creating a marketing plan usually means producing a large volume of creatives to test within the target market.
In 2024, the demand for higher velocity creatives with more diversity will grow even more, making it crucial for your band to constantly push new ads or ad iterations across your social media channels.
If you want to know how to do this for cheap, check out our previous article.
8. Weekly New Ad Creatives
Another great way to streamline your results is by creating weekly new ad creatives, which allow you to organize your marketing approach.
The more frequently you produce new creatives, the better your overall performance will become.
9. High Demand for UGC Ads
Similar to influencer marketing, UGC is another way to increase your brand awareness and create a sense of authenticity in your marketing strategies.
However, unlike the costs of producing new creatives from scratch, UGC is a type of content marketing that allows users to create ads for you with their own resources. This makes it more cost-effective for your business while still achieving maximum results.
10. Bigger Push For User Reviews
The value of positive customer reviews in your marketing efforts can not be understated.
That’s why more wellness brands are making an effort to incorporate these reviews into their marketing campaigns and encourage customers to leave them feedback as well.
This leaves you with an abundance of new material that you can translate into fresh marketing ideas.
11. Visual Competitor Comparison
What’s the best way to get ahead of your competition?
By showcasing your superiority with eye-catching visual graphics.
For consumers concerned with personal care, side-by-side competitor comparisons give you an easy way to demonstrate why they should choose your products over the alternatives in a clear, easy-to-understand way.
Part 2: Our Dirtea Case Study: 1,017% Growth In 5 Months
Now, let’s look at an example from one of our clients.
Dirtea was founded by a pair of brothers on a mission to bring the life-changing health benefits of mushrooms to the masses.
Not only that, their signature powder blends are made to be deliciously mixed with your favourite beverages so that you can reap these benefits without the taste of fungi.
When the team behind Dirtea first approached us, they were looking for a systematic way to grow their business in the health and wellness industry, which was difficult to do given that mushroom-based products were becoming more and more mainstream.
Like other dietary supplements, Dirtea is considered a high LTV brand, meaning that the lifetime value is expected to grow due to the ongoing need for customers to repurchase these products. However, this still presented us with plenty of obstacles.
Here’s how we approached their marketing strategy…
The Challenge
Dirtea is a High LTV brand, the challenge was to be able to build a marketing strategy that is efficient enough that it can make the brand front-end profitable.
Being able to do that would make them a self-funding machine which was crucial for them, Self funding in the sense that it can continue to fund its own growth without needing external funding and thrive in the current economy of when access to capital is becoming hard.
This was especially harder to do for them because they were in the CPG Industry (Majority of brands are playing the LTV game here and are aggressive on customer acquisition with the expectation of making profit back in the lifetime future value.), as facebook is an auction that meant that we had to figure out ways to beat our competition at scale that is willing to bid more than us for the same audience.
Our Strategy
This is a screenshot describing how the facebook auction algorithm works,
We knew that being able to outbid massive wellness brands was simply not attainable for Dirtea.
So instead, we opted to shift our strategy away from bidding a higher advertiser bid and create higher-quality content that engages with our target audience, therefore pushing Dirtea’s ads higher in the Facebook algorithm by influencing and giving us a higher “Estimated action rates” & “user value” score.
So we tried to compensate for the diff in our bid and competitor’s bid by proportionate increase in ad relevance to audience (User Value) and CTR (estimated action rate) to compensate for it.
Unlike traditional advertising channels like television, social media channels value user relativity over pure advertising costs. That means that marketing campaigns that have better-estimated action rates, or the click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR) combined, and overall user value is prioritized in the algorithm.
So, we focused on controlling just these two factors.
The Steps We Followed:
Step 1: Merchandising
First, we made sure that we were pushing the most valuable products to potential customers.
To do this, we work with a multi-SKU merchandising sheet that helps us evaluate the ROAS of each individual product.
From there, we started allocating the advertising budget to push products with a higher rate of return than others, allowing Dirtea to increase its profits without increasing its spending.
You can take a deep dive on how to do this here: merchandising blog
Step 2: Increasing AOV
Once we know the products we wanna promote i.e the bestsellers. We made a model for our CAC and we came up with that at spend we want on scale our CAC (customer Acquisition cost) will be so high that we wont be able to acquire customers on profitability at current AOV.
The way to increase average order value (AOV), which means encouraging your customers to buy a larger amount of products in every order. So to achieve that we started by looking at AOV histogram and noticed what the different buckets of Order value were and which products constituted that.
Then we design offers and bundles around that to move the customers up a bucket. For Dirtea, we did this by creating custom-tailored initiatives for each product.
For example, if a customer regularly buys Dirtea’s Reishi mushroom powder for better sleep, we would create an offer recommending another product they might enjoy, like their Lion’s mane for a better morning focus after the deep calm sleep from Reishi and call it the “Smart sleep bundle” thus guiding people who were just gonna buy 1 product to rather try a bundle which is higher AOV for us.
Another option for order initiatives is to include a free sample of a less-popular product along with the purchase of your best seller. So, when your customers fall in love with the other products as well, their AOV will naturally increase.
This is how we improved our AOV by 75% now we could afford a higher CAC and were 1 step closer tp being more profitable on front end.
Step 3: Creative Strategy
Next, we developed fresh, creative marketing strategies using our systemic method.
In Dirtea’s case, these strategies were focused on improving user value. In other words, our goal was to create ads that were more relatable to our target audiences. The first step in doing this is to fine-tune the brand persona.
