Word-of-mouth the best form of marketing for health and fitness brands
“Word of mouth marketing is the best form of marketing,” for the health and fitness marketing sector believes CEO and founder of fitness company SWEAT and co-creator of the Kayla Itsines Bikini Body Guide, Tobias Pearce.
Once this word-of-mouth effect is amplified online, success will follow, he said.
Itsines has 7.3m followers on Instagram
“If you can provide benefit to somebody and they like it the old word-of-mouth marketing is the best form of marketing,” he said.
Speaking at Mumbrella’s Health & Wellness Marketing Summit on ‘Harnessing Social Media to Build a Profitable Empire Within the Fitness Space’, Pearce told the audience organic reach “is not king” reiterating the need for paid media.
“You can achieve a certain amount organically but at the end of the day paid media is going to be the turbocharge of business.
“Using Facebook as an advertising platform we are able to jump in and go ‘I want to target these people in that area who fit these profiles, here is my content let’s specialise in that area’.
“Social media is global but being able to target people on that granular level is pretty awesome,” the CEO of SWEAT said.
Discussing the difference between organic reach and paid media, Pearce said it was organic reach which got the business off the ground, but advertising which helped the brand go global.
Tobias Pearce, Kayla Itsines and Facebook’s Jacqui Cole
“There are two aspects to it, the organic side of using the social networks and then there’s obviously the business side where you do the advertising, the organic side was huge and lifted us off the ground and got things started, and then obviously as we started to integrate with the more commercial side of advertising that really started to accelerate the growth of the brand.”
Although dissecting how the duo used social media to market the global mobile fitness program SWEAT, Pearce said “Kayla and I don’t have any formal education around business and marketing, so for us we made a lot of the really decisions of our business based on instinct and based on what was logical”.
Giving advice to fitness and wellness businesses startups, Itsines emphasised staying true to the brand and being authentic.
“Set guidelines and say ‘what will we do, what will we not do’ and stick to those guidelines, be completely real with everything, don’t try and be someone that you are not because you can only keep up that persona or that lifestyle for a certain amount of time until you get caught out”.
Tobias told businesses to “forget all the business strategy” and ensure the product can sell itself.
“For somebody starting a business create something that actually works, forget all business strategy marketing and advertising… because at the end of the day if your product is good enough it will sell itself”.
Abigail Dawson was Mumbrella's senior content journalist covering event content. She left Mumbrella to move into an agency role in 2020.
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