3 Health & Wellness Brands with Highly Effective Influencer Marketing Strategies
From probiotics for gut health to CBD products for pain relief, health-conscious consumers are constantly looking to discover the latest and greatest supplements and tools to better their mind, body, and soul.
As the influencer marketing industry has boomed, thousands of knowledgeable health and wellness creators have popped up online — many of whom have legitimate credentials to back up their expertise. These creators share their trustworthy product recommendations, paired with stories about their personal health experiences, drawing in consumers to try out their favorite products and services.
In Part 1 of our health and wellness series, we broke down 5 influencer marketing best practices that your brand should follow in 2024. Now, in Part 2, we’re highlighting 3 health and wellness brands that have effective influencer marketing strategies. Take inspiration from Care/of, Bloom Nutrition, and Mountain Rose Herbs.
Care/of
In the past, Care/of, the personalized nutrition brand, focused on tentpole influencer campaigns with macro-influencers. And while these campaigns were effective in driving brand awareness, they also proved to be expensive and difficult to measure and scale.
So, the brand shifted gears to launch an always-on influencer marketing strategy that is both scalable and cost-effective. Here’s what the team implemented.
- Forging long-term partnerships: Because health and wellness supplements usually take a few weeks or even months to take effect, it’s essential to partner with influencers for a longer period of time. Care/of enlisted well-aligned creators as long-term brand ambassadors who could represent their brand for a prolonged period of time. With the program, the brand not only built relationships with new audiences, but also was able to measure the success of trends that are difficult to implement through their one-off partnership program.
- Adopting a growth mindset: For Care/of, influencers an integral part of their growth marketing strategy. In fact, Care/of’s influencer marketing program is managed by performance marketers. Focusing on hard numbers, the team uses Aspire’s robust sales tracking capabilities and social analytics to track real-time results. Armed with data, Care/of isn't afraid to experiment with different social channels, types of content, and creator niches to find what works — and re-invest in those strategies. For example, Care/of found that Instagram Stories are an incredibly impactful way to engage customers and drive sales. By leveraging this medium, Care/of has been able to achieve impressive results and continue to refine their approach.
Just one quarter after implementing these new strategies, Care/of saw an impressive 85% increase in product-related posts, 4x boost in engagement, and a staggering 313% lift in impressions.
Bloom Nutrition
Over the last couple of years, Bloom Nutrition seems to have taken over TikTok users’ For You Page. While the wellness brand started as a DTC business, it quickly expanded to brick-and-mortar retail as Bloom secured partnerships with major retailers like Target and Walmart.
Bloom Nutrition now boasts over 470K followers on Instagram and 720K on TikTok, with each post garnering thousands of views and engagements. Beyond social metrics, Bloom has also achieved significant business growth, tripling its revenue from the previous year and shipping over 100,000 orders on a monthly basis.
So, what’s the secret?
- Building a grassroots community: Founded by influencer Mari Llewellyn (2 million Instagram followers), the brand’s influencer marketing strategy is rooted in community — specifically the community that Mari has built from ground up over several years. Mari, who has been posting fitness and health content online since 2017, started the company using the funds she earned from selling her $5 workout guide. Mari credits Bloom’s success to the personal wellness platform she’s cultivated over the years, which has allowed her to build trust and loyalty from her followers. She told Modern Retail, “The community that I had built and gained trust with on my platform were all of our customers. The entire Bloom following was my following. It gave us the boost we needed at the beginning and I felt like they knew who was behind the brand.”
- Leaning into lo-fi content: Instead of the traditional approach to influencer-generated content (in which creators dedicate a video to the brand’s products), Bloom Nutrition asks creators to produce their normal content while incorporating Bloom’s products into their video. Why? Today’s consumers want to see relatable content that feels like they’re on FaceTime with a friend. This type of storytelling resonates more with consumers than overly promotional ads, which is why Bloom’s approach to IGC is extremely successful.
- Implementing product seeding: While Bloom Nutrition does operate an official TikTok influencer marketing program in which creators are paid, Bloom Nutrition products also frequently get unpaid promotions from celebrities and influencers, who request free products and post them organically on their own social channels. By sending influencers its products for both termed and termless campaigns, Bloom is able to reap the full benefits of word-of-mouth commerce.
Mountain Rose Herbs
Mountain Rose Herbs, the wellness brand retailing herbs, teas, and more, was in search of a new growth channel that would reliably drive revenue for the brand. So, the team introduced a new revenue stream through affiliate marketing and supercharge conversions through authentic influencer content.
Here’s what made their affiliate program so successful.
- Partnering with true brand fans: Instead of spending too much time on outreach, the brand built a branded application page to implement on their website so that brand fans could join the affiliate program organically — saving them hours of manually searching for affiliates and connecting them to over 25 high-quality brand partners per week.
- Implementing a competitive offering: Each affiliate was incentivized with a 10% commission to boost sales and spread word-of-mouth in an authentic way. Using Aspire’s customizable workflow, the brand seamlessly built affiliate links for each creator and paid them in bulk via our PayPal integration — allowing them to easily manage and scale their affiliate program.
- Repurposing content: Mountain Rose Herbs’ creators produced engaging educational content, including behind-the-scenes snapshots, recipes, and DIYs. This goldmine of content provided easy access to high-performing content for the brand to repurpose across the company’s blog and social channels.
