10 Effective Health & Wellness Marketing Ideas That Get Results

The most effective health and wellness marketing ideas are ones that build trust and interest with audiences. Promoting products and services in our industry can be trickier than in others because of its reputation for woo-woo and snake oil. But by building trust with target audiences and educating them about the benefits of your offering, you can quickly get sales.

In this article, we outline 10 effective health and wellness marketing ideas for brands and businesses.

We’re a specialist fitness marketing agency with 15+ years of industry experience, so we know first-hand what works (and what doesn’t!). We’ve helped gyms, wellness studios, and personal trainers to successfully promote their businesses, so our marketing strategies are tried and tested.

Top Wellness Marketing Ideas

These are the marketing strategies we use with our wellness clients and are proven to work for brands in the industry…

1. Content marketing
2. Wellness partnerships
3. Quizzes
4. Affiliate marketing
5. Reviews & case studies
6. Stand out on social
7. Online ads
8. Email marketing
9. Wellness events
10. Partner with influencers

Let’s explore each of these marketing ideas and what makes them so effective for wellness brands and businesses…

Fitness Marketing Ideas Mini-Guide

25 fitness marketing ideas for your gym, studio, or online business. Attract new members, get more PT clients & boost your fitness blog.

Content Marketing

Content marketing can be a particularly powerful strategy for wellness brands. This is because people can often be cynical of the products and services in this sector. So, educational content that explains the science behind your offering is especially important.

Unfortunately, some brands make unsubstantiated marketing claims, which tarnish everyone and make would-be customers distrustful. But you can use content to overcome this challenge and set yourself apart from the dodgy companies.

Content marketing for wellness businesses should…

• Prove the safety of your product
• Demonstrate that it gets results
• Explain the benefits

These aspects are particularly crucial in wellness marketing since a few bad apples have given some of the industry a bad name. 

The content approach can take a variety of forms depending on your product, resources, and audience. Blog articles or videos are both excellent formats for educational content since you can publish them on your website and divide them up into multiple social posts too. Content that explains scientific studies related to your product, how it works, or why it benefits people can all be effective for wellness businesses.

You might also like… How To Use Content Marketing To Build Your Brand or Learn More About Our Content Creation Services.

We may earn a commission if you click some of the links in this article, but this doesn’t influence our editorial decisions to include them.

Partner with Complementary Wellness Brands

This is a great way to expand your audience and reach people who you know are likely to be interested in your brand. Find complementary brands in your niche and approach them about collaborating. Running a joint competition is a popular way to co-promote to each other’s audiences. 

It’s a win-win approach to reaching a broader yet still highly targeted audience. The key is to incentivise social media follows, email sign-ups, and sales. While brand awareness is nice, lead generation and revenue are better.   

In this example, Trip Drinks partnered with Sweaty Betty yoga clothing and Farm Girl Cafe to give away wellness prizes. To enter, participants needed to follow all the accounts, like the photo, and tag someone else. This approach enabled all the brands involved to grow their audiences by tapping into broader networks and incentivised social media engagement too.

Lead Generating Quizzes

Use quiz marketing to cut through all the noise and competition in the wellness industry. People love to take a short quiz and receive tailored feedback on the results, so give them what they want! 

Quizzes are a brilliant way to stand out on social media and in Google search results. They also drive high-quality leads since you can build the sales qualification process into your quiz questions. Plus they have crazy high conversion rates of 30-50% (compared to 3-10% for standard lead magnets). 

Quiz ideas that wellness businesses can use include…

• Which supplement is right for you? Ask questions about their food habits, flavour or formulation preferences, and health goals to identify which of your supplement products is best for them. 
• Which lifestyle area do you need to prioritise? Ask questions about their diet, hydration, activity levels, sleep habits, stress etc. to guide where they should focus their efforts and how your products or services can help.
• Which essential oil matches your wellness needs? Ask questions about their wellness goals, such as improved sleep or energy, along with their scent preferences, to choose the most appropriate oil.

Tools like ScoreApp make it really easy to create online quizzes that generate strong leads.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a highly effective marketing option for wellness brands. Just ask Lululemon, the Mayo Clinic, and Myprotein, who all use affiliate programs to drive sales.

The brilliant thing about the affiliate model is that it’s low-risk. You offer a commission to bloggers, influencers, or wellness websites who promote your product or services. But you only pay it when they generate sales, so it’s a win-win situation. 

It’s easy to set up affiliate marketing with platforms like Shopify and Podia. They have built-in features that allow you to track sales and pay commissions automatically. So, if you’re already selling your wellness products through these platforms then it’s an easy add-on. If not, you can partner with an affiliate company like Awin, Rakuten, or Skimlinks to set this up. 

Fitness Marketing & Lead Generation Roadmap

Your All-in-One Toolkit to Attract, Engage & Convert More Clients

Reviews & Case Studies

Client reviews, case studies, and success stories are hugely powerful marketing tools. This is especially true in the wellness sector, where there are lots of less-than-reputable companies making bold (but unsubstantiated) claims. It’s particularly important to prove that your products and services actually work for potential customers. 

People trust reviews and word of mouth more than other forms of marketing like adverts. So they’re one of the most persuasive forms of marketing that wellness brands can invest in.

Plus you can get a lot of mileage out of one customer case study. It’s a powerful piece of content in itself, but you can also use it in blog articles, YouTube videos, social posts, infographics, reels and stories, along with good old-fashioned press coverage.  

