How Customer Personas Can Help Market Your Health or Nutrition Brand

Brand Persona

Health and nutrition companies that want to connect with their target customers must stop generalizing about who their audience is and get real. Learning to define comprehensive Customer Personas is the first step.

Customer Personas are fictionalized characters that marketers use to bring audience segments to life. Personas dig deeper than traditional customer profiles, because they are based on research, industry insights and core customer values. For instance, rather than marketing to a woman in her 40’s, a health or nutrition brand that uses customer personas would market to Janelle, a 40-year-old office professional that works out 3 times a week, supports environmental causes and prefers cooking her own meals to dining out.
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Marketing Sports Nutrition Products to Everyday People

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Is broadening the scope of your health nutrition brand a good idea?

The majority of sports nutrition companies that market products like energy bars, powdered supplements and sports drinks have traditionally, and almost exclusively, targeted professional athletes. That trend seems to be changing.

According to an article by Stephen Daniells of nutraingredients-usa-com, leading OTC company, Swisse Wellness is now focusing on what they term  “a premium quality sports nutrition range designed for everyday men and women who lead busy, active lifestyles.”

The article also cited a 2013  report by Packaged Facts that suggested sports brands could improve profits by focusing on casual athletes such as fitness walkers and yoga buffs.

I  can appreciate the need for companies to expand their offering to keep growing. However, as a professional athlete and a veteran marketer, I can’t help but wonder
if some of the brands that follow suit will run the risk of diluting their marketing messages. And will the added sales be worth that cost?

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Unique Tactics for Health Nutrition Marketing at Trade Shows

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Or, what I would do to market my booth at the Arnold Health Festival

The Arnold Sports Festival happens in Columbus the first weekend in March every year. With over 800 health nutrition exhibitors competing for attention, I can’t help but have trade show marketing on my mind. I wonder, how many of those companies are advertising their booths at local, health-related businesses before and during the event. I know I would. Thinking outside of the walls of the expo is an inexpensive way to advertise a health nutrition brand, and a great way to target the types of visitors you want. Here are 5 local places I would consider for marketing my booth: Continue reading

Marketing Health and Nutrition at Sporting Events and Trade Shows

5 ways to use social media for a profitable return on investment

As an athlete, I often attend and participate in sporting events and sports-related tradeshows on both a local and national level. I make it my business to pay attention to how the attendees are responding to the various offerings, and lately I’ve noticed a pronounced “advertising fatigue” among event goers. Today’s tradeshow and special events audiences have seen it all, which makes it harder and harder to break through all the noise and get their attention. It takes fresh, innovative thinking to stop them in their tracks and show them something they’ve never seen before. Continue reading

Continued Changes in Marketing Health Nutrition

A new sports drink may prove that ingredients still matter

For some time now, it seems the sports drink industry has been losing its focus on health. The main reason for this, of course, is that even sports drinks as popular and well-known as Gatorade have found themselves marketing to the “casual consumer” more often than the athletes they originally set out to satisfy. Continue reading

Health Nutrition Marketing and NSF Certification

supplement marketing

If you are marketing a dietary supplement or sports nutrition product, you should know if it is NSF Certified for Sport.

As a competition-level athlete, I was excited to read about a new program of certification for sports supplements and nutrition products.

After all, most athletes want to enhance their performance through the use of legal supplements, but it can be hard to navigate the sea of confusing information about what is and isn’t considered a “banned substance”. All too often athletes are disqualified for using substances that they thought were completely harmless and legal, and of curse, no one wants to put their own health at risk. That’s where NSF comes in. Continue reading