Are you ready to take on the “Green Rush” of CBD marketing? The CBD wave has been rising nonstop. Lately, many aspiring entrepreneurs have wanted to ride it to the bank!
Before you dive in, though, we all know you need an effective strategy first. Your brand can blaze a trail in the CBD industry with the best tricks and tools!
More nations are legalizing such products due to the promising benefits of cannabidiol.
As more and more people rave about CBD oil, the burgeoning CBD market could be worth $20 million by 2024.
However, there are still legal hurdles in marketing hemp-derived products despite 2018’s Farm Bill opening the way to CBD users and those who market CBD.
Because of this, the cannabis industry has resorted to alternative tactics such as sponsored posts and Google advertising. To get your CBD marketing running and over these hurdles, we’ll teach you all about:
What’s the first step to a CBD Marketing Strategy?
To start your CBD brand, you must first know how to comply with CBD laws. While the federal government allowed the use of hemp-derived CBD, specific state laws complicate the issue.
A state like California could totally allow CBD products while another like Kansas could completely ban them.
Worse, some social media platforms have a carpet ban on selling CBD ads, and Google adverts for the CBD hemp extract are swiftly taken down.
As you can see, this makes advertising CBD oil quite tricky. Posting an online ad haphazardly could spill it outside your target audience. You may land in legal trouble, and your content marketing strategy may come to an abrupt end.
Of course, business owners never fret about mere setbacks and always find another way to sell CBD.
In response, they’ve crafted a new strategy for hemp products. This involves innovative digital marketing tactics like content marketing and affiliate marketing CBD.
Since everyone’s on the internet nowadays, your brand must have a website equipped to handle online transactions.
Also, your brand must have an array of content that would entice them closer to your brand.
What’s more, you may request permission from other companies to feature your content on their websites.
Read More: Digital Marketing 101: What You Need To Know
CBD Marketing Restrictions
Google Ads
Google has continued to be a particularly sharp thorn in the CBD industry. The search engine giant holds a policy prohibiting CBD advertising, placing it under their recreational drugs advertising policy. Consequences include account suspension, loss of credibility, and flagging billing information. There are ways to move around the policy if you still want to use Google for your CBD content marketing.
How to still run an ad on Google
- Create a new Google Ads account specifically for your CBD products. If you trigger a Google trap, it won’t affect anything outside of that business.
- Next, create an ad campaign through the ‘paid search ads’ option.
- Once done, find relevant keywords to connect to your product. This is when SEO optimization and keyword research come in.
- This is the important part. Write the ad without directly promoting your product. Focus on benefits without promoting anything not scientifically and factually backed (i.e., CBD oil cures cancer and helps asthma)
- Finally, create a landing page for your consumers. This is where content strategy comes into play, where you can create informative content that will lead to consumers wanting your product.
Facebook Ads
After a long battle between CBD brand owners and the social media platform, Facebook finally allows the advertising of CBD products– as long as they’re topical. This is pretty good news for a CBD business, as advertising on the platform can bring in more customers to your website with a simple link. Just be sure to promote only non-digestible CBD products like CBD oils, and your Facebook campaign is on its way!
How do I create a website & sales funnel?
You’ll need the best marketing tools for your business, including an e-commerce platform and interesting landing pages. It will perform several functions like tracking your online revenue and recording customer purchases.
Unless you can build your own from scratch, you’ll need to outsource this to another company. Here are some of the most popular e-commerce platforms for your CBD marketing strategy:
Woocommerce
Pros:
If you need a free and easy-to-use e-commerce platform, this option may woo you.
Woocommerce is integrated into the free content management system (CMS) WordPress, one of the most commonly used ones nowadays.
Plugins for WooCommerce include WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips for order confirmation emails. WooCommerce Customizer also lets you customize button texts and labels without changing any codes.
Cons:
You might need to shell out more cash if you need better features.
Shopify
Pros:
Not to be confused with the music player, Shopify enables your small business to enter the online market quickly.
It cuts out the technical busywork and lets you choose from many storefront themes.
You can add a host of plugins to Shopify, including Nudgify, which creates effects like FOMO to engage customers. Plugins also include SimplyCost track profits and Pre-Order Now to keep product pages up to date.
Cons:
Unfortunately, it’s not compatible with some of the most popular merchant services, such as Squareup.
