CBD Digital Marketing - Best Practices and Brand Building
Estimated to be a $16.32 billion industry by 2026, CBD is a fundamentally secure market.
The biggest issue our clients experience or have experienced with CBD is a two faced problem.
How do I get my message out there through the digital space?
How do I build my CBD brand?
Before we get to that - let's jump into what CBD is.
Extracted from either hemp or marijuana plants; cannabidiol as it's true name -- CBD as it's commonly known, is commonly associated with health and wellness. The extract is put into two classifications.
Food Grade
Therapeutic Grade
It's important to note it's societal association with health and wellness because majority of consumers go after therapeutic grade CBD in order to manage pain or other health related symptoms. This also provides an avenue to present your product in front of consumers through digital mediums.
Legally speaking, CBD derived from marijuana plants is illegal and majority of digital networks will not allow it past their compliance departments. However, due to the 2018 Farm Bill which removed hemp as a controlled substance, CBD extracted from hemp can be treated like any other product and is under the jurisdiction of the FDA for which they will craft health guidelines by which the industry must follow in the future to safeguard consumers from misleading advertorials, regardless of format.
From this we can surmise three things
Make sure you have a lawyer on retainer. If you don't have one, Black Drone can recommend a few options based on your state of residency.
Use CBD that is extracted from hemp if you plan to sell it to consumers
Guidelines set forth by the FDA must be followed
How do I advertise CBD with digital marketing?
This is where we get into the meat and bones. Setting up your digital business eco-system is imperative to brand building online. Without having avenues through which you send your message - there is no way for you to find new customers, differentiating your brand through tests and retaining customers. The low hanging fruits is going to be Organic Traffic -- search engine optimization.
1. CBD Search Engine Optimization:
Website. Is your domain a core asset or assisting asset? This means when you buy a domain for your CBD brand, is it exact match (i.e. thebestcbdonline.site) or is it brand focused (greenrelief.com) Depending on which one it is, it changes the difficulty in acquiring users but also changes introvertedly the image of the brand for the long run. Getting both and building both is not beyond the realms of reality and should be heavily considered.
Technical SEO. Do you have your H tags set up properly? Are your images optimized? What is the speed of your site on a 3G throttled mobile? Make sure that users are not having a bad experience engaging with your brand from a technical perspective.
Social Signals. Do you have a Twitter account? If not, get one. Reddit? Get one. Whatever is out there that people use to communicate or interact with one another and companies - make sure you’re on it. It doesn't matter about followers, likes or how many images you have. At least, not when you are starting. It matters that everything is unison and that it exists. For some consumers - they might prefer TikTok to Snapchat. The same applies to companies - for some industries, LinkedIn is more important than Facebook. If you're maintaining these signals, there is no way for you to know which one is more important.
Content. This goes beyond just writing a few articles. Get creative -- make a video, create a downloadable, promote someone else's complementary product or even give out physical product in exchange for an action. Increasing engagement with your brand / product is the end goal to all of this.
2. CBD Email Marketing
MailChimp. Most CBD companies will fall into this bucket. You don't need something overly complex to manage, you need to get the message out there and you need to be able to do it fairly quickly with a few segmentation options. MailChimp is a great way to achieve that.
SendGrid. This is meant for more advanced CBD companies that want to work with API's. Shifting data back into their email platform in order to create truly complex targeting strategies. Shipping Facebook or Google data and compiling attribution history while sending the message through a cost effective email is an excellent way to keep costs down while backing up the deliverability with real time tested data.
Email Content. Don't look at your content for email campaigns as a one way road. When you're sending out a message for your product, it's important to remember how and when you conquested that users email in the beginning. Did they sign up from a previous sale? Was it a direct consumer? Did they experience previous pains in ordering the product the first time?
3. CBD Paid Digital Media
Google. The crown jewel of digital advertising. When we pair Google Ads to CBD brands, we see impacts of over 50% in added revenue. Shopping, display, search, re-marketing, local shopping - all these channels have consumers that trust the content displayed by the network and therefore are on average a greater lifetime acquisition.
Facebook. Recently changing it's stance on hemp based CBD products is a must for any company let alone CBD brands.
Instagram. Visually dominant, the format works well with brand building and with CBD you want to stand out apart from competitors visually as it's physically faster than written differentiation’s.
Snapchat & TikTok. Both fledgling networks, both hold demographics which view CBD in a more positive light are greate venues to keep your brand top of mind for the customers to come.
Pinterest. Over 90% of eCommerce products flow through Pinterest. Although not on the same scale as Instagram of actionable users, Pinterest offers CBD brands discounted ad traffic.
Quora. Not only is Quora good for your organic traffic in it's question based format, the ad inventory is affordable and leans heavily on convincing users who are on the fence.
LinkedIn. If your CBD brand has a B2B side to it - LinkedIn is excellent with getting in front of vendors.
Programmatic. AdTherorent, Quantcast, StackAdapt, DoubleClick, Amazon, all of these provide mass inventory at varying prices. Excellent for when the road map of ad buying has been drawn out. Often enough, direct purchases made through these vendors can outperform Google or Facebook. - Amazon. Search ads on Amazon are working for many CBD brands and will continue to do so as the eCommerce giant continues to absorb market share.
Feed Aggregators. Sites like Rakuten, Wal-Mart or eBay allow data feed submission and bundling your product into the format of an existing vendor is always an easy win - especially when they are not known to cut deals on ad inventory.
4. CBD Analytics
It doesn't matter whether you use Google or Adobe or Pardot. What matters is that you are collecting user behavior statistics and compiling them into a manner which can be interpreted and actions can be formed. Understanding the difference in performance of when your site if loading at 5 seconds vs 2 seconds is important as that sets up your key performance indicators - of which you are to base your improvements and next steps. If a user can't check out because the phone number field is broken, how are you to know if you have nothing recording the errors?
5. CBD A2P SMS Marketing
Twilio. Out of the box solution that works to improve customer service and highly under utilized by many industries let alone CBD.
Custom solutions. SMS Marketing is a bigger giant than CBD with more headaches than dealing with Facebook. Custom solutions exist for CBD brands depending on their needs and requirements. Some companies need direct routes to consumers in specific countries, others need lower rates. Whatever it is - in today's climate of A2P SMS, it can be achieved and you should be dedicating some time into learning it's benefits and how to apply them to your customers.
6. Affiliate Marketing
In-house. One of the later stages of CBD brand marketing, affiliate programs allow others to the work for you. Without generating your own eco-system first, you stand the risk of losing control over the program. We highly recommend reaching out to agencies that have overseen and rolled out affiliate programs before encouraging the idea.
It's important to get these channels built out ahead of time. Not all of them will work - but without testing them, you won't know what channel works best for your CBD brand.
Once you have identified core channels which communicate your CBD brand to consumers - the next steps are about polishing your image in the eyes of a consumer.
Does the packaging help you stand out?
Is the price point reasonable? Can it be lowered to increase quantity, can it be increased to meet profitability?
How does customer service play a role in mapping your lifetime conversion value?
Can you glean any information on persona's of consumers to be able to better tailor your messaging?
Are you making sure that the brand message fits the channel?
If someone is browsing videos - are you presenting your product in an acceptable format?
Without taking the basic best practices to building a CBD brand of creating these avenues to funnel your message you won't be able to get to the key questions that will really turn your CBD product into a CBD brand.
This material does not constitute legal, professional or financial advice and Black Drone disclaims any liability with respect to this material. Please consult your attorney or professional adviser on specific legal, professional or financial matters. If you require more in-depth support on your CBD products or brand, please don't hesitate to reach out.