The analysis of digital marketing strategies for dietary supplements on the example of Ukrainian and international brands

Abstract

Aim. To analyze digital marketing strategies for dietary supplements on the example of Ukrainian and international brands.

Materials and methods. To assess the current state of digital marketing, the content analysis of the official Instagram and TikTok pages of three brands of dietary supplements was conducted. They are two Ukrainian dietary supplement brands – “PERLA HELSA” and “BIOTUS”, as well as the international “NOW FOODS”. To assess the effectiveness of online marketing tools, 104 recent publications were analyzed. The effectiveness of social media posts was determined by the level of engagement. To test the statistical significance of differences between the groups, the one-way analysis of variance and Welch’s t-test were used. To assess the representation in the search space, the results of Google organic and paid search for a number of relevant queries were analyzed.

Results. There is a steady upward trend in the share of short video formats (Reels, TikTok videos), which provide the highest average engagement rate (0.374 %), and it is statistically significantly different from static posts and carousels (p = 0.0135). It has been found that the presence of images of people in the frame has a significant positive impact on the audience engagement since publications with them have a statistically significantly higher average ER (0.405 %) compared to those where they are absent (0.200 %, p < 0.001). It has been found that the informational and educational content have the highest engagement rates (0.379 % and 0.319 %, respectively). Search engines have identified a multi-channel approach with a combination of the SEO optimization, paid advertising and visual search results. Organic search results provide a more stable presence.

Conclusions. It has been found that effective digital marketing of dietary supplements is based on short video formats that increase engagement in educational and informational content using images of people to build trust. In search engine promotion, the system SEO optimization plays a key role along with paid tools.