Magento
Pros:
Do you want your brand’s website to outshine the rest? With Magento, you can add features to your website that add versatility to your marketing strategy.
It knows you have the ambition to expand your brand, so it’s designed to scale along with your ascent.
Magento plugins include Magento 2 Social Login, allowing customers to easily log in to your store through social media. Magento 2 Reward Points by Mageplaza can also be added to let customers earn points through actions on your site.
Cons:
The very best doesn’t come cheap, as you might need to spend more on dedicated server hosting.
Once you’ve found your e-commerce platform, you should build your website properly.
Ideally, your web pages should link to each other according to this structure:
- Homepage
- Categories or sections
- Subcategories (for bigger websites)
- Individual blog posts and pages
Your customer’s navigation experience should start with your landing page. They will then look for further information, so they should have an easy time looking for it.
For instance, place answers to frequently asked questions in your FAQ section, so consumers can easily find them. A proper site structure not only simplifies the user experience; it also helps Google understand your website.
Whether for CBD marketing strategy or other industries, you need Google search traffic. Google will easily include it in search results if you’ve properly structured your website.
This increases the likelihood that people will visit your landing page and buy your products.
More importantly, your strategy must follow the stages of the sales funnel:
- Awareness/Attention: The customer gains awareness of your brand, but they display no inclination for it.
- Interest: The customer acknowledges the merits of your products but has not decided on purchasing them.
- Decision: The customer ponders on buying your product, but they haven’t finalized their choice.
- Action: The customer finally pays for your product or service.
Your CBD marketing strategy must be inbound, meaning it guides the entire sales funnel towards your brand. It would help if you informed people about your brand to include them in your customer base.
They must learn about the benefits of your products and services through blogs and other content.
Next, you must explain why your customers should buy what your company offers. If your inbound strategy for marketing succeeds, your brand is on its way to success!
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Marketing Strategies
Having a marketing strategy is key in creating any brand. Through your strategy, you can stay focused on your consumer’s needs and desires and stay ahead of competitors in your market. Having a CBD marketing strategy will do the same for your CBD brand. From social media to sites online, your strategy will guarantee your success.
Content Marketing for CBD businesses
Content marketing uses content (like blog posts, articles, and videos) to entice your audience. This is different from traditional advertising, like paid ads and paid advertising campaigns, as the selling focus isn’t so blatant. This is especially useful for advertising CBD, as your content could lead your brand to become an authority that CBD consumers come to for information. Presenting educational content on CBD presents your website as a place marketing CBD and as a brand that is knowledgeable about your subject.
Marketing content could look like listicles of the best products on the market, posts about new laws around CBD, and news about the industry that will keep customers coming to your website.
SEO is one way to ensure that your content reaches your target audience. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of gaining visitors to your website through search engines. Using an SEO strategy in your content, like specific keywords searched the most, ensures that your content ranks high on search engines. The higher you rank, the more visible you become.
Want content that ranks high but doesn’t have the time to create it? LeadAdvisors is the perfect solution to getting your content marketing off the ground.
What can a content strategy do for CBD products?
Your brand’s expansion relies on growing its influence throughout the internet. A part of your strategy must include posting content on affiliate websites.
This shows consumers that your brand is worth recommending, so they’re likely to trust and purchase its products.
Moreover, this helps your funnel’s interest stage as your content highlights your brand’s merits.
For example, take a look at this CBD article from Inquirer. Since the Inquirer is a reputable news source, the article’s CBD oil brand will gain higher credibility.
People reading the article will learn more about CBD oil products, so they will likely search for them online.
Even better, they might click the links in the article that proceed to the sponsor’s landing page. Once your consumers stumble upon your homepage, it may now guide them to the decision stage.
Your landing page must now ultimately convince your potential customers to acquire your products.
Writing effective guest posts can quickly guide your consumers through the entirety of the sales funnel. Use sponsored posts well, and those target customers will become loyal customers!
Social Media Strategies
Of course, your brand should be where everyone is nowadays: social media! While social media could be a useful tool in your CBD marketing efforts, it can also be a minefield of restrictions for a CBD company. CBD marketers get the most out of social media platforms when they keep up with the restrictions of each platform.
