Digital Marketing for Sports Nutrition Brands
In today’s highly competitive sports nutrition market, having the best products often takes a back seat to having the most effective digital marketing strategies and tactics. There are six major marketing channels that need to be considered when developing a digital marketing strategy for a sports nutrition brand. Below, we’ll outline each of the along with a brief summary. Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll share specific tactics for each of these channels in the coming weeks.
1.) Amazon Marketing for Sports Nutrition
The Big A. It’s truly a jungle for newly emerging sports nutrition brands but it’s also the place that shoppers are most likely to find you when you’re first starting out because it takes months (years) to build enough traffic to your own website to sustain your business.
When building your brand on Amazon, focus on these three things;
- Keywords – In Amazon Seller Central dashboard go to the “Brands” tab. In the dropdown you’ll see an option for “Brand Analytics”. Select that and then you’ll be on a page called Amazon Search Terms. We suggest changing the default date range from weekly to quarterly. Then begin entering what you believe are the terms that your shopper would most likely use when searching your products. You’re looking for terms that have a Search Frequency Rank of LESS THAN 100K. Amazon will show you the top three brands that rank for that term. Click through to the product page listings for those items and make note of the search terms in the title and first 2-3 bullets. You’ll want to use those same terms in your product listing.
- Product Listings – now that you have your top keywords, you want to carefully craft a headline and bullets for your product page using those keywords. Make sure that you use all of the character spaces for the headline and the first bullet and be sure to include your most important keywords in those two in particular.
- Enhanced Content & Media – enhanced content and media refers to all of the pictures in your Amazon product listing, the videos uploaded to the listing, and the area down below the primary bullets which is called EBC (Enhanced Brand Content).
2.) Email & SMS Marketing for Sports Nutrition
Sports nutrition shoppers are typically higher engaged, meaning they spend a lot of time researching and learning about supplements and training. Therefore, email marketing tends to be a very important marketing channel for sports nutrition and supplements in general. Your email strategy starts by selecting an ESP (Email Service Provider) that can perform all of the marketing functions needed to build and scale your email marketing. Click here to read our Email Marketing Buyers Guide to see a complete review of four different ESPs that we’ve used.
3.) Organic Search (SEO) for Sports Nutrition
Organic search marketing and search engine optimization is one of our favorites because it’s so important and also because it tends to generate one of the highest ROI for sports nutrition and vitamin supplement companies. Just perform a Google search for any of the top health and supplement trends. The companies listed at the top of SERP #1 (search engine results page), are likely getting tens of thousands of visits to their website per year from that one search. When you do the math and realize that up to 2% of that traffic will convert to purchase, it’s thousands of transactions, many of whom are new customers.
4.) Paid Search (SEM) for Sports Nutrition
While nothing beats organic search traffic in terms of ROI, the next best thing is usually paid search. Also known as SEM (search engine marketing), paid search is a valuable tool for sports nutrition companies who are trying to build their audience. Particularly if those companies have a unique ingredient or benefit. Often times this unique attribute can be targeted as a keyword. For instance, the keyword “keto supplements” increased by a factor of 2500% from January of 2017 to Jan of 2019 based upon Google Trends data. Companies who had focused on this segment leading up to that time likely saw a win-fall in consumer traffic and sales during this time.
5.) Paid Social Media Marketing for Sports Nutrition
Paid social refers to advertising, primarily on Facebook and Instagram. The first thing to consider when marketing sports nutrition supplements on social media channels is the age of your target audience. If your shopper is likely below the age of 35, then it’s best to focus your social media marketing on Instagram. If, however, your audience ranges from 35 up to 50 yrs and older, than Facebook should be included also. Facebook owns Instagram and has worked hard to try to make Instagram less commercialized. Therefore, advertising inventory (the amount of ad space available) is somewhat limited on Instagram compared to Facebook and therefore advertising costs tend to be higher on Instagram. Regardless, its still relatively cheap as compared to other marketing traffic channels we’ve covered.
6.) Influencer Marketing for Sports Nutrition
Influencer marketing can mean a lot of different things depending upon who you’re speaking to. That’s in large part because Influencer marketing has changed quite a bit over the last 3-5yrs. In that short amount of time, the number of “influencers” has skyrocketed. The fundamental shift has created an opportunity for sports nutrition companies to engage with larger numbers of smaller influencers, often called micro-influencers. These micro-influencers are typically willing to offer what they call “sponsored posts” in exchange for free products and swag. This brings your cost of advertising down considerably when you consider, for example, that a $40 bottle of supplements may only cost you $8 to manufacture and the micro-influencer is willing to promote your brand for 1-2 bottle per month. Influencer marketing is a numbers game. The trick is to create a robust process for sourcing, outreach, shipping and following-up with your influencers. If you’re able to do that, influencer marketing can be one of the most valuable ways to market sports nutrition supplements.
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