If you’re familiar with digital marketing at all, you probably already know that a brand persona is a way of creating messaging with the same tone, voice, and pain points as your ideal customers. To do this, we use in-depth customer research processes to better understand the target demographic, including their physical needs, emotional needs, objections they may have, and so on.
But in our method, we take things one step further by combining the persona with the “job to be done” or JTBD. Think of your product as an employee your potential customers will hire to complete a job. By looking at it this way, it allows us to create messaging that more accurately addresses their needs since most consumers buy a product based on the function it will be fulfilling for them.
Now, with our persona and JTBD nailed down, we began the process of producing creatives at high volumes. But unlike other marketing agencies, we do this by focusing on ad iterations.
Rather than using all of our client’s budget on producing new creatives, which can be very pricey, we created updated versions of existing creatives by changing one or two variables at a time. This saves significant time and money and gives us the power to produce the volume of ads needed to beat out competitors.
For Dirtea, we enlisted an in-house team of:
- UGC sourcing specialists
- Video content editors
- Scriptwriters
With this framework, we were able to churn out 100 creatives every single week, and the results were astounding.
Check out a breakdown of our full creative strategy here:
5 Steps To Create Ad Creatives That Convert & 90+ Ad Formats To Get Started
Step 4: Landing Page CR Testing
Once we began consistently pumping out a high volume of ad creatives, it became easier for us to test which marketing ideas were performing well and which weren’t.
From there, we decided to develop specialized landing pages based on each of our highest-performing ads. Because our goal was to focus on estimated action rate and user value, we adjusted our marketing approach to create a seamless sales funnel for every single ad.
With this method, we were able to drive up our CTR and CR, as well as increase the overall user value since these landing pages were custom-tailored to the unique journey of each customer.
The Results
So, how did this strategy play out for Dirtea?
Here’s what our methods did from their brand growth in just five months:
- Overall revenue growth of 1,017% in just five months, far surpassing other competitor brands in the health and wellness industry
- For every dollar invested into ads in year 1 of their LTV, they increased their return on invested capital (ROIC) by 346%
- Jaw-dropping monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
- Seamless scaling on first-order profitability and increased AOV
- Consistently outperformed every other wellness brand in their niche market, thanks to our ability to churn out vast volumes of creatives fast.
- Streamlined customer flows that helped us better understand unit economics and consumer behavior, making it easier to produce targeted ads.
Now, with all of that being said, you should know that stories like Dirtea’s aren’t a one-off occurrence.
In fact, with the right wellness marketing tools at your fingertips, your brand could be the next to skyrocket in growth.
Even got mentioned by Charm.io as the #1 Fastest growing Shopify brand 2023.
Part 3: 5 Hacks For Wellness Marketing
1. Bundle Your Offers
One aspect of the health and wellness space that makes growth a challenge is the fact that customers are typically very loyal to their favorite personal care products.
For instance, men who love Old Spice deodorant are a lot less likely to try an alternative brand, making it difficult to break into that product niche. You can combat this by offering bundle deals to entice a higher AOV for your existing customers and entice new customers to try your products.
Let’s say you have a best-selling protein powder that your customers consistently purchase, but your pre-workout isn’t performing as well. By offering a sample of the pre-workout with the purchase of their protein powder, you can eventually increase your AOV and improve your LTV.
2. Create High- Volumes of Ads
As we’ve said, beating out competitors on social media platforms boils down to being able to out-produce in terms of ad creatives.
That’s why we created a cost-effective creative strategy you can follow for all of your wellness marketing campaigns. Check it out here: 5 Steps To Create Ad Creatives That Convert & 90+ Ad Formats To Get Started
3. Implement Retention Flows
Since the wellness business is driven by LTV, keeping your existing customers engaged with your products is equally as valuable as bringing in new business.
The easiest way to do this is by using a customer retention flow, which is usually done through SMS or email marketing.
Retention flows can do two key things for your wellness brand:
- It builds a lasting relationship between the customer and your business, which translates into better LTV.
- It gives you a built-in audience to test out new products, seek out reviews and testimonials, and collect data from your email list for your marketing efforts.
The more frequently you connect with your customers, the easier it becomes to scale your brand. For more insight into this process, you can find our retention flow checklist here: Balancing Acquisition and Retention: The Core of a Solid eCommerce Marketing Strategy
3. Implement Retention Flows
Directly advertising to consumers is by far the most costly avenue you can take with your marketing budget. So, if you’re a small or medium-sized wellness brand, we recommend focusing your efforts on strong organic traffic methods. Choosing to organically promote your products is significantly more cost-effective.
It can also build trust from potential customers since research indicates that more consumers are buying from brands that feel authentic.
The best funnels for organic traffic come from:
- SEO or optimizing via search engines
- Content marketing
- Social media
- Influencer marketing
- UGC
With these marketing tools, reaching your target audience has never been easier. We currently work with our friends at Kynship, for influencer seeding and they are working incredible for our influencer organ efforts.
4. Leverage Product Development
From skincare to mental health and physical fitness, the wellness industry constantly seeks to reinvent itself, and your wellness products should be no exception.
The most successful wellness brands are those that work on product development consistently, giving their loyal customers even more reasons to buy from them. This drives up your LTV and solidifies you as an authority figure in your industry, especially when launching new personal care products your audience didn’t even know they needed until now.
Ready to Grow Your Wellness Brand?
With such stiff competition in the eCommerce space, knowing which health and wellness marketing strategies are right for your brand is a challenge.
Our team is here to help you meet your short and long-term business goals with a systematic approach you can count on for growth, scale, and profitability.
Connect with us to schedule a consultation today.