Benefits
You may post about hemp-derived products on Facebook and Instagram so that your target audience can link to your landing page. Attach hashtags to those posts, so people can easily identify and share your content.
You could also perform influencer marketing as part of your strategy of marketing. You may ask well-known personalities on YouTube to promote products such as those from your brand.
They can’t directly promote your brand, but the videos may link to your landing page.
Pitfalls
Before posting anything, check each platform’s advertising restrictions for CBD oil restrictions.
For example, while Facebook and Instagram allow some posts, they don’t allow any CBD oil ads.
As for Pinterest, you aren’t allowed to post anything related to CBD oil.
Twitter is like Facebook regarding CBD. As long as you’re advertising topical CBD, you’re safe. Just be sure to be pre-authorized by Twitter before posting and read their stipulations here.
Understand their user guidelines well, and social media could serve as CBD marketing tools!
Influencer Marketing For CBD Brands
Benefits
Using an influencer to spread the reach of brands allows a wider reach than would normally give; you can tap into the influencer’s fanbase (why does this sound familiar?)
Influencers are designed to use storytelling to sell their brand and personality. Selling your brand is not too much of a stretch for them.
Pitfalls
Avoid the posers. Many influencers out there are fake and want a free product. Please don’t fall for it. Please do your research, look at their social media and make it a good fit before sealing the deal.
It isn’t easy to precisely measure how well the content is doing.
Affiliate Marketing For a CBD Business
Want to create buzz about your CBD brand? Try an affiliate marketing program!
An affiliate marketing program is when you hire affiliate marketers to promote your product, whether CBD edibles or CBD oil products. They can also push CBD customers to your website. They get a percentage for every sale you make in connection to them. Pretty simple, huh?
Benefits
If you find yourself too busy with your online store to engage new customers, having affiliate marketers would work for you. This way, someone other than you can build brand awareness without your brand feeling less aggressive to target customers.
In addition, the affiliates are promoting you on their various channels online, which can be beneficial to your search engine rankings and your position as an authority in the cannabis industry.
Pitfalls
Of course, the benefits of this strategy take time. Nothing will happen over the weekend. Instead, you’ll have to recruit trusted affiliates among CBD users and periodically check in with the program to keep it on the right track.
This strategy also includes money, meaning you’ll have to budget enough for services. While something like that is a drop in the bucket for large businesses, this needs serious consideration for those just starting to sell CBD online.
Email Marketing For CBD Brands
Many CBD companies use email marketing as it’s great for staying in touch with current customers. With emails, you can let your customers know when there’s a sale, and what’s going on with your business, and entice them to look at your online content.
Benefits
There’s a reason why so many CBD brands use email marketing. It’s easy to create and track metrics, allowing you to see your success in real-time. It also allows you space to promote products and services while building a relationship with your base, particularly new customers.
You can even create a marketing campaign through it.
Pitfalls
One major problem is that most people won’t open the email. Many different companies saturate the consumer market with emails to the point that most people glance over the title and hit delete. You’ll have to beat your competition and the consumer’s instinct to check out.
That’s why it’s critical to have a design that can draw both your loyal visitors and CBD-curious consumers. It’s also important that the design is mobile-friendly.
How do I utilize email marketing?
Your content should have a call-to-action for customers to give their email addresses in exchange for newsletters.
Once you have those details, your marketing strategy may now conduct email marketing.
As the name suggests, you send emails to your subscribers, which should draw your customers closer to your brand.
If you’re dealing with first-time customers, you could sweeten the deal by providing promo codes.
These will give discounts or special content that should improve their initial impressions of your brand. This way, they would likely get a repeat purchase.
On the other hand, they might exit your site and leave their online carts behind. In this case, your strategy should include customer win-back tactics.
For instance, you may send a reminder to people who left their online cart.
This email or SMS should emphasize the value they’re missing out on, so they will likely return and finalize their purchase.
Of course, you’ll take forever to go through your email list! You should use email marketing platforms that automatically send your emails depending on your preferred settings, like Klaviyo. Klaviyo provides email segmentation and a data analytics dashboard to keep you up to date on important metrics for your email campaign.
Other email marketing platforms that are perfect for CBD sales include:
This is one of those marketing tools you should add to your brand’s arsenal!
How do I generate brand awareness & optimization?
