The Power of Influencer Marketing for Health & Wellness Brands: An Interview with Lara Harding

Introduction

Influencer marketing is nothing new. Brands have been partnering with celebrities for centuries to promote their products. Even in the Roman Empire, famous gladiators would promote oils and wines to their fans. In the early 2000s, the celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, was the face of the UK grocery store, Sainsbury’s, and more recently, we’ve seen international celebrities like Beyoncé endorsing designer perfumes and Kevin Hart modelling Fabletics sports apparel. But now, influencer marketing is not all about big brands and celebrities.

With the rise of social media and individuals known as micro-influencers – people with heavily engaged, yet not necessarily large, social media followings – influencer marketing is becoming more and more accessible for small and established consumer brands alike. As influencers are increasingly seen as an integral part of everyday life for consumers, they’re becoming a key part of consumer brands’ digital marketing strategies. Now, you can find influencers in every niche. However, identifying and establishing a successful partnership with the right one for your brand takes great skill and strategy.

In this interview, Lara Harding, Senior Social Media Executive at Click Consult, part of Ceuta Group, discusses what it takes to build a successful partnership with influencers in your category, the fundamentals of a powerful influencer strategy, and the impact influencer marketing can have on your OTC /Health & Wellness brand’s success.

1  – What is influencer marketing and how has it transformed the way businesses promote their brands?

Influencer marketing is a promotional strategy that involves collaboration with individuals who have a heavily engaged online following, typically on social media. By partnering with influencers, brand owners can tap into their credibility and influence, enabling them to connect with their target audiences more authentically, fostering trust and engagement.

In the Health & Wellness sector, influencers play a crucial role in shaping perceptions, promoting holistic lifestyles, and providing relatable content that resonates with consumers. This can be anything from make-up tutorials to Vitamins, Minerals, and Supplements (VMS) recommendations.

What sets influencer marketing apart from more traditional marketing methods or celebrity marketing is it facilitates two-way real-time communication between brands and their audience. Instead of passively watching a celebrity promoting a product on TV or a billboard, consumers play an active role in influencer marketing, reacting to, commenting, and direct messaging the brand through the influencer’s platform.

Also, a lot of people don’t realise how cost-effective influencer marketing can be, especially when working with nano and micro-influencers, who have an extremely engaged yet not necessarily massive following on social media. This requires a relatively low investment, yet it can provide you with an entry point to a highly relevant segment of your target customer base. In that way, it has kind of evened out the playing field between big-name, big-budget brands and emerging brands with limited resources and budget.

2 – What defines an influencer? And what sets influencers apart when engaging their audience?

But when influencers create content, they are self-aware and mindful that their advice might not be gospel for everybody. An Influencer will never tell you, ‘You should do this,’ or ‘You have to do this.’ They should be guiding people. They should be saying, ‘This can help, but everybody’s different,’ because some people might try that influencer’s tips and tricks and it might not work for them, but another person will come along, and it might work for them, so it’s about the influencer being knowledgeable in what they do and in the audience that may be watching them.

3 – How would you suggest OTC/Health & Wellness brands go around choosing the right influencer to work with?

It’s essential to conduct thorough research to identify influencers whose values, audience demographics, and content align with your brand’s identity and target market. A lot of brands or companies may have different software to identify influencers in their field, but there’s no one-rule-fits-all. We use Klear by Meltwater. It’s an advanced platform for influencer marketing, which allows us to find and vet new influencers, create and manage campaigns to support our clients’ marketing goals, and analyse the results.

Most of the time when selecting an influencer to work with, it’s less about how large the influencer’s following is and more about how relevant and engaged the consumers who do follow them are with their content. Collaborating with influencers who have genuine expertise and a small but highly loyal following in your area of expertise can yield more impactful results than working with a big name with a vast, widely varying audience.

An influencer is speaking on behalf of your brand so they need to align with your brand’s values and their audience should align with your target market. You need to consider factors like: is the influencer relevant? Do they have an engaged following among your target audience? Are they authentic and can they convey your brand’s message effectively?

Now, depending on your brand, you might not just have one influencer. You might want to target a variety of consumer groups with your products. In that case, you will need to find an influencer for each of those groups.

4 – How much control does the brand have over the influencer’s content?

