Influencer Marketing for Health & Wellness Brands: The Ultimate Guide for 2024

If there’s one thing the pandemic has taught us is that health is our most valuable commodity. In fact, the Global Wellness Institute projects a 9.9% growth rate, and the market is expected to grow further to nearly $7 trillion by 2025. However while the market is expanding and getting more competitive, it’s making buying decisions more complex. While technology makes everything accessible, knowing which brand to trust with something as fragile as your health is tricky.

So, how can brands build credibility and sell their products from a place of trust? Spoiler alert: health and wellness influencers.

During the pandemic, a lot of faulty information around medicines, and health hacks were circulated through social media, and since then, consumers are more conscious of misinformation. This means health and wellness brands have to find more personal ways to connect with their audience—and collaborating with credible influencers can help you do this.

Benefits of Health & Wellness Influencers

Health influencers have experience, knowledge, and insight into their subject matter. They care about providing as much value as possible to their followers. The more value they offer, the more engaged their audience becomes.

It’s this audience and community building that enables influencers to create kick-a** influencer marketing campaigns, and produce significant results for brands. As a brand, your job is to not put these health and wellness creators in a position where they have to compromise their authenticity.

‍Health influencers offer advice on well-being, including workouts, mental health tips, nutrition, and product reviews. It’s their regular content and interaction with their followers that builds up the trust factor.

Here's some reasons why health and wellness influencer marketing is a great solution for your brand:

Back your brand positioning with experienced and knowledgeable creators

‍From nutrition products to workout regimes, having a reliable influencer educate the audience about the subject helps increase positive experiences and loyalty. Case in point: Yasmin Karachiwala, an Indian celebrity fitness trainer, trained many bollywood personalities before joining social media as a health and fitness influencer. She often collaborates with different equipment brands to propagate the message of enjoying workouts with proper technique and form.

Inject diversity into your content (like workouts, emotional well-being, apparels, equipment, nutrition)

‍Health and wellness has a wide scope and so does influencer marketing. The practice allows influencers to bring diversity into their content by exploring different segments like workouts, mindfulness, equipment reviews, nutrition and much more. Interestingly, it also allows brands to create diverse content pieces on one aspect of their health and wellness offering which further improves content value.

Build trust in your products

‍Gone are the days when consumers would buy health and wellness products from television ads. They’re now placing their faith in products that come from a trusted source because it directly impacts their health. To build trust, brands need to advance and verify the quality of their products and services, be accessible at all times, have a personal messaging strategy for all their communications, and be consistent in creating helpful content. Influencer marketing has a track record of helping brands improve engagement and expand its reach. For instance, WW (formerly known as Weight Watchers) joined hands with 5000 influencers (including Oprah!). The brand achieved an engagement rate of 3.1%. This was a result of widespread messaging and consistent brand recall which helped them gain significant engagement and build trust among its community.

‍Generate social proof through UGC content

A report by Collective Bias shows the millennial generation is more likely to buy from peer endorsements more than celebrity campaigns. Many health and wellness brands use their customers as influencers. This helps promote brand authenticity and relatability. While many brands go for macro-influencers, using existing customers and folks of non-celebrity status help build social proof that takes away the “salesy” tone from the content and make it more natural and acceptable.

6 Steps to Creating A Health & Wellness Influencer Marketing Campaign 

To ensure you’re taking a well thought-out and consumer-first approach to influencer marketing, follow this roadmap:

Step 1: Conduct Market Research 

Look at any marketing resource on the internet, and 90% of the time, they’ll ask you to start campaign-planning with research on your target audience. But this isn’t the best approach. Before you jump the gun, you need to figure out which niche your brand falls into. 

To do this, invest time in market research. This will help you pinpoint gaps in the industry and zero in on a niche that isn’t saturated, but has potential. Here are some examples of top-performing niches under health and wellness:

• Nutrition
• Weight loss
• Diabetes
• Anti-aging
• Arthritis
• Hair loss
• Skincare
• Reproductive health

Say your brand sells cold-pressed juices. You’ll have three options while choosing your niche—weight loss, anti-aging or nutrition. Make the decision wisely, because all your communication going forward is dependent on it. 

