Most of the health & fitness industry belongs to the biggest names in the sector, but that’s true for any industry in general. Therefore, it should not be taken as a sign that smaller ventures have no chance of succeeding in the health and wellness segment. In fact, there has never been a better time for smaller businesses in this sector to grow, thanks to the presence of digital tech and the internet in general. With that in mind, let’s discuss a few methods that SMEs within the health, fitness & wellness industry should consider for succeeding.
Save Funds Where You Can
Health and wellness is not exactly a small segment, so the expenses will vary depending on factors such as:
- Whether they are manufacturing or retailing
- Whether they sell products, services, or both
- Which of the sub-sector(s) they deal in
- The size or scale of their operation(s); small and medium business itself is a very vague category in this respect
As one can probably imagine, what the company can save on, and how, will differ in accordance with these variables. However, there are a few shared expenses between them. For example, health food cafés, gyms and health supplement manufacturers cater to different sub-sectors within the same industry, but they all pay for commercial electricity because it’s an essential aspect. Most business utilities are common expenses for health & wellness companies across all sub-sectors, and they could save a lot of money here. Depending on what you are paying your utility providers right now, it could be possible for the company to reduce its annual utility costs by as much as 40% – 45% with the help of a comparison site like Utility Bidder.
Given how important it is to create and hold standards in the fitness and wellness business, it is mandatory to find ways for cutting expenses without cutting down on the quality. If there was ever a way to cut costs without sacrificing quality, then decreasing commercial energy expenses would be the perfect example of doing just that.
Redirect and Reinvest
For sustainable growth in any sector, then clever redirection of the budget and reinvesting a portion of the profits is key. Any money that you save by reducing avoidable expenses should be re-channelled into another section of the budget. For the health and fitness industry, marketing is second in importance, only to the quality of the actual products/services, so that’s where the concentration should be, and in that order if you are trying to grow the business.
Listen to your present customers and find ways to first improve the quality of what the company has on offer. Only after that should you be redirecting the rest towards marketing. Understand that perfecting the core formula for any product is not the same as going immediately into mass production with it. The same goes for finding the right balance of inventory stocking if you are into retail; you only need to find the ideal formula or model, but the actual manufacturing/stocking can be started later in small batches to first analyse its real-life market performance.
Why Marketing?
Quality comes first, but marketing is the second most important facet to manage here. This holds true because unlike medical healthcare, both services and products in the health and fitness segment rely heavily on visual cues. This actually allows smaller businesses to market those visual elements via affordable means such as social media marketing, and media-supported content marketing.
To explain the concept at play here, let’s take the example of a company that manufactures and sells their own range of fitness oriented dietary supplements. Such a business could potentially have a wide range of target customers, spread across most major age groups. Visual elements should be used intelligently to market their products to each of those target groups separately, but they should always have the visual element present in the content nonetheless. It is so essential because:
- Customers will first be visually associating what they see with the brand and the product
- People looking to lose weight or gain muscle mass prefer having an idyllic estimation of what they can achieve while making purchase decisions
Now you know why big sports supplement companies spend so much money on sponsoring professional athletes and Instagram celebrities to represent their respective brands. In most cases, achieving what they have achieved in terms of fitness is impossible for someone who isn’t in the same game, but it still has a major influence on their purchase decisions.
While it is certainly not necessary for a budding supplement manufacturer to hire top tier sports personalities as their models to succeed, they still can do better by investing more in the visual marketing aspects of their business. Hire an experienced and well trained, local gym trainer who also looks the part, and he/she can become your initial company representative on the official social media channels. Use their experience, knowledge and aesthetics to create valuable and insightful content for followers, readers and subscribers.
As long as the published content and the products are in line with each other, this should help you build an actual community of connected fitness enthusiasts. For fitness and health-oriented companies, having that community of customers would be a major achievement in terms of not just marketing success, but also for building a solid reputation to grow on.
