Marketing For Nutritionists: Your Ultimate Nutrition Business Plan
What is Nutrition Marketing?
When it comes time to open the doors to your nutrition business and start working with clients, you might find yourself struggling to fill your practice.
In school, you likely learned how to work with clients, but you might not have received a full rundown on how to find those clients to begin with. This is where nutrition marketing comes in!
Marketing is essentially the act of promoting your business, offers, and services to the public, so that they understand who you are and how you can serve them.
One way to look at it is, when starting a nutrition business, 80% of your time will be spent marketing your nutrition business while the other 20% of your time will be working with clients.
In turn, spending a majority of your time on marketing will ultimately help you to sign clients, fill your practice and grow a thriving nutrition business.
My Favourite Nutrition Marketing Strategies
Social Media
For a lot of business owners, social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or TikTok end up being the main way they market their nutrition business…and for good reason!
Social media is a great way to build a community of raving fans.
By sharing helpful, educational and inspirational content on social media, you have a good chance of being able to turn your community into paying clients!
Although there are a lot of pros to building a business on social media, you might end up finding yourself on a hamster wheel of constant content creation.
Unfortunately, most of the content on social media only has a short shelf life, which means that you have to be producing new content over and over.
When choosing which social media platforms to be spending your time on, definitely consider where your ideal clients are spending their time.
You might find women over 50 spend more time on Facebook while busy 9-5ers are hopping in and out of LinkedIn.
Think of social media as a way to nurture your community and invite them to take the next step with you, whether that’s to join your email list, listen to you on a podcast, or one of the many other strategies that we’ll be covering below!
Email Marketing
One of the main reasons I love email marketing and growing an email list is that you can connect with your audience without worrying about algorithms, social media outages, or your competitors' content getting in the way!
Did you know that 99% of consumers check their email every day? So you can rest assured that your email content is getting the eyes it deserves! (Hubspot)
My favourite strategy is to repurpose the content that you are already creating for social media or in other places and send this same content out to your email list.
Worried that your audience will be annoyed that you already put this content out on other platforms?
Rest assured that it’s likely they might not have seen the content when you first posted it, or they’d be more than happy to consume it for a second time.
Popping into someone’s inbox is a more authentic, intimate way to share about the goings-on in your business than any other social media platform or marketing tool ever could.
Check out Flodesk, my favourite email marketing platform! Get 50% off your monthly email marketing subscription for the next year.
Blogging
You might have heard the expression “blogging is dead”, but I’m here to tell you that’s further from the truth.
In fact, my blog post How to Start a Nutrition Business made it to the first spot on Google search in only 2 months since posting!
The key to blogging is to write engaging, helpful content that is being searched by your ideal clients or niche.
This means doing some market research to see what people are searching about your niche and creating content that answers their exact questions.
Some of my favourite tools to use for coming up with blog topic ideas are:
Once you decide on your blog topic, you’ll have the best success for ranking in Google search by writing a post with over 1500 words.
Keep it educational and don’t worry about giving away too much information in your blog post.
By sharing lots of high-quality information in your blog posts, you’ll showcase how much knowledge and understanding you have about your topic, and thus in turn win the trust of your audience!
Pro tip: Include a call-to-action in your blog post like a link to sign up for your email list or a button to schedule a discovery call. Tell your audience the exact next steps you’d like them to take.
Podcasting
Podcasting is one of my personal favourite ways to market your nutrition business and grow your audience!
Podcasts are a fantastic way to communicate with your audience and share your knowledge, and most podcast listeners will listen to every single episode you put out right to the very end.
This means that with podcasts, there is a high chance that the majority of your content is being consumed by a highly captive audience, and podcast listeners are also highly likely to take an action that you ask them to take.
This could look like asking them to leave a review, sign up for your email list, attend one of your workshops, or share your podcast with a friend.
Another reason podcasts are a great nutrition marketing strategy is that you can grow your audience and reach by inviting on different guests that will share your episode with their audience, too!
Youtube
If I could give you one piece of advice, it’s to start a Youtube channel right now! Why? Because YouTube has more than 2 billion active users and has a search engine built right into it!
This means that people are using YouTube as a way to search for information, and by creating educational and entertaining content on this platform, you’ll have a chance to rank in the search and capture a new audience.
Here is the ultimate YouTube marketing plan that you can follow:
Step 1: Choose a topic for your content that is searched by your ideal client or niche
Step 2: Record and post an educational YouTube video speaking on this topic
Step 3: Strip the audio and post as a podcast episode
Step 4: Transcribe the audio into written form by using a platform like Otter.ai or Descript
Step 5: Post the written content as a blog post
Check out my YouTube channel for more nutrition business and marketing tips!
One way to get even more reach and eyes on the content you’ve already created is by posting it on Pinterest! Pinterest is another under-rated search engine where users go with specific search intent.
Use a graphic design program like Canva to create pin images of your podcast content, blog content, or Youtube videos.
Post them on Pinterest with a short description and link people directly to your piece of content.
Pinterest users love nutrition, meal plan and recipe pins, so don’t miss out on utilizing this marketing tool as part of your overall strategy!
Guest Podcasting + Guest Blogging
If you’re looking for a quicker way to grow your audience and get in front of more people, consider guest podcasting or blogging.
By pitching to be a guest, you’ll get access to the host’s audience where trust has already been built, and have the opportunity to educate their audience and invite them to join yours.
The key to pitching to be a guest is to share how much value you can bring to their audience, and let them know 3-5 topics you feel very confident in sharing.
Another thing to remember is to leave their audience with a call-to-action on where they can follow you, how they can join your email list, and how they can learn more about your offers or services.
Word of Mouth - Referrals, Past Clients, Collaborations
The last (and highly underrated) nutrition marketing strategy that I’ll leave you with is to leverage growing your business by word of mouth!
Here are 3 ways to leverage word of mouth marketing:
Connect with other practitioners (like NDs, MDs, Chiropractors, etc.) and let them know how you can further support their referral clients with your nutrition services
Check in with past clients and offer them an incentive for every new client they send your way
Collaborate with other practitioners in and out of your niche to grow your audience. Think outside the box when collaborating with things like social media lives, takeovers and guest expert trainings.
I was able to grow my own thriving nutrition practice based almost solely on referrals from another nutritionist, and many of my own nutrition business clients have been able to sign multiple clients by word-of-mouth efforts!
Learn how to. build a referral network for your nutrition business in this blog post.
