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Great vegan marketing strategies are extremely rare.

Mostly because vegan brands typically don’t promote their products as if they were in mature and saturated markets. With that said, the new wave in healthy and plant-based DTC brands is starting to change that with vegan marketing strategies that have turned niched vegan products into mass market health products.

These are the vegan marketing strategies we’re going to focus on.

Do this right and you’ll be take any one of the many vegan business ideas and multiply your chances of success.

Let’s get started…

Build An Email Funnel

While advertising is an extremely important vegan marketing strategy, that’s not what should create the foundation of your business. Instead, it should be focused on owned marketing because you own it. The most important owned marketing channel? Email marketing. This is why the first step should be to build a complete, thorough, and effective ecommerce email marketing funnel.

Let’s say you run a $1MM vegan brand. You should be able to generate 30% of your total online revenue from email marketing. In this case, that means $300,000 without having to spend a cent in advertising and without worrying about any platform banning all of your hard work. All additional vegan marketing strategies should use your email operation as a benchmark.

Action Plan:

Complete all Klaviyo flows
Send 2-4 campaigns per week
Clean list every 2-3 months
Send segmented campaigns

Launch A Content Brand

Owned marketing is the most important vegan marketing tactic. So whenever you can double down on it, you should. This includes weaning off advertising just enough to afford your own content brand. Why? Because it’s the most reliable way to reduce your customer acquisition costs, which in turn directly makes your business more profitable.

So what does launching a content brand mean exactly? It means to start a separate channel where you produce consistent content to build an audience of people interested in a single topic. This can be on a blog, Youtube channel, TikTok or something else. This is a process that takes 12-18 months for best results, but it’ll pay dividends if you plan on staying around.

Action Plan:

Figure out your best customer
Publish content for that customers
Distribute those pieces of content
Convert traffic into email newsletter
Link to products within content

Build Off 60 Day LTV Window

In advertising, if the math of acquiring a customer doesn’t work on paper, it won’t work in real life. This is why having a high AOV offer is extremely important. However, most vegan products aren’t expensive in the first place. So while you still want to sell high AOV bundles, if you want to be profitable, you need to calculate your allowable CPA based on your 60 day LTV window.

Your 60 day LTV window is the revenue you earn up to 60 days after someone first buys a product for you. Fortunately, most vegan products are actually subscription friendly. It’s also arguable that 60 days is better than 30 days, but not as potentially chaotic as 90 day LTV. So focus on your site, offers, and owned marketing to get this up at all costs.

Action Plan:

Triple down on post-purchase sequences
Considering implementing SMS
Push your subscription offer whenever possible
Boost AOV with bundles and upsells

Specialize On One Ingredient

It’s not enough to just be a “vegan” brand in most categories unless you’re the first vegan brand in that category. Chances are, you’re going to be competing with hundreds of other vegan brands. So you have to differentiate yourself from those brands. The best way to do that? By focusing your messaging to highlight your primary ingredient.

For example, let’s say you are selling frozen pizza that contains extra protein. You want to focus on the extra protein rather than it just being a “frozen pizza”. This gives people a reason to buy your vegan frozen pizza over everyone else. With that said, you do still want to make your vegan messaging loud and clear.

Action Plan:

Focus on primary ingredient
Position your brand around it
Tell everyone about it

Use “Mass Market” Copywriting

The problem with most vegan marketing tactics is that they rely on advertising the word “vegan”. This is fine if you specifically just want to target vegans. However, because they only represent about 5% of the U.S population, if you want to broaden your potential market, you should switch out vegan since it’s usually seen as a divisive word that translates into bad food.

The alternative? Switch to the word “plant-based”. It’s been shown that it’s a much more consumer friendly term. Most people don’t identify with being a vegan, but everyone understands that plants are healthy. Sure, plant-based is exactly like vegan, but for the purposes of eating, it’s more than a suitable replacement.

Action Plan:

Switch vegan with plant-based
Repeat it on all marketing and packaging
Sell to “flexitarians”, not just vegans

Produce “OAA” Ad creative

The huge mistake most vegan business owners make is assuming the majority of your ad results come down to really knowing every potential “hack” to in platforms like FB ads. However, the truth is that 80% of all your success with advertising actually has to do with the videos and images you use on your ads.

Knowing this, the best ad creative strategy is one that helps you come up with as many reasons why people should buy your product. For this, I’ve discovered that creative based on offers, audiences, and angles works best. For example, you can try an ad that sells a new bundle. Another example is selling based on a secondary benefit of your product.

Action Plan:

Discover new offers, angles, audiences
Test all 3 for winning ads
Turning winning ads into high production video ads

Invest In MOFU Creative

The vegan space is not new. In fact, it’s really old and it’s extremely competitive. This means you can’t win in this space by being “more vegan”. The only way to win is to be the more trustworthy vegan product. This can be in terms of taste, quality, or something else. Either way, the way to prove this is with MOFU creative.

MOFU stands for “middle of funnel”. This is where you teach customers why they should choose you over everyone else. For example, you may want to advertise that your product has 100+ raving reviews or you may want to highlight your supply chain to prove you’re truly vegan. This is the least used type of ad creative, but arguably one of the most important.

