Health and Wellness is, well, healthy and well – but you have to be smart
Sometimes life just isn’t fair. And sometimes that unfairness works in your favor.
If you’re a marketer of health or fitness products and services, you’ve got a leg up over marketers of a lot of other stuff, according to recent LiveIntent analysis of health and wellness advertising campaigns.
The data showed that messages in the category do a lot better than average for all categories. Health and fitness messages, for example, achieve a 25% higher clickthrough rate (CTR) than average. And people don’t just click through – once they do, they are 5% more likely to convert compared to all other messages.
Still, the good news doesn’t mean that health and fitness marketers can just spray money into media, then take a nap as the sales roll in. To make it all work, they need to practice at least a little bit of marketing hygiene themselves.
Timing and environment matter
For one thing, the environment the messages appear in is important.
The analysis found that health and fitness advertisers have the most success with lifestyle publications. Ads in email newsletters that focus on home and garden or food and drink garner three times the average level of clickthroughs, according to the data. By contrast, placing ads in email newsletters that focus on real estate, law, government or politics may be a waste. For health and fitness advertisers, those types of newsletters show a CTR two times lower than the average email newsletter.
Timing matters too. If you want to catch the new year’s rush – when it seems like everyone is making resolutions to get healthier and happier – now’s the time to get media buys set up. The data confirmed that new year’s resolutions are a driving force for a lot of marketing in health and fitness. In fact, a majority of health and fitness campaigns kick off in the first two weeks of January, which saw a 20% increase in spending in the category over other months. By July, the flow slows. That month had the lowest number of active health and fitness campaigns – 7% lower than the monthly average. (But, perhaps counterintuitively, that could also mean that health and fitness advertisers who do invest then may have an easier time of finding choice inventory.)
The study also found that the day of the week and the time of day are success factors. Weekends perform better than weekdays. And messages shown from 9 am to 3 pm provide higher numbers of clickthroughs and conversions than average, while messages from midnight to 6 am do the worst.
… As do gender and age
Paying attention to gender can also give health and fitness marketing a boost. For messages in the category, women perform better than men, with a 10% higher CTR and 35% higher conversation rate.
Age also matters. Audiences over 40 years old were shown to respond more to health and fitness advertising than their younger peers, with a CTR two times higher and a conversion rate three times the average.
… And device
You might think that because the over-40 set performs best for health and fitness ads that desktop would be the screen of choice for health and fitness marketers.
Not by a long jump. (Sorry.)
It turns out mobile is the over performer. For health or fitness campaigns, smartphones brought in twice as many clickthroughs as desktops, which were the lowest-performing devices. Health and fitness marketers need to be mobile-friendly.
Trimming the fat and taking the dive
In sum, if you’re all about selling stuff that makes people more healthy and fit, you can feel good that they are likely to take steps toward buying it after they see your messages.
Health and fitness marketers have a tremendous opportunity to hit a sizable sweet spot for their messages, especially if they carefully choose their targets, and when and where to message them.
They’ll be able to control their marketing spend, staying slim and trim while the cash in their companies’ coffers continually expands. Unlike waistlines, expanding the bottom line for a company means it’s both healthy and fit.
