How Consumers Find Health and Wellness on the Internet

As global events have changed, the purchasing habits of many consumers worldwide have also changed. As a result, businesses have had to rework how they view online marketing and eCommerce. No longer an afterthought or tertiary strategy, retailers have had to rethink e-commerce as a major source of business, in some cases bringing it to the forefront as a primary strategy. This also meant many health and wellness products, including supplements, exercise and fitness, lifestyle, and self-therapy solutions have had to transition online. When businesses were forced to shutter for months at a time during the Covid-19 pandemic, many of them had little recourse but to retool their brand for online business. This also meant that consumers now had plenty of options to choose from, changing the way they decided on purchases or where to commit their health and wellness dollars.

Though the amount of choice and how many of the consumers’ favorite brands changed the way they were presented, the method consumers used to look for products didn’t change much. Relying on current tools such as Google, Amazon, and social media to find what they needed, the end-user was still using traditional means online to find the products of their choice. What changed was how much they could find, how many businesses offered the product categories they were looking for, and how they ended up purchasing that product.

The key to cutting through the noise of so many competitors hitting the online marketplace at one time remains in understanding the traditional way consumers find their products online and pivoting your strategy to meet the criteria to rise to the top of those platforms. This means creating an optimized brand for search, diversifying distribution avenues, and creating a desirable social media presence. There are a few fundamental ways every business can accomplish these goals.

Continue to focus on the customer’s health and well being

Even though the way you present your business has changed, your overall presentation should remain consistent. Too many health and wellness businesses mistake pivoting to an online strategy as changing their philosophy altogether. When customers seek out health and wellness products, they’re not looking for complete upsets in their lifestyle, nor are they seeking a warehouse experience, looking for the best deal on bulk products. Instead, consumers in the health and wellness segment are reaching out to find the product they are familiar with or trying to find that new product that will help them solve a problem they have already identified.

Some customers may also be looking for advice from whom they understand will have plenty of product knowledge. This means being able to keep the lines of communications open even virtually. Some solutions could include:

• guides
• blog articles
• vlogs
• podcasts
• live chat

This goes a long way to earning the consumer’s trust, as with many other actions to pivot to a more digital business solution.

Build trust with your audience

Trustworthiness is the cornerstone of any good business and the foundation of satisfied repeat customers, the holy grail of any brand. This is also the first gate any new customer will check for when deciding whether they will be a patron of a business or move on to somewhere else. We all know how to create this trustworthiness in traditional forms.

Offer quality products, create a positive customer experience through service, offer products at a fair price, and support your customer throughout the entire purchasing experience and beyond.

This worked well in the days when consumers walked into physical stores, met with somebody behind a counter, and spent time with them discussing what they sought and how the store could help them. Unfortunately, these traditional means are now just a piece of the puzzle. Even as things start to return to the way they were, consumers still rely on more digital sources before they even step foot outside their homes. This means gaining your audience’s trust before they even get to see your business.

How do you gain trust in the health and wellness segment before a customer even hears about your business? Visibility and relevance. Think about what your audience is searching for and what they seek. If they search for related health and wellness products, but your business doesn’t show up in the first few pages of a search, there isn’t much there to trust. This includes pinpointing your business with map services, related keyword results, and a relevant social media campaign that puts you at the forefront of engagement results.

Engage with your audience through social media

Though not the end-all and be-all of online marketing, social media remains the most effective, and cost-effective, way to reach a wide audience. The key to social media is creating a presence that provides interaction and organic content building. Remember when audiences go to platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok, and Instagram, they’re not looking for ads but instead information and distraction.

This means keeping communication open on these platforms and keeping the content you provide closer to the forms of posts mentioned earlier. Once you start pushing sales too hard, audiences start to disengage, and you’ve lost a potential customer through any venue you sell through.

Don’t be afraid to let other retailers handle your products.

Health and Wellness is not an exclusive club. Though we would like to think that all those seeking a better body and mind do so with the dedication of a recluse monk, the truth is most people do so whenever it is convenient to their schedule. What’s more convenient than “buy with one click” on Amazon? It may seem daunting at first, but retail sites such as Amazon offer very reasonable partnership deals to most eligible sellers. It’s not as scary as you would think, and it has a greatly diversified distribution for branded sellers and resellers alike. After costs are met and the strategy is set, some health and wellness products sell better through an Amazon storefront than brand storefronts, creating enormous revenue streams.

The bottom line is that health and wellness customers didn’t just decide to wait for their favorite supplement store to re-open their doors, nor did they keep calling their favorite spas to see when they could come back during the pandemic. Instead, they sought new ways to continue their routines. That change may not be permanent in its current form, but it has augmented how consumers spend their health and wellness dollars. The trick is finding ways that your business fits into your customer’s new buying routine.