Action Plan:

Find best proof elements
Test most impressive proof

Focus On Premium/Luxury Branding

If you’ve ever started a vegan brand before, chances are you’ve realized it’s actually more expensive than if you were to start a non-vegan brand. This is especially true if you ever wanted to add additional premium ingredients. So if you want to compete in the ever growing vegan or plant-based markets, your best bet is to charge more for your products.

There’s a caveat though… you can’t sell premium priced vegan products like you do regular products. The reason is that you’re targeting 2 different buyers and each has their own triggers. Regular buyers focus more on price. Premium buyers focus more on status, scarcity, and exclusivity.

Action Plan:

Increase your pricing
Build status with influencers
Focus on small batches
Sell super premium “drops”

Expand With Omnichannel 

Vegan products fall under the CPG or consumer packaged goods category. By definition, this is a category where products are relatively cheap. This isn’t ideal for scaling with just advertising, especially when your CAC rises as you grow out of your initial “hardcore fanbase”. Yet, you still need volume to get the real benefit of being in CPG. The solution is omnichannel.

Omnichannel is when you use both online and offline methods to sell your products. This means while you’ll start with your Shopify store, you will eventually need to move into “marketplaces” like Amazon and more importantly, need to get your product in physical retail stores. Because CAC is stable in physical retail, all you need to do is focus on getting in more stores.

Action Plan:

Build a strong owned audience
Expand into online marketplaces
Scale with physical retail

If you want to compete, you need the best health and wellness marketing strategies available.

These health and wellness marketing strategies aren’t what you’re thinking though. This isn’t about just setting up a Facebook ad campaign or just sending out emails. What we’re going to talk about are the strategies used by today’s faster growing health and wellness brands.

So whether you sell skincare, CBD, or something else… you’ll find something here to help.

Let’s get started.

What Is The Wellness Market?

If you’ve ever bought a supplement or a shampoo, then you’ve been a customer in the “wellness market”. Basically, it’s any product that helps improve your customer’s health and wellness whether it’s physical health, mental health, and even emotional health.

More specifically, it’s a market that contains industries such as…

Personal Care/Beauty
Nutrition/Weight Loss
Mind/Body Health
Medicine
Wellness Real Estate
Wellness Tourism
Workplace Wellness
Spa Economy
Thermal/Mineral Springs

…etc

The wellness market is one of the biggest markets in the entire world. In 2017, it was estimated to be a $3.7 trillion market that was expected to only grow more, faster. 

For the purposes of this guide, we’re going to focus on wellness consumer goods such as beauty.

How Do You Build A Wellness Brand?

The secret to building a wellness brand is positioning.

Because every category within the wellness market is extremely competitive, you have to switch from focusing on just your consumers and build a business designed to be differentiated from your competitors so people have a reason to choose you over someone else.

For example, take a look at the keto cereal market.

For decades, the cereal market sold sugary products that were sold as health products. Now in the last few years, the keto cereal market has been booming because they can accurately claim they’re actually healthier than “big cereal”. This messaging has now allowed multiple keto cereals to become household brands such as Magic Spoon.

This is exactly how you should build a wellness brand.

Figure out exactly what differentiates your brand from everyone elses in your category, then use digital marketing strategies to spread that message to as many people in your market as often as possible until you’re known in the market as “the X brand”.

How Do You Market A Health Product?

The trickiest thing about marketing a health product is figuring out what exactly people want to hear as you apply different marketing strategies to get their attention. After marketing tons of health products in the past though, here is what I’ve found health consumer care most about..

For food & beverage health products…

Benefit – Customers start by looking for certain health benefits
Taste – Customers then look if it’s even something they’ll enjoy consuming
Nutrition – Customers double check what’s inside of available products

For personal care & beauty products…

Benefit – Customers start by looking for certain aesthetic benefits
Visuals – Customers then look if the product can deliver the results they want
Ingredients – Lastly, customers look if the ingredients inside are safe and effective

This pattern can be seen in almost every health and wellness category because at the end of the day, people want a product that works, is safe, and they’ll actually be OK to use on a consistent basis.

Here are 9 wellness marketing strategies you can use to let people know about your attributes.

Build An Email Funnel

Almost every health and wellness category is very regulated and for good reason. It’s always tricky to make bold health claims, especially once you’ve grown big enough for the FTC and other competitors to start paying attention to you. Not to mention the TOS of every ad network, which tends to be strict for the same exact liability issues you would face on your own.

The solution then is to build a complete ecommerce email marketing funnel that takes someone from subscriber to repeat customer. You want your email funnel to generate at least 30% of your total sales from email marketing. You still need to minimize your health claims, but if for some reason your ad account gets banned on Facebook or elsewhere, you’ll still be in business.

Action Plan:

Complete all email flows
Send 2-4 campaigns per week
Clean list every 2-3 months
Send segmented emails
Focus on promoting best sellers

Launch A Content Brand

The entire ecommerce industry was pretty much lifted out of obscurity because of cheap CPMs from new (at the time) channels like Facebook advertising. These days, CPMs have now skyrocketed and while advertising is still viable, it’s virtually mandatory to add in organic channels into your marketing mix. Wellness marketing works best with paid AND organic traffic.