Step 2: Create a Buyer Persona 

Now that you’ve doubled down on a niche, it’s time to define your target audience. Think about who is going to use your products. You can ask yourself the following questions and list the answers in an Excel sheet:

• What kind of lifestyle do they lead?
• How well do they understand the nuances of health and wellness?
• Are they prone to stress?
• Do they have any illnesses or chronic conditions? 
• Are they involved in sports or any other activities?
• Who do they currently follow in the wellness space?

The answers to these questions, combined with demographic information will help you create a super specific buyer persona—a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. This will give you a deeper insight into your audience’s pain points, helping you market your products more effectively. 

Apart from secondary research, you can also conduct user interviews and focus groups to understand what consumers want and why they’re frustrated with existing health and wellness brands. Note down the points discussed during these interactions and revisit them while creating a shortlist of influencers you’d like to approach. 

‍Blissclub, an activewear brand, observed several complaints about the lack of pockets in yoga pants during their market research. And they capitalized on this, making it their USP.

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Though they were relatively new players in the space, the brand was able to make a mark by jumping headfirst into influencer marketing. Today, several Indian content creators  like Sakshi Shivdasani and Malvika Sitlani Aryan are singing praises about Blissclub’s sports apparel—and loyal followers are quick to follow in their footsteps. 

Step 3: Define Your Goals 

Executing an influencer marketing campaign without defining your goals is like driving without a destination. You won’t get anywhere. So, make goal-setting a priority.

Here are four common goals you should aspire towards:

• Improve engagement on social media accounts
• Boost brand awareness and image
• Drive conversions
• Gain customer insight and data

If your overall goal is to improve social media engagement on your brand’s accounts, your goals could look like this:

• Attract 800 followers over 60 days with paid partnership posts on Instagram
• Increase engagement rate by 5% on all social media channels over three months
• Triple the number of Twitter followers within 120 days

Pro trip: Don’t forget to choose key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand whether you’re meeting the set goals. These could include conversions, referral traffic, reach and awareness and audience growth.

Step 4: Choose Relevant Channels 

The influencers you partner with will heavily depend on which channels you want to be active on. Depending on your niche and objectives, pick a distribution channel for your brand. For example, if you’re looking to build a fitness community, Discord is a great place to start. 

Chloe Ting, a fitness YouTuber was able to scale her Discord server to a whopping 105,725 members. The best part? Her community members were completely engaged, sharing workout tips and tricks everyday and staying accountable through chat rooms. 

If your focus is leaning towards increasing brand awareness, choose platforms like Instagram or Facebook. You’ll be able to reach users through sponsored posts and paid partnerships. Whoop, a wearable smart health product, collaborates with experts to talk about health, wellness and nutrition. This makes them an indispensable source of information for fitness enthusiasts all over the world. It’s simple, yet effective.

Similarly, you have a wide array of content types at your disposal. From tutorials and FAQs to unboxing videos, product reviews and experiential marketing events. You could either pick your preferred channels based on your content formats or vice-versa. 

Step 5: Learn About Legal Guidelines

Considering that 80% of users turn to social media platforms for medical and health information, health and wellness brands must ensure the content they are posting is accurate and compliant with legal guidelines. 

Double-check whether information is safe to post and from the right source. In several countries, if influencers aren’t clear about paid promotion posts, they can be sued for misleading consumers. If you violate a legal regulation, it may lead to fines, lawsuits (where payments will be made in damages to the plaintiff), shutdown of your business or frozen assets. So, make sure you clearly understand consumer acts, new regulations about influencer marketing and legalities to stay on top of discrepancies.

And when working with influencers, make sure you cover the most important legal aspects when you create an influencer contract.‍

Step 6: Draft an Influencer Marketing Brief

Don’t leave your influencers in the dark. Create a campaign brief to set expectations and communicate your goals and KPIs. This will ensure that they’re on the same page regarding scope of work, responsibilities and payment cycles.

