The Social Media Marketing & Communications guide for Natural Health and Wellness insiders.

Are Stock Photographs Hurting Your Brand?

Happy families… Perfect smiles… 40-ish couples tussling on the beach… Worry-free seniors in spotless golfing whites…

Stock photography provides inexpensive images to communicate every emotion imaginable to every psychographic imaginable on behalf of your brand. It’s like a miracle panacea for designers.

Or is it?

Don’t you want to take every opportunity possible to communicate what’s special and unique about your brand?

Relying on stock photos for your company website (and enewsletters, brochures, products etc) basically tells your prospects “Sorry, we have nothing original to offer you.”

Natural health and wellness companies are notorious offenders. If I see one more stock image of a drop of water falling into a pool of soft blue ripples or a twenty something woman in a bike helmet on a natural health product website I might just have to poke my eyes out.

What MommyBloggers Can Teach Natural Health Brands About Marketing

Nummies Bras Website - simple and effective

I’ve always admired so-called “MommyBloggers.” They get it. They know how to leverage their brands through social media. They engage their networks with apparent ease, transparency and effectiveness. They make it look so easy, like it just comes naturally. Maybe it does. After all…

• Moms like to socialize and talk to each other. When a product or idea helps them, they tend to evangelize and share it with others.
• Mom oriented businesses often grow out of the personal experience, passion and values of visionary founders. This helps them speak clearly and effectively to the needs of their target market.
• Parenting and childhood are universal themes.

Um, are you seeing any parallels to the world of natural health and wellness?

• Natural health enthusiasts also evangelize products that have enriched, changed or saved their lives.
• Natural health businesses also often grow out of the personal experience, passion and values of visionary founders.
• Health is also a universal theme.

But many natural health businesses struggle with web strategy, social media and online marketing.

What are mommybloggers doing different? What can we learn from them?

How Information Technology (IT) Is Different From Social Media

Do You Have a Social Media Map?

Imagine you’re trying to get to… Disneyland. You’re in a car. You ask a guy for directions. He says, “Disneyland? Oh, that’s easy. Here’s how you get to Disneyland: Press down lightly on the accelerator while you slowly release the clutch. This introduces fuel to the carburetor and engages the transmission…”

Half an hour later you’re getting a pretty thorough understanding of combustion engine mechanics. But you’re not any closer to Disneyland.

Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, YouTube… are all tools with mechanical aspects. Certainly you need to know how to use them, just like if you’re going to drive to Disneyland you need to know how to use a car. BUT – an understanding of mechanics is NOT the same as having clear directions to your destination.