Digital marketing has opened so many doors for today’s businesses, both large and small. It’s incredible the reach an advertisement can have now that it’s on the interconnected, worldwide web. It almost seems too easy!
But for some industries, digital marketing presents some serious challenges. CBD companies, for example, struggle to make their companies stand out given modern restrictions to digital CBD marketing.
One of the biggest restrictions is in social advertising. Social giants like Facebook and Google do not allow purchased ads for CBD products (except for topical CBD, according to a recent update). Even the best CBD companies with the most resources can’t bypass these guidelines and get their advertisements out there!
So, it’s up to CBD marketers to develop a more creative strategy. If you want to successfully market your CBD pills, oils, tinctures, bath bombs, chocolates, or any other amazing product in the digital realm, you need a great digital marketing strategy curated for the industry. Here are some ideas from the pros.
Start With Your Audience
It’s not enough anymore to focus on the quality and premium nature of your CBD products. Consumers are getting smart—they know that your CBD products were probably sourced from some of the same farms as many of the other high-quality CBD companies out there.
Smart CBD companies are learning to differentiate their products from others, not only by the quality of what they sell, but also by who they sell the products to. Defining a niche-specific target audience will outline your entire platform for marketing your products.
Start with the age demographic. It’s true that the majority of CBD users are between the ages of 21 and 65, but what if you could focus on just one decade of that 45-year age span? Or just a few years?
For example, you could focus on the college-aged crowd with a young, hip CBD marketing campaign. Your content would be current and trending, and it would talk about using CBD for things like studying, passing tests, going to social gatherings, and more.
On the other end of the spectrum, you could focus on selling CBD to seniors. There’s a huge market for selling CBD to those with arthritis, glaucoma, and other age-related illnesses. You could consider building an entire marketing platform towards this audience.
Focus On Content Marketing
In the CBD industry, content creation is easily the most powerful form of marketing. There’s so much misinformation, misconceptions, and misunderstandings around CBD that there’s a huge opportunity for digital marketers of today to get it right.
If your company can create amazing content that educates your chosen audience, you’re already one step ahead of dozens of CBD companies on the web. Educational videos, blog posts, graphs, memes, guides, downloadable white papers, and more that accurately portray CBD information are in popular demand among consumers.
Your content doesn’t have to only educate, however. It could inspire, entertain, create laughs, or even directly sell your content. With a good search engine optimization strategy, your CBD company will quickly rise the search engine ranks and see greater exposure as a result of your efforts.
Pay For Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing and brand partnerships make up some of the most impactful forms of marketing no matter what products you sell. Influencers are typically those with a healthy number of devoted followers who love to hear what their favorite Instagram, YouTube, Facebook (etc.) star has to say about various products and services.
This is a great way to get around CBD advertising bans. You can pay for an “advertisement”
of sorts from a brand that aligns well with your own (but isn’t competing, of course). They can share what they love about your product in exchange for free products, affiliate income, or a flat-rate fee.
To give you an idea of how important this form of marketing is today, about 17 percent of today’s marketers use more than half of their marketing budgets towards influencer marketing and 65 percent of marketers with an influencer marketing budget say they’re going to increase that budget. Now is the time to get on board!
Get on Forums
There are a lot of questions out there regarding CBD, and your knowledgeable marketing team can answer many of them. There are dozens of cannabis-friendly forums, websites, blogs, channels, and more that you can peruse regularly.
Answer questions that are relevant to your products and post a link to product pages, blog posts, and other content they might find useful.
Utilize Email
With so much marketing attention being put on influencers and social media, email is an oft underutilized channel. But email is just as relevant as ever, and you can make a powerful statement with your subscribers.
A whopping 99 percent of consumers who responded to a 2020 HubSpot survey check their email every single day. About 50 percent check their personal email account more than 10 times per day! This group also said that they prefer to receive personal communications and updates from brands through email over any other form of communication.
These statistics speak for themselves! If you’re not using email marketing to further your CBD brand, now is the time to start. You can schedule regular email updates, monthly newsletters, special promotions, and more to your subscribers to further your brand and stay above the competition in your area.
Take Advantage of Paid Ads When Possible
As mentioned at the start of this article, most social outlets have lifted the ban on advertising of topical CBD creams. Because they’re not ingested, and people who have been using them obviously have not broken out in hives or rashes, the general digital world is on board with advertisements for these products.
Take advantage of this exposure for your brand. If you don’t yet sell CBD topicals, and it’s within the scope of your company to do so, consider adding topicals to your product list just for the media exposure. Each click to your website will expose consumers to your brand and potentially the other products you sell. Social advertising works, so it’s worth looking into!