You might also like… How To Write a Killer Client Testimonial. 

Stand Out On Social Media

Social media is pretty saturated with wellness content so you’ll need to work hard to stand out. Along with using savvy health hashtags, you can do this visually or through what you say in your social posts.

For example, a wellness brand with black or graffiti-style branding would be a stark contrast from the pastel-themed approach taken by many others. It would jump out of the feed and set itself apart from competitors, so be more likely to catch the attention of scrolling potential customers. 

Likewise, posting funny fitness quotes or yoga captions can set your wellness brand apart from the rest. There’s no question that inspirational quotes are popular in wellness marketing, especially on Instagram. But because of this, they can feel over-used, which is why we prefer to use funny quotes in our marketing campaigns. They show some personality, help people connect with your brand, and also set you apart from the inspo crowd.

Because we’ve seen this work with so many marketing clients, we created a ready-made bundle of funny and inspirational quotes for social media. They make it quick and easy to build an engaged following on Instagram and Facebook. Get them as part of our Fitness Instagram Growth Roadmap…

Fitness Instagram Growth Roadmap

Grow your fitness Instagram, increase engagement & generate leads.

Online Ads

Online advertising can be a quick and cost-effective marketing tactic. It gets your business in front of potential customers immediately which means you can generate sales from the get-go. 

Google Ads and social media advertising are typically suitable for most wellness businesses. Google is ideal in situations where there’s already established demand for your product e.g. it’s something that’s been around for ages (like protein powder). People are already searching for it online so you just need to convince them to choose your brand. 

Social ads are good for building brand awareness and launching brand-new concepts. If you’re selling something that’s particularly innovative, then people might not know about it so won’t (yet!) be searching for it on Google. But you can get in front of them on social media by using targeting based on related interests or hobbies. 

Whichever advertising channel you choose, be sure to set up a sales funnel to maximise conversions. That way you’ll have a process for turning visitors into customers, and ensure those who aren’t ready to purchase at least sign up to your email list.

Email Marketing

Speaking of email, this is definitely something wellness brands should be paying attention to. We recommend email marketing to all of our clients as it allows you to own your audience data in a way that social doesn’t. Instagram or Facebook can block your account without warning meaning you’d lose access to your community overnight, but if you have their email addresses then you can continue to talk to them. 

In the current world of unpredictable algorithm and platform updates, email marketing is essential for minimising risk.  

Start by creating an email opt-in form and showcasing it on your website and social channels. You’ll get more sign-ups if you offer something in return, such as a freebie (like our marketing ideas ebook) or discount codes on your products. Email lead magnet ideas for wellness businesses include…

• Ebooks
• Checklists
• Workbooks
• Cheatsheets
• Email courses

Then build a welcome sequence of emails that subscribers will automatically receive. This is where email marketing really comes into its own. It enables you to nurture subscribers from strangers into raving fans over the course of a few emails. 

The first email should deliver the freebie they signed up for and encourage them to respond so that your address doesn’t get caught in spam filters. The second email can introduce the benefits of your product or compelling piece of science behind how it works. The third could be a customer case study outlining how your product helped them, and so on. Tools like Constant Contact and Podia make this easy.

Fitness Marketing Ideas Mini-Guide

25 fitness marketing ideas for your gym, studio, or online business. Attract new members, get more PT clients & boost your fitness blog.

Wellness Events

Many of the ideas covered so far have been focused on digital marketing for wellness brands, but there are plenty of effective real-world activities too. Events are one of our favs as they allow you to build a proper community of raving fans, create buzz around your brand, and they’re loads of fun too!

Wellness brands can run launch events, classes, workshops, meetups, tasting sessions, and any number of other live activities. If you’re looking to make B2B sales to retailers, gym chains, or other mass-market distributors, then trade shows can be an excellent option. 

You might also like… 15 Business-Boosting Gym Event Ideas.

Partner With Influencers

Influencer marketing is particularly popular in the fitness and wellness industries. Partnering with people who have an engaged social media following can help you reach targeted audiences. It also allows your brand to piggyback off the credibility and trust that the influencer already has with their followers.

You don’t necessarily need to find influencers with millions of followers, micro-influencers with 1000-10,000 followers often have a more loyal follower base than mega-influencers. You’ll typically need to pay a flat fee per social post or blog article, but can sometimes negotiate a deal involving free product and affiliate commission. 

Fitness Marketing & Lead Generation Roadmap

Your All-in-One Toolkit to Attract, Engage & Convert More Clients

Get The Fitness Marketing Roadmap

Your All-in-One Toolkit to Attract, Engage, and Convert More Clients – Tailored Specifically for Fitness Businesses Like Yours!

The Fitness Marketing & Lead Generation Roadmap is a comprehensive resource designed for gyms, personal trainers, and online fitness businesses. It’s packed with video workshops, marketing templates, step-by-step guides, cheat sheets, and more. We cover:

• Fitness Marketing Strategy: Build a solid foundation and plan for success.
• Lead Generation: Attract more clients with effective tactics.
• Social Media: Boost your online presence and engagement.
• Email Marketing: Nurture leads and convert them into loyal customers.
• Advertising & Promotion: Get your message out there efficiently.
• Content Marketing: Create compelling content that resonates with your audience.