The Wellness Writing Conundrum: Crafting Content that Informs and Inspires

Health and wellness brands today face a unique content marketing challenge: creating compelling online content for an audience of highly educated professionals and lay consumers. 

Whether you’re offering blog posts, e-books, or social media updates, you want write engaging, informative content about topics consumers care about. But you also want to gain the respect of professionals by offering content that’s evidence-based and accurate.

For health and wellness brands, this is a uniquely challenging situation — but it doesn’t have to be. Here are some tips for crafting smart, powerful content that speaks to people in the know as well as to more casual readers.

Quality content is informative

If you have a health and wellness brand, chances are your site’s visitors are looking to you, rather than WebMD, for answers — and that’s both a huge opportunity and a challenge. Maybe your readers just want simple answers to simple questions, like “How can I feel better?” and “What should I be eating given my condition?” But keeping them on your site means establishing and sustaining credibility with informative content as well as go-to answers.

Your job isn’t to exhaustively explain what happens when you get a headache or what exactly causes something like hand tremors. Instead, your job is to address the basic needs of your target buyers and site visitors with select data woven into brief, compelling narratives. In essence, you need to assume a curatorial role, bridging the gap between simplicity and depth. Top-notch content providers can accomplish this by offering you experienced journalists and writers with the training and expertise to both inform and engage.

Creating content that informs and engages is the strong suit of professional content writers with industry expertise who can simplify complex topics for broad audiences. Such writers can take medical knowledge, once solely the purview of scholarly journals, and deftly summarize it into content that is both digestible and compelling.

Quality content is inspiring

Your visitors want to live better and feel well. How can you help them achieve these goals? How can you create content that addresses these issues and keeps readers engaged? 

Quality health and wellness content doesn’t just inform — it inspires readers with brief narratives that are intellectually and emotionally compelling. 

Here are two strategies that skilled content writers employ to inspire readers. 

1. The logos strategy

Aristotle famously coined the three “ingredients for persuasion”: ethos, an appeal to ethics; pathos, an appeal to emotion; and logos, an appeal to logic. It’s that last one, logos, that can be particularly powerful when you’re crafting content aimed at helping people maintain their health and wellness. 

Think of logos as an if/then argument: “If this worked for a lot of people, then it should work for me, too.” For a website offering daily suggestions for a heart-healthy lifestyle, here is what a brief logos appeal might look like:

I hate running. What else can I do to lose weight?

The dreaded running routine is not the only option for folks seeking to lose weight. The American Heart Association recommends regular walking regimens to improve cardiovascular health. Studies have shown that walking also helps with strength, mobility, mood, sleep, and, yes, weight loss.

The Global Corporate Challenge, for example, followed 60,000 workers who walked 10,000 steps a day (about 5 miles) for eight months. The results? Participants lost an average of 10 pounds each, and the number of walkers with high blood pressure fell by 34 percent.

So forget the fear of running, and go for a stroll with the family.

2. The anecdote strategy

Behind every health and wellness issue — every statistic and every case study — are real people. And their stories can make compelling content for health and wellness brands. By seamlessly weaving information in with brief, inspirational anecdotes, skilled content providers can build wellness brands’ credibility and influence. Here’s what the anecdote strategy might look like:

I’m diabetic. How can I relieve the pain in my feet?

It’s called diabetic neuropathy, and it affects some 25 percent of diabetes patients. For 46-year-old Sierra Magdalene, a waitress and mother of three from Tempe, Arizona, the pain was unbearable.

“I’m on my feet all day, so sitting down for 20 minutes was not realistic,” she says.
In addition to medication and a modified workload, Sierra searched for home healthcare solutions to her pain. Although she still experiences discomfort, she says her overall pain is now “significantly reduced.” Here are 10 proven home treatments for neuropathy recommended by leading podiatrists: ...

Alone, data and treatment options are informative, but stories of healing and hope can motivate readers and make health and wellness content much more compelling. It’s the difference between content that merely reads well and quality content that engages a site’s visitors.

As a health and wellness brand, you’re in a unique position to change lives for the better. Quality content writing can help you do that, establishing your site as a destination for health information and a source of inspiration for readers to achieve their wellness goals. 

With a bevy of seasoned journalists and content writers on hand, Prose Media brings this advantage to our clients. Our writers are trained in the best practices of content production, and they’ve got the industry experience needed to speak directly to the issues your readers will be curious about. Sign up today for free, no-obligation access to our platform. We’ll help you tap into the power of logos and anecdote — of logic and human interest — to craft content that will build a robust and loyal following for your health and wellness business.