Maximizing ROI on Your Natural Products Marketing Budget

Natural products have never been bigger with consumers. Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic began and gave a boost to this already fast-growing sector, the global wellness market is worth $1.8 trillion. While established brands could market themselves with tactics as simple as distinctive packaging, like Celestial Seasonings teas, or as the best place to buy macrobiotic ingredients, like Erewhon, today the competitive landscape is much tighter.

That means that for most wellness brands, marketing isn’t just an option—it's a necessity. The success of your marketing efforts hinges not only on creativity and strategy, but also on the efficiency and effectiveness of your budget allocation. 

Maximizing the return on investment for your marketing spend is crucial to ensure that every dollar contributes to your brand's growth and customer acquisition. That’s especially true for brands operating across industries or in sectors like cannabis and supplements that face additional regulatory pressure. 

If you’re looking for actionable tips on how to make the most of your brand’s marketing budget while expanding brand awareness, marketing reach and resonance with the right audience, here’s what you need to know:

Invest In Your Target Audience

Anyone who has ever discussed their people-pleasing tendencies in therapy or coaching knows the temptation of being everything to everyone. But this approach is as bad for brands as it is for your mental health. Not only is it impossible to truly appeal to every single person in a total addressable market, it’s not a smart way to spend money.

Instead, invest in identifying and understanding your brand’s target audience. Who are they, and what pain points are they looking to solve when they’re scrolling through e-commerce offerings or glancing over the store shelf? Insight into what makes them tick can be used for strategic audience segmentation so your brand can effectively map messaging to that unique consumer landscape.

Strategize Budget Allocation

The reason you want to identify and deeply understand your target audience before spending another dime on marketing or PR is so you can put your spend into the highest ROI channels for those consumer segments. For example, social media and influencer marketing might have huge ROI for fashion or cosmetics brands, but may be less effective for brands with cannabis products or supplements that need to age-gate their ads or avoid making health claims.

For many brands, the best place to start is the workman-like realm of content marketing. Search engine optimization (SEO) might not be as glamorous as, say, engaging the Hawk Tuah girl to review your product on TikTok. But going after high-volume keywords and drawing web searchers into the top of your sales funnel is a proven way to build brand awareness and  provide consumer education for B2B and B2C brands. 

A smartly written company website with SEO-focused webpage copy and blog content tailored to your target customers in brand voice and tone is step one to building Expertise, Authority and Trust (EAT) with your audience. As potential leads enter your brand’s content marketing ecosystem, draw them further toward a purchase with middle-of-funnel content marketing tactics like gated content and white papers, email drip campaigns and case studies.

For brands with a small budget—don’t sweat it. Grasslands’ project-based marketing services can be an effective place to get started and ensure your name doesn’t disappear from consumers’ radar while you get revenue locked in and scale your operations. 

Data-Driven Decision Making

Whichever PR and marketing tactics your brand begins with, the key to maximizing ROI is to analyze marketing performance over time and make tweaks to your messaging strategy accordingly. Tools like Google Analytics (GA4), social media insights and data from a customer relationship management system can all be used to chart how well your marketing and PR tactics are meeting key performance indicators like conversion rates, customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend.

The technical side of data-driven business analytics often gets the lion’s share of the focus and accolades, and for good reason. The math needs to be mathing, absolutely. But in marketing and PR—which, let’s face it, are all about relationships—it’s also important to remember the human element.

In wellness public relations for instance, building media relationships, arranging deskside meetings with reporters, setting up strategic partnerships and bringing brand activations to life are all key ways to keep brands in local, regional and national media conversations. But it can be challenging to put a number on the real reach of soft-touch tactics. 

An editor who passes on an executive profile, for example, may later accept a pitch for a newsjacking opportunity. Product samples sent out to a journalist in March may not result in coverage until a gift guide runs in the fourth quarter.

The same is true in marketing. Website SEO, for instance, is a long game. It takes time for search engines to index pages and move them up or down in the rankings for search engine results pages (SERPs). That’s especially true for higher volume, lower intent short-tail keywords that are already dominated by big e-commerce sites. 

Community Engagement and Building Trust

As important as it is to set KPIs and pivot strategy as the data dictates, it’s also important to look for a PR agency that knows how to communicate value with both data-based reporting and really listens to its clients as product launches get delayed or longer-term goals change. 

Ultimately, maximizing the ROI on wellness marketing and natural products PR isn’t just about the literal return on your financial investment. It’s also about tangibly feeling the return on what a brand invests in its community. 

Gathering testimonials and social proof through earned media coverage are additional ways to help your customers feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. Building trust, reflecting consumers’ hopes, preferences and identities back to them and growing with the target audience are all valuable goals that may not be as directly measurable as media mentions, sentiment and online reach, but can be even more valuable in the long run.

‍Learn more about Grasslands Agency’s strategic marketing services and our proven process for brand building.