Building a content brand means starting a blog, Youtube channel, TikTok or something else designed to grow an audience of people related to your topic. So if you’re starting a skincare brand, you would want to start a TikTok that gives daily or at least near daily skincare tips. This will take 12-18 months to build, but it will radically reduce your average CAC.

Action Plan:

Nail down your ideal audience
Product consistent content
Distribute those pieces of content
Send traffic to build an email list
Link to products within content

Sell High AOV Bundles

For most health and wellness products, the number one wellness marketing tactic is advertising. However there are two sides to growing a wellness brand with advertising. On the ad side, it’s creative. On the store side, it’s average order value. For you to grow a wellness brand with advertising, you need to promote your highest viable priced product because it’s what makes the math work.

Considering most wellness products are between $10-$30 and where you want to be is over $50 (if possible), then the only way to reach that kind of average order value is if you bundle your products. This dramatically raises your chances of being profitable with ads. If you’re in a category with cheaper products, then selling bundles.

Action Plan:

Bundle relevant products
Sell with landing page
Promote with ads

Focus On One Ingredient

For obvious reasons, people who are into health and wellness are going to be extra vigilant when it comes to what they’re putting in or on their bodies. This means managing your ingredients list is incredibly important. With that said, in a world with thousands of ingredients, you actually want to be known for one specific ingredient whenever possible. This is a key wellness marketing tactic.

For example, let’s say you’re selling soap and one of the main ingredients is charcoal. Well, you should promote it as “charcoal soap” and if all or at least the main soaps you sell use charcoal, you should build your entire brand as a seller of charcoal soap. This lets people know what you’re selling and differentiates your brand at the same time.

Action Plan:

Pick a main ingredient
Position your brand around it
Let everyone know

Write Compliant Copy

Once upon a time, I worked with a client who had a very large competitor sign up to their email list for the sole purpose of suing my client if they read any sort of non-compliant copywriting. It’s also important to remember that health and wellness products need to be careful with their messaging due to the FTC themselves doubling down on this in this market.

The solution is to understand how to write compliant copy. The secret? To focus only on things you can 100% prove. For example, you can prove your soap has charcoal because it was made that way. So basically, if it’s on the ingredients list or can be reliably tracked such as where ingredients were sourced, you’ll want to focus on that.

Action Plan:

Understand compliance laws
Focus on provable claims

Produce “OAA” Ad creative

The most scalable wellness marketing activity is advertising. However, the trick to making your ads work better isn’t by using any “FB ad hacks”. The only true way to effectively and reliably scale your ads is with more and better ad creative. This means videos and images that capture your customer’s attention and then entices them to click through so they can buy.

This is where my “OAA” ad creative formula comes in. Basically, you want to make ad creative that focuses on specific offers, specific angles, and specific audiences. In other words, you want to try and promote new bundles with new marketing angles to new audiences. This will allow the AI to find the best customers for your products.

Action Plan:

Find new offers, angles, audiences
Test with images, then videos
Triple down on winning ads

Invest In MOFU Creative

Because the health and wellness space is so competitive, the only real competitive advantage one brand has over the other is trust. Many digital marketing strategies try to relay that trust, but the only tactic that is specifically designed to do that is MOFU or middle of the funnel content. So if you’re running ads, I highly suggest running these types of ads.

MOFU creative are images and videos that answer the question, “why should I buy from you?”. For example, if you’re selling charcoal soap, you can make a video ad that explains how your charcoal soap is praised by 1,000+ customers. Incidentally, this is the type of ads most ecommerce products use the least because people are unaware of how effective it is.

Action Plan:

Figure out your USP
Use best proof elements
Be radically transparent
Make ads based on above

Focus On Premium/Luxury Branding

While the biggest businesses in the world tend to be low priced brands, many of the most successful DTC brands are in the premium or luxury categories. The reason is that there are much less competitors in the premium and luxury categories. Furthermore, because most DTC brands use higher quality materials/ingredients, the higher pricing allows it to be viable.

You can’t sell a premium priced product like you do a “mass market” product. By far the most important thing to do is to prove that it’s worth the extra price point. Typically, this comes down to the quality of the materials used. It’s also important to stop frequent discounting and instead triple down on status, scarcity, and exclusivity to seduce people into buying.

Action Plan:

Increase your pricing
Use popular influencers
Sell products in small batches
Implement exclusivity with “drops”

Expand With Omnichannel 

Most health and wellness products fall under “CPG” or consumer packaged goods. These types of products are relatively cheap in the world of retail, which means the best source of revenue tends to be in high volume marketing channels. Even with the internet, this still means that physical retail is one of the best ways to grow a health and wellness brand.

So while you should start and stick with DTC for as long as possible, you should always understand that if the goal is to build a $25MM+ health and wellness brand, you need to use your ecommerce business to help you launch your physical retail business. The more successful your ecommerce efforts, the more proof you have that it will sell in physical retail.

Action Plan:

Build a strong email list
Drive lots of ecommerce revenue
Use data to get into stores