The level of control that a brand has over an influencer’s content varies depending on the agreement you have with the influencer, the nature of the partnership, and your marketing objectives. Every influencer is different and as you deal more with them, you’ll get to know their style of working and how best to work together. Finding the right balance between brand control and influencer creativity is key to ensuring the success and authenticity of influencer marketing campaigns.

Full Control

In some cases when the partnership is paid and contracted, the brand has full control over the influencer’s content, dictating the messaging, visuals, and captions on the influencer’s posts. This level of control ensures that the content aligns perfectly with the brand’s image and marketing objectives, but it often comes at the expense of building an authentic or genuine connection with the influencer’s audience, as it may feel scripted or promotional.

Guidelines

Many brands opt for a middle-ground approach. This is usually done through a gifted collaboration, where you’re sending products out to an influencer to try, and if they like the product and are happy to promote it, they show their audiences what they think of it.

With a gifted approach, the brand has substantially less control over the influencer – the influencer may not even rate the product or produce any content about it, but it’s much more cost-effective and allows for a more collaborative rather than transactional relationship.

The brand owner can still provide the influencer with guidelines, which is crucial in the Health & Wellness industry, especially when it comes to OTC categories, where brands must be extremely careful with the product claims they make. You might provide the influencer with a list of things they can and can’t say or provide a creative brief that outlines the key messaging, brand values, and your specific requirements or restrictions. This allows you to maintain the necessary control over the content, but it gives influencers the flexibility to inject their creativity and personality into the content, resulting in more authentic and engaging posts and a larger likelihood of resonating with their audience.

When taking this approach, it’s important to to trust that the influencer will be able to convey the right message for your brand in their own way. Micromanaging them is not good practice.

5 – What are the benefits of influencer marketing? Especially for OTC / Heath & Wellness brands?

Brand Trust:

Influencer marketing offers several benefits, the most obvious being that it can improve your brand’s reach and awareness. Perhaps the biggest benefit, particularly for OTC and Health & Wellness brands, where winning consumer trust is paramount, is that it can elevate your brand’s reputation.

93% of consumers trust user-generated content (UGC) more than traditional advertising*. Therefore, one piece of content about your brand created and posted by the influencers that your audience trusts can yield far greater results than ten marketing campaigns you develop yourself.

When influencers promote a brand or product, it comes across as authentic and genuine and validates your brand’s credibility. Through the influencer, their followers are more likely to trust your brand and consider making a purchase, especially when the campaign includes an influencer discount code, whereby you create an exclusive discount code for your products that the influencers share with their followers.

Developing Strong Brand-Consumer Relationships

I also touched on this earlier, but one of the most unique benefits of influencer marketing is that it enables smaller businesses and emerging brands with limited resources to engage directly with their target audience and influence them through the influencer’s endorsement. They can even connect with consumer groups that traditional marketing channels fail to reach and encourage them to engage in a two-way conversation. They can build a loyal following for their brand.

This is especially important in the Health & Wellness market, where brands often have difficulty balancing creating engaging content for their audience with upholding a high level of authority and professionalism. OTC and Health & Wellness brands often encounter challenges related to consumer trust, product differentiation, and regulatory compliance. Influencer marketing helps mitigate these challenges by offering a personal touch that resonates with consumers, showcasing the benefits of products in an engaging manner, and ensuring compliance through transparent disclosure practices.

Analytics & Insight

Influencer marketing campaigns are often highly trackable and measurable, allowing businesses to evaluate the success of their campaigns based on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as reach, engagement, click-through rates, and conversions. This data-driven approach enables businesses to optimise their influencer marketing strategies for maximum impact and return on investment (ROI).

6 – How do you and your team go about building a brand’s influencer strategy? Where do you start and what are the steps to success?

We will enhance your marketing strategy by identifying the right influencer – or influencers – for your brand and your brand goals, ensuring their values and audience align with your own. We then build strategic collaborations with these influencers to create engaging content, drive brand awareness, and foster a genuine connection with your target audience.

Our team has years of experience developing strong relationships with a wide range of influencers who, in their own right, have built a strong connection with their audience and evoke high degrees of credibility and confidence within these niche segments. In the case of PrecisionBiotics, the partnerships we built with the influencers went beyond a single campaign and several of them have expressed interest in becoming brand ambassadors.

