When working with clients in your wellness practice, providing ongoing support and resources between sessions, helps to maintain motivation. Creating high-quality client nutrition education materials with worksheets, graphic designs, and audio content will help to reinforce the important health messages you’ve shared with your client. 

Beyond written or downloadable education materials, graphics and audio resources have quickly become a preferred way of communicating health messages. These visual and audio bytes reinforce the changes you’d like your clients to make in a format that is compact and easy to comprehend, lending itself well to communicating wellness messages.

With the rise of internet-based tools and free online design tools, creating nutrition education materials for your wellness practice has never been easier. While countless resources are already available, creating your own has several advantages.

Healthie is a practice management platform and mobile app designed to help nutrition & wellness professionals manage their business and build relationships with clients. 

How to Create Nutrition Education Materials for Dietitians

1. Tailor content to meet specific clients’ needs. Nutrition education materials available on government websites are designed to serve the general public.  While a helpful starting point, clients come to you for individualized care. When you make your own educational materials, you can incorporate important details like cultural food preferences, intolerances and allergies, and grocery budget practicalities to ensure your tools are uniquely suitable.  
2. Create content that is easy to edit. When you work in a dynamic, evolving field like wellness, the ability to regularly edit nutrition education materials is invaluable. Creating your own resources gives you the ability to update your content as soon as new research comes available. Incorporating the newest scientific evidence in your practice is key to keeping your work relevant and your services reliable.    
3. Make your resources accessible across multiple platforms. Cross-posting your nutrition education materials not only ensures ease of access for existing clients but also increases the likelihood of attracting new attention.  Publishing high-quality health resources, geared toward what your clients want is one of the best ways to ensure consistent web traffic, to raise your SEO and to build your brand.   
4. Develop a consistent, recognizable style. A signature style (or brand) allows people to quickly recognize your work. Be sure to include your logo and your contact information so people know where else they can reach you. Letting your talent and expertise speak for itself is a great way to grow your brand with a network of people motivated by your work ethic and style.  
5. Monetize Your Educational Materials. Creating quality original content is time-consuming! Bundling nutrition education materials into a wellness program for distribution has become a popular way for creative professionals to command a greater return on investment for their work. Programs enable you to build, compile, and distribute resources on a specific topic, to an audience of your choosing. The core tenet of a program is that it drips content out over the course of weeks and months, rather than sharing all information at once. 

The Healthie Programs feature allows providers to curate short term programs, or challenges, that work for their client base. Click here to start your free account today.

Tips for Creating Engaging Nutrition Education Materials

1. Create Resources that Resonate with Your Wellness Clients

Education materials are useful when they effectively deliver the desired message to an audience. Here are a few tips to consider once you think you’ve identified a need for creating a resource:  

• Think of your ideal client, who are they and what are they hoping to learn?  
• Use an active voice and a conversational tone
• Incorporate evidence-based content but avoid the technical jargon
• Deliver a positive message
• Include culturally appropriate graphics and language
• Trial your health resource with family, friends and colleagues before launching

2. Choose Which Format to Communicate with Your Clients

Print and digital resources, including articles, worksheets, podcasts and infographics are all useful tools that clients will reach for at different points in their journey. Preferences may vary depending on your target demographic and the specific knowledge or skills they hope to gain.

Written Content

Articles serve as a practical option for sharing new research while worksheets can be a helpful tool for rehearsing skills like calculating insulin to carbohydrate ratios or comparing nutrition fact table information.  

Graphic Content

Infographics offer an aesthetically pleasing, low barrier method for sharing information.  Complicated ideas are conveyed via pictures and graphs and typically require no more than a minute or two for viewers to absorb the key points.  People today are choosing to engage more frequently with ultra-efficient options like this for quickly building their knowledge base.

Audio Content

Podcasts offer creators the option to produce audio content that requires no visual engagement on the part of the consumer. Like listening to the radio, podcast listeners can take in content while in the car, on the way to work, or even in the shower.  Podcasts seem to be popular with younger audiences and those less attached to more traditional print resources.  

3. Use Online Tools for Creating High-Quality Nutrition Education Resources

Whether interested in making your first infographic, Instagram post or podcast episode, you do not need to be an artist, designer or engineer to get started.  There are countless tools and free platforms available online to teach you everything you’ll need to know. Here are a few tools we suggest to help get you started:

• Snappa.com: Offers templates, free images and easy to use drag and drop tools to help users quickly create high-quality online graphics for social media.  
• Canva.com:    Offers professional layouts, photo editing tools and drag-and-drop tools to create graphics for social media.  Option to professionally print your work and have it delivered to you too.
• Biteable.com:  Offers templates and tools to quickly and easily create video content that can be shared across social media platforms.  
• Anchor.fm:  Offers all the tools necessary to create, distribute and monetize a podcast.  

4. Share Your Resources with Clients

Once you’ve created your educational resources, it is time to share it with your clients.  Sharing your work digitally is simple to do and adds value to existing and prospective clients alike.

• Telehealth platforms like Healthie make it easy for you to share your resources and videos with your clients. Organize your clients into groups and upload which education materials you’d like all group members to access.

• Bundle your education materials into a comprehensive wellness program, for new or existing clients. Healthie’s Program tool makes it easy to customize your wellness programs and automatically distribute pre-loaded content like videos, quizzes, surveys, handouts, and even customized emails. Schedule when you want your program materials to be released and how you want your clients to receive it. To set up your free Starter account today, click here.

• Create free ebooks or downloadable content to use as marketing incentives on your website or social media profiles.  This can be a creative way to attract your ideal client, and grow your practice.

Getting creative with sharing effective nutrition education materials with your clients lets you hone your evidence-based practice skills while showcasing your creative passion for achieving health goals.  By adding a consistent, on-brand look to your work, you’ll add valuable resources to your existing client and attract new leads.  ‍