Read More: How to Create An Influencer Brief That Guides (Not Directs) Winning Creative

Here are some influencer briefing elements at a glance:

• Timeline: Important dates, such as first draft submission and campaign launch date

• Budget: Information on additional budget for shooting and editing the content

• Company overview: A brief description about your company, its USP and how it’s helping users meet their health and fitness goals

• Content guidelines: Information on how the post captions should look like, including hashtags, tone of voice, use of emojis

• Key objectives: The SMART goals you had shortlisted during the third step of your campaign-planning process

• Distribution channels: The various social media platforms you expect them to upload the final post on

• Campaign reporting requirements: Metrics you intend to use while measuring results from the campaign?

• Payment information: Information on the payment process and cycles

Although the prospect of creating a detailed brief might sound tiresome, it can help you save a lot of time and energy down the line. And once you’ve created the first one, it’ll be easier for you to replicate the same for future projects.

Finding a Wellness Influencer Fit for Your Brand

Working with an influencer can get you traction, but to drive sales, you’ll need to get the right traction. And this happens only when you’re picky about who you’re partnering with. Invest in finding influencers who resonate with what your brand stands for. This will help them create content that’s more authentic and believable. 

Before choosing an influencer: Analyze the type of content they’re creating. Do they stay true to your brand values? Are they following a healthy, achievable and sustainable lifestyle that can inspire viewers? 

Answering these questions can help you narrow down a list of influencers to approach.

Once you’ve listed down the potential influencers you’d like to partner with, follow these two important steps to double down on the perfect fit:

Step 1: Consider Every Aspect of the Influencer's Social Media Presence

Reach out to influencers who have been in the health space for a long time. While follower counts hold weight, their engagement and post quality are a lot more important. Don’t limit yourself to one social media platform. Check out all of the handles they’re active on and analyze their presence on each one. 

Consider their expertise and niche, as well. For instance Cassey Ho has an impressive presence on both YouTube and Instagram and creates content around pilates, nutrition and athletic wear. So, if your brand falls into any of these categories and advertises on either of the two channels, a paid partnership with her would take you a long way.

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Step 2: Check for Authenticity

It’s easy to buy followers these days. This means you have to be extra careful that the influencer you’re partnering with has an engaged audience. Remember: engagement always takes precedence over follower count. This is why many brands choose to work with micro influencers. Here are three factors to consider while checking for authenticity: 

• Follower ratio: Influencers don’t follow a lot of people. They like keeping their feed clean, only choosing to connect with other inspiring creators in their industry (along with friends and family, of course!)

• Experience: When did the influencer start creating content? If the account is new, but has a huge follower count, chances are it's a fake profile

• Quality of content: Post quality is non-negotiable. Although some of their earlier posts may be questionable, you’ll see that most influencers exhibit a steady evolution into great content

Read More: Conducting a Fake Follower Audit on an Influencer's Account

By conducting in-depth research into the influencers on your list, and double-checking for the ones with fake followers, you’re bound to find one that can help supercharge your marketing efforts and boost top-of-mind recall for your brand.

Leverage Trusted Health & Wellness Influencers‍

Finding key health and wellness content creators in your niche will give your brand an instant credibility boost among their followers. It will help your brand sell from a place of trust. Like any well-executed marketing campaign, there is some groundwork you need to do before you can start. Understand the audience you're trying to reach and what goals you want to achieve.

Start narrowing down the influencers you want to work with. The best part is they already have a very good idea on what makes their audience tick—which will help you validate whether their audience is the right fit for who you're trying to reach. Keep your influencer briefs detailed and your influencer contracts tight.

The rest will be left at the mercy of the influencer's content creation abilities. If you've picked the right health and wellness influencers, you'll know. We've helped a number of health and wellness brand scale through influencer marketing.

Is yours next? Book a call with us.