Fitness & Nutrition Hits Its Stride on Social

Fitness businesses converting over 6.3% have got a leg up on competitors.

Make sure your landing pages are optimized for a mobile audience.

With the rise of at-home workouts and wellness routines this past year, there’s never been a better time to engage your audience through social channels. And according to our data, fitness and nutrition marketers are making platforms like Facebook and Instagram a priority. Roughly one-third of traffic (29.2% to click-through and 34.8% to form-fill pages) is being driven from social media.

Something else we found interesting: Your visitors are almost all mobile. In fact, less than a fifth of the industry’s traffic (18.5%) comes from desktop—and it’s shrunk since last year. We’re speculating, but this might reflect the growing popularity of nutrition influencers and online fitness groups. 

What’s it mean for marketers? Since your audience is highly mobile and social, you wanna build landing pages with that in mind.  Keep your page short, easy to read, and simplify your conversion goal—either by sticking to click or reducing your form fields.

 

Readability is an important part of a healthy landing page.

Fitness and nutrition landing pages usually convert better when their reading ease scores are at an elementary school level. (So, super easy to read.) You can see from the graph that you may also be able to score some conversions with especially professional language—but there’s a sizeable dip with pages written for a high school or college audience. 

How many words should you use? Given your large mobile audience, we reckon it’s best to keep your copy under 250 words (if you can). Word count increased slightly across the industry this year, but a short page is still gonna perform better.

 

You’re marketing “feel-good” services—so make ‘em feel good.

Compared to other segments, fitness and nutrition pages have significantly higher levels of negative sentiment. Like, big time. The industry has the highest levels of language associated with both anger and disgust (117.8% and 448.3% over the baseline). 

Maybe the scream-in-your-face, welcome-to-your-nightmare motivational style works in movies, but we don’t see any trend that suggests this kind of tough love converts visitors. In fact, it looks like positive sentiment and joy-related language could be the best way to get people active. 

So, how do you optimize your copy? Emphasize the benefits of a healthier lifestyle (rather than the risks of a less healthy one). Let’s say you market a nutritional meal prep company. Think “start purifying” the body instead of “stop polluting” it. Get visitors excited to make a positive change.