Health and wellness brands build their reputation on credibility. In this week's podcast, Danny spoke to Megan Levy, the Director of Client Services at Wellness Amplified, an influencer marketing agency focused on health and wellness, to talk about building relationships and educating influencer partners.
Takeaways from this episode include:
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About our guest:
Megan Levy (@meganlynnlevy) is the Director of Client Services at Wellness Amplified (@wellnessamp). Wellness Amplified is an influencer marketing agency with a single-minded focus in health and wellness. Wellness Amplified is the only agency that works across the breadth and depth of specialties in health, wellness, nutrition, fitness, wellness beauty, and healthy living. In addition to influencer marketing, Megan loves obsessing over her Peloton bike, running, and all things Hoboken.
Key episode insights:
The need for credibility in the health and wellness space
The health and wellness space is crowded with noise from a plethora of brands trying to make a name for themselves. Influencers can help break through the noise, pushing the latest and greatest panaceas to their audiences. Megan Levy’s agency, Wellness Amplified, realized that the health and wellness space needs credibility now more than ever to overcome the saturation.
“Part of why our agency was created is just that there's a lot of need for credibility. There’s just so much information out there that you need credible sources to help you navigate it.”
Acquiring credibility, however, takes time, effort, and education. Before influencers can educate their followers about why a particular brand, supplement, or technique works, they themselves have to be taught. Megan’s agency uses a robust briefing process to ensure this product education happens:
“The briefing process is really important to us in our agency. We make sure to have really detailed creative briefs that the influencers will sign off on before moving to contracting.”
All this amounts to attaining credibility among an audience, both on the part of the influencer and the brand they represent. Ensuring influencers are educated and authentic in their claims goes a long way in earning the trust of their followers.
Pre-vetting influencer partners for future campaigns
Before influencers can be briefed, however, the right ones have to be found. Considering the stakes for health and wellness brands, Megan revealed that she pre-vets influencers before even giving them a brief. When scoping a campaign, she reaches out to influencers who might be a good fit to see if it’s a product or brand they’re interested in.
“We always try to pre-vet our influencers, let them know they're being considered, to make sure it's something they're open to.”
Sometimes, Megan even sends potential influencer partners a product to see if they like it or find it useful. In the health and wellness space, like many others, it’s not just about finding a good influencer, it’s finding the best one to tell a particular brand’s story. That means finding ones who have credible, authentic voices with the authority to speak about the effectiveness of a product and a believable interest in using it.
Creating opportunities for influencers in and out of campaigns
Through all the time marketers spend interacting with influencers in and out of campaigns, they can build solid one-on-one relationships with their partners. Megan decided to take all of her individual relationships she’s built and put them in one place: a Facebook group.
The goal was to give influencers an opportunity to connect with one another, while giving them opportunities beyond campaigns to learn more about their industry and build fruitful partnerships along the way.
“A few months ago, we knew that we had all these great one-on-one relationships with influencers, but there was an opportunity for the influencers to also talk amongst each other, and for us to help.”
Though it took some heavy lifting to get going, Wellness Amplified’s Facebook group, Wellfluencers, is growing in size. Megan routinely shares insights, best practices, and tips for members, who carry on the conversation in the comments.
“We want to use this group as a forum where influencers could potentially learn something new. We're using it as a space where we can continue to learn more about health and wellness and to make networking easier.”
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