doTERRA Essential Oils: Social Media Monitoring Project Part 1

Source: MLM News Report

Introduction

When you think of medicine, the first image that pops up into your head is probably of doctors and prescription bottles. However, many people choose to use natural, holistic medicine to treat their ailments and improve their well-being. Holistic medicine is designed to improve the entire body with a focus on health – both physical and mental. Founded in 2008, doTERRA, meaning “Gift of Earth” in Latin, is taking the lead in the holistic health industry by developing CPTG therapeutic-grade essential oils. This new standard in therapeutic quality ensures that essential oils are pure and only the best. 

Rather than using traditional marketing methods, doTERRA uses a direct selling model that focuses on building relationships between people through essential oils. With over 2 million Wellness Advocates using and selling doTERRA products, doTERRA is creating opportunities for individuals to take charge of their health and financial independence.

One of these advocates is Ange Peters who runs a podcast and holistic health and lifestyle programs with her brand, HOL: FIT. On her website, she shares her journey from a Starbucks barista to doTERRA Canada Founder and Double Diamond leader. Ange has created a community of nearly 100,000 essential oilers within 5 years.

Sharing essential oils is a personal experience and doTERRA understands that mass marketing is not effective in creating that person-to-person relationship. However, doTERRA is active in the groundswell similarly to other brands on social media. 

In the rest of this post, I will be exploring how doTERRA uses social media and whether it is effective as a direct selling company.

Platforms

Instagram

            

Source: Social Bakers

Source: Social Bakers

doTERRA is pretty active on Instagram. On average, they post at least twice a day about their products, tips and a variety of recipes. They respond to a few comments per posts as shown in the images above, but they don't respond to everything—because who has time for that? The tone is very positive and enthusiastic.

Twitter

                           

Source: Social Bakers

Source: Social Bakers

Twitter is their least engaging platform with less than 10% of the amount of followers they have on Instagram. Their tweets don't gain much traction with only a couple dozen likes, a few retweets, and even less replies. While doTERRA actively responds to Instagram and Facebook, they are not as socially devoted on Twitter. Rather, it is other users that are responding to people's questions on Twitter.

Facebook

                        

Source: Social Bakers

doTERRA's most popular platform is Facebook with over a million likes. I was surprised to see the disproportionate amount of users on Facebook compared to their other social media channels. From a quick scroll, I saw that their Facebook posts get on average 1,000 likes, 200-400 comments, and anywhere between 600-1,000 shares. They respond more often to Facebook posts than on their Instagram and Twitter and post more engaging content such as asking questions and giveaways. I participated in their last giveaway and they liked my comment an hour later!

Google Trends

Interest over time has steadily decreased in the past year. However, there are two major peaks on November 18-24, 2018 and February 17-23, 2019 when doTERRA has its BOGO (buy one, get one free) weeks. I predict that there will be a spike again this November when the next BOGO promotion happens. 

The company's headquarters is based in Utah. Unsurprisingly, doTERRA is most popular in Utah and neighboring Rocky Mountain states. It was unexpected that Hawaii and Alaska are within the top 5 subregions. The cultures in these states are very different from mainland U.S. which could lead to more usage of holistic medicine. 

I wanted to see how doTERRA trended in comparison to "essential oil" searches in general as well as with Young Living, a major direct-selling competitor. In a quick Google search of the top essential oil companies, these two brands showed up on every list. Young Living has a slightly higher average interest over time than doTERRA does, but doTERRA has more prominent spikes throughout the year. The difference is not drastic enough to say that Young Living is more popular than doTERRA. As mentioned earlier, the interest in doTERRA has a downwards trend, but this is persistent Young Living and essential oil as well.

The top related query, "adaptiv doterra", comes from the recent release of the adaptiv series last month. Each year doTERRA hosts a convention where they release a convention kit of new products. These products are exclusive to convention attendees for a few weeks and then are released to the public. This is a clever strategy to build excitement first with the mystery of what will be included in the kit and secondly for the wait to purchase once they have been revealed.

As shown in the maps, essential oils are popular throughout the country, but mostly in the middle of the United States.

Conclusion

Source: The Whole Daily

Because of the complex structure of direct-selling and multi-level-marketing, doTERRA has three distinct audiences they need to target: retail customers, wholesale customers, and wellness advocates. Their Instagram and Facebook accounts are very successful compared to Twitter—mostly because doTERRA interacts more with their customers on those platforms. The company is not very consistent across the three platforms, and I would suggest that doTERRA steps up their Instagram and especially their Twitter to the same quality of their Facebook account. The goal of using social media is to get people excited about essential oils as well as educate and inform them about doTERRA products. The company does this well through their promotions, specifically the BOGO deal which is one of their top related queries. It's evident that the BOGO campaigns promote high buzz as we have examined in the Google Trends analysis. In the next post, I will dive deeper into how these BOGO campaigns are impacting social media engagement across doTERRA's Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts and what this means for the groundswell.

I love free stuff, don't you?