If you own or manage a business in the health and fitness vertical, you know how “crowded” the industry is. Mom and pop storefronts, regional chains and nationally recognized brands all compete in the health and fitness industry, which can make it difficult for your business to stand out.
As is the case in other industries, working with an influencer to promote your goods or services can be an effective way to differentiate your business from even its closest competitors. Because “health” and “fitness” often mean different things from one person to the next, influencer marketing in this niche differs from the same kind of activity in other industries. Rather than having a singular focus, influencer marketing in the health and fitness industry is typically multifaceted.
What is Influencer Marketing?
To understand why influencer marketing is important in your industry, it’s helpful to have a solid grasp on what it is. Put simply, influencer marketing is when a brand partners with an influencer to promote its goods or services on social media platforms.
An influencer you might want to partner with will have a significant following on social media that has attributes that resemble the characteristics of your target audience. Once you reach an agreement with an influencer, the person will use their social platforms to promote your goods or services.
In general, there are two kinds of influencers, macro, and micro. Macro influencers have usually achieved some sort of celebrity status and they often have tens of thousands or even millions of followers. Micro influencers normally have 10,000 or fewer followers. As a rule of thumb, macro influencers are a good choice for spreading brand awareness while micro influencers are the right pick to share messages that inspire people to take action.
If you want to increase awareness of your brand, you may want to tap a macro fitness influencer like Jen Selter, who has millions of social media followers. Selter has a history of partnering with brands like The Perfect Sculpt and Rebels Refinery. While she has more followers than a typical micro influencer, Elise Young may be a good choice if you want to work with a micro influencer to get people to sign on with one of your personal trainers or attend your facility’s fitness classes.
The Benefits of Influencer Marketing
In addition to building brand awareness and motivating people to try your goods or services, influencer marketing can produce other meaningful benefits. Here are a few of them:
- Builds trust: While some consumers are skeptical of messages delivered through more traditional forms of advertising, they tend to trust what the influencers they choose to follow have to say. If an influencer endorses what you have to offer, their followers will know they can trust your brand too.
- Establishes your brand as a resource: Influencer marketing enables you to share valuable information with a broader audience through a trusted mouthpiece. This can establish your brand as a resource people will rely on.
- Provides authenticity: Because influencers share messages in their own words, this type of marketing has an inherent air of authenticity that can be difficult, if not impossible, to emulate in other types of advertising. It’s this authenticity that may make it easier for people to believe what an influencer has to say more readily than they’d accept the same information delivered through another marketing channel.
If you question the effectiveness of influencer marketing and the benefits it has the potential to yield, ask yourself what would inspire you to take an action of some sort. Would it be a commercial starring a spokesperson you didn’t recognize? Or, might it be a fitness influencer like Elise Young who you’ve been following for a while and who suggested you make a certain move part of your workout routine when you visit a given gym in your local area? If you’re like many other “connected” consumers, it would more likely be the latter rather than the former.
Musselwhite Marketing: Your Virtual Marketing Department
Whether you operate a gym, spa, wellness center or another kind of health and fitness business, Musselwhite Marketing is the virtual marketing department for you. We’re experts at health and fitness marketing on social media, and we know how to get the most out of influencer marketing in your vertical.
Contact Musselwhite Marketing to learn how we incorporate social media and influencer marketing into our overall health and fitness digital marketing now.