We work with influencers across a wide range of digital platforms, too, so wherever your target consumers are, we can find the right influencer for your brand and ensure that some impactful content drops into your audience’s social feed, whether it’s on Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube or Q&A based articles with industry experts.

7 – Can you give me a few examples of inspirational influencer marketing?

Fenty Beauty

Aside from the work we’ve done, I’ve seen many inspiring influencer marketing campaigns from other brands.

A famous one you might know about is when Rihanna launched her beauty brand, Fenty Beauty. Now, Rihanna’s an A-list celebrity, she could have relied on her fame and self-image to promote the brand. But she didn’t. She collaborated with a variety of fans, influencers, make-up artists, models, and celebrities from Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) groups to reflect her brand’s tagline, “beauty for all”. She worked with a whole host of people: people with disabilities, skin conditions, plus-sized people, etc.

Of course, all the Fenty Beauty campaigns have been a massive success for the brand, but what stands out to me is that Rihanna used her platform to push underrepresented groups to the forefront of mainstream and social media, inspiring a greater social movement towards multiculturalism and inclusivity.

Bayer’s Canescool Soothing Cream Gel

Likewise, Bayer teamed up with micro-influencers, including Mollie Campsie and Hannah Witton on Instagram and Adeola Patronne on TikTok to support the launch of their new vaginal dryness relief product, Canescool Soothing Cream Gel, to effectively connect with their target audience of young women, whilst promoting inclusivity and communicating their brand’s values.

On top of digital activity and advertising across a variety of platforms, Bayer’s influencer marketing campaigns on TikTok and Instagram, designed to be “humorous, slightly quirky and very inclusive,” empowered the brand to reach a huge, untapped segment of the OTC market and receive thousands of likes and upwards of 11,000 views.

8 – If you could leave readers with one final message or final piece of advise, what would it be?

I just wanted to note the importance of maintaining other types of marketing activity as well. Influencer Marketing delivers so many unique benefits, but it’s essential to keep up with other kinds of above-the-line and below-the-line marketing activities.

Influencer marketing excels at engaging audiences in digital environments where consumers spend a significant amount of their time, but not all consumers use social media and those that do aren’t on it 24/7. Incorporating a mix of marketing methods enables you to connect with a wider audience. It also strengthens your connection with consumers reached through influencer marketing campaigns, as you can catch them in different contexts and at every stage of their buying journey, from their first engagement with your brand through to the point of purchase and recommending your brand to the people they know.

Whether you have an ecommerce business or you sell solely in the traditional retail space, a powerful online presence is crucial for brand success in the digital age. A high-performing branded website that is easy for consumers to find is key to growing brand awareness in the Health & Wellness space, where 61% of consumers go online to learn about health-related information*. If you pair that with a bank of quality user focused content (UFC) that addresses your target audience’s relevant pain points and queries, you can also enhance your brand’s credibility in your category and stay ahead of the competition.

Get in touch to discuss how Ceuta Group can make your brand objectives a reality

From PrecisionBiotics’ organic influencer strategy to iconic campaigns from global brands like Fenty Beauty, the influence of authenticity in influencer marketing cannot be overstated.

The key is to have a robust understanding of your brand, the consumer group you want to target, and the influencer you want to work with. Ceuta Group’s digital marketing strand, Click Consult, has empowered brands in the OTC and Health & Wellness sector to build strong and long-lasting partnerships with influencers in their niche, establish authentic connections with their target audience, and gain a repeated ROI through loyal customers and strategic influencer discount campaigns.

Get in touch to discuss how Ceuta Group can escalate your brand’s online presence, grow a loyal customer base, and achieve sustainable success in the competitive OTC & Health & Wellness market through influencer marketing.

*”OTC Pharmaceutical Marketing Trends.” Snipp. Accessed on 20/02/2024. From https://www.snipp.com/otc-pharmaceutical-marketing-trends.

**Adobe. (n.d.). Consumers Say Yes to Data-Driven Health and Wellness Support. Adobe Business Blog. Retrieved from https://business.adobe.com/blog/the-latest/consumers-say-yes-to-data-driven-health-and-wellness-support