This is the key advice from this year’s NutraIngredients Europe Marketing Initiative of the Year winner Sunna Van Campen, founder of the six-year-old brand Tonic Health.
The startup has become well-known for its junk-free effervescent vitamins and gummies for kids and was recently named in the top five of Alantra’s Food & Beverage Fast 50 poll, showing its impressive growth in the mainstream channel.
But the brand has also made a name for itself as a platform for information on healthy grocery shopping tips through its social media channels.
Van Campen highlighted that despite the award’s title, the ‘Unsponsored Supermarket Truth’ campaign has, in fact, been running for around three and a half years, and didn’t begin as a marketing campaign in the traditional sense.
“We knew we needed to talk to our customers about our products but if we’re just telling them, ‘you have to buy a product because of X, Y, and Z’, it’s not very engaging, you’re not building a relationship and you’re not building a community.
“We were thinking if our customer is looking for help on their health journey, how can we serve them?“
Posting short and simple video clips of himself recommending healthy options and alternatives across the major UK supermarkets, Van Campen and his marketing team of two have grown the brand’s Instagram, Facebook and TikTok following to 1.6 million.
Van Campen very rarely mentions Tonic’s own products in his posts, as he points out, no social media user is looking for product promotions in their feed.
“Fundamentally, people are on social media today for entertainment or education, right? And if we’re there saying, ‘hey, buy a Tonic because it’s the best thing ever’, people are like, ‘I’m not here for that’.”
Uploading daily, the entrepreneur has learnt what doesn’t work, as well as what does. He recalled a time he decided to post a rebuttal to a criticism of his nutrition advice.
“We learned quite quickly having done that, it basically drives an argument rather than driving a progression in the conversation. Because no matter how articulate you are or what science you share, there’s a pool of people that are just wedded to their belief.”
He noted that many have the misconception that social media algorithms favor creators that post regularly, when the platforms actually favor creators that get high engagement on individual posts, making quality more important than quantity.
That said, he and his team have a high pot rate in order to gain a constant stream of feedback. Spending around two days a month filming content and trickling that content onto Tonic’s feeds three times a day, the team closely watches how the videos perform, with particular attention to number of ‘saves’, allowing them to constantly tweak future content to ensure their output is useful.
While the time and energy that goes into the content can’t be quantified in exact sales, the entrepreneur argued the long-term content strategy game pays out in the end.
“Ultimately, if you build trust, engagement, and community first, I do believe, when the time is right, they might consider your product.”