Many people learn about certain brands by watching videos and reading reviews. They learn more about how certain items or services can improve their daily lives.
More often than not, those reviews and videos will recommend a product at the end.
Likewise, it would help if you adopted this tactic in your strategy. For instance, this CBD Salve article serves as informative and promotional material.
It teaches how CBD oil topicals can help with skin conditions, and then it concludes by promoting a brand’s CBD oil salve.
Convincing readers about the benefits of CBD oil topicals plants the idea of purchasing them. Those types of content lead consumers toward the awareness stage of your sales funnel. Moreover, these increase the chances that potential customers will check your guest posts and CBD-focused blogs.
As we’ve discussed, these will tackle your customers’ interest and decision stage. Thus, your CBD marketing strategy must employ various tactics that complement each other.
How can analytics & KPI track performance?
Your CBD marketing strategy must have ways of tracking progress. You should know how it’s performing, so you can implement adjustments if needed.
In other words, you should include analytics and KPIs in your marketing tools. There are online analytics websites that can track your marketing progress.
However, it would help create comprehensive key performance indicators (KPI) for analytics to help you.
These are the necessary achievements that indicate success in certain aspects of your strategy.
For example, readers satisfy email KPIs such as email conversions whenever they follow calls-to-action to subscribe to newsletters. You may input KPIs into Google Analytics, a vital marketing tool that can track them in real-time.
Once you’ve gathered the Analytics data, you may check them for possible improvements to your marketing efforts.
Just make certain aspects like product prices match your KPIs to provide accurate information. In addition, Google Analytics provides a heatmap of your website.
This shows where users often click on your web pages, giving you a better understanding of the user experience. CBD marketing tools can help your strategy adapt to any market conditions!
Read More: How to Generate Traffic: Content Production Strategy Tips
Who is the best CBD oil marketing agency?
It would help if you had an excellent strategy to launch a successful CBD oil brand. Though, it doesn’t mean you have to do it yourself.
Instead, why not outsource your digital marketing to the experts at LeadAdvisors?
LeadAdvisors can handle your CBD marketing while you deal with the other aspects of your business. They know all about the essential marketing tools, such as Google Analytics.
From building domain authority to branding on Google, LeadAdvisors will help raise your CBD marketing from the ground up.
With LeadAdvisors, you’ll be at the forefront of the CBD oil Green Rush!
FAQ’s
Can CBD brands market on Facebook Marketplace?
The short answer is no, and it doesn’t look like the foreseeable future. Long answer? You should be fine if you keep your ad vague and focused on topical, hemp plant-based products. Facebook is known for rejecting ad campaigns that advertise CBD but align with its restrictions. Don’t be discouraged, but do keep that in mind.
Can A CBD business offer CBD on Instagram Shop?
You can try, but it will be taken down more than likely. Even worse, your account might even get shut down. Just like Facebook, as long as you’re smart about how you advertise and stay within the restrictions, you can market your CBD products.
How do I know which eCommerce platform is right for me?
No two platforms are the same. Carefully consider the needs of the business and make sure your potential platform meets all of them.
How do I find affiliate websites?
Reach out to websites that showcase content like yours. Then, reach out to them through their contact information. Be polite, be to the point, and thank them for their time.
Is an online CBD brand profitable?
We’d say so. Just last year, the cannabis industry hit USD 4.9 billion in revenue. It doesn’t look like CBD will stop climbing any time soon, either.
The best way to a great CBD brand is a great marketing strategy that highlights how great your product is. Don’t have the time to create one? Contact LeadAdvisors. We’re here to help!
What are the 3 other marketing strategies outside digital marketing for CBD businesses?
Retail
Retail will be a great way to take your business offline and into the real world. Going offline will allow your site and your actual shop to bring in organic traffic while giving consumers a place to go.
Door-to-door
Door to door is a tried and true method to use. Why not meet your target audience on the sidewalk instead of just focusing on online markets and search engines? This gives your brand personality, leaving consumers with an impression of your brand that could lead to organic growth in consumers.
Partnering with Local Businesses
Maybe one of your CBD marketing strategies is in your town. While marketing CBD oil online, you can partner with local businesses to spread the word about your brand. Businesses like local massage therapists and chiropractors would use your products, like CBD oils and offer them to their patients.
Grow your business on autopilot, schedule a strategy call now.
