8 CBD Marketing Ideas For New & Existing CBD Companies

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Table of Contents

The Best CBD Marketing Ideas Using Organic & Paid Tactics

If you’re a CBD marketer or business owner, I’m sure you’re looking for the best CBD marketing ideas for your budget. In this article, we discuss the top 10 best CBD marketing ideas to grow your e-commerce business.

Does your current marketing strategy consist of a holistic approach of CBD marketing ideas using multiple digital marketing channels, or are you keeping things (too) simple by only using social media platforms to promote your business?

Social media is an integral part of any CBD marketing plan and should mainly be used for PR, customer education, creating brand awareness, and building product trust. If you’re only focused on social media to execute your CBD marketing ideas, you’re limiting yourself.

Social media also has way too many restrictions to be an effective CBD marketing channel and there are several other options to implement your CBD marketing ideas such as search engine optimization (SEO), blog content marketing, as well as paid advertising options like sponsored content ads, programmatic display ads for CBD, and Google search ads.

Yes – it is totally, 100% possible to advertise CBD online, legally, and we have been running successful CBD advertising campaigns in search engines like Google & Bing as well as banner ads on the world’s most popular websites.

The good news is that there are plenty of options for marketing CBD that does not require a large marketing budget for media/advertising/PPC (pay-per-click).

Below we’ll discuss 8 CBD marketing ideas to help grow your business using paid advertising, as well as 3 organic CBD marketing ideas that require zero ad spend.

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The 3 Best Organic CBD Marketing Ideas

We’ll start with the foundation for any CBD business. Organic marketing tactics like SEO, blog content marketing, and email marketing are essential CBD marketing ideas that you’ll want to implement early on in your business lifecycle.

The organic CBD marketing tactics we discuss below are far more cost-effective than running paid advertising, especially for new CBD businesses. The fact is paid ads for CBD are expensive and would require a minimum monthly advertising budget of $1,500-$3,000 USD per month.

So, if you’re a new CBD company, we highly recommend starting with the organic CBD marketing ideas listed below. 

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1. CBD SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

CBD SEO should be the foundation of any CBD marketing strategy. It has to be the ideal CBD marketing idea because an effective CBD SEO strategy will bring you highly qualified traffic, for free, from organic search for many years.

Keep in mind that absolutely everyone who is interested in learning more about CBD, or in evaluating CBD brands/products, or purchasing CBD products, will start with a search engine almost every of the time.

When these prospective customers search for CBD, you want content from your website to show up with high visibility and placement in organic search results – preferably the top, or close to the top of page 1, right?

This is precisely why you want to invest in an experienced CBD SEO agency to implement this CBD marketing idea on your website, asap.

Eighty percent of consumers will conduct online research to learn about the features, benefits, and reviews of a product/service before actually purchasing from a business.

With the high level of competition with CBD businesses in the USA and the EU, your online visibility needs to be a priority in your CBD marketing strategy.

If one of your CBD marketing ideas is to build a website conversion funnel, and you need an effective strategy to drive highly qualified people to your website to fill to the top of your funnel, we highly recommend implementing a CBD SEO strategy on your website.

CBD SEO makes your website search engine friendly and easily found in relevant search results, but it doesn’t stop there. SEO is never a one-and-done thing.

In order to rank on page 1 for a relevant search query, your website needs to score high with Google in terms of relevance, authority, and trustworthiness when not comes to each specific search query.

So how do you build and maintain your site’s relevance, authority, and trust on the topic of CBD products?

You implement a keyword-driven blog content marketing strategy and regularly publish relevant, high-quality, SEO-optimized blog content on your website that answers the questions your target market is asking about CBD products.

The goal of CBD SEO is to drive qualified traffic to your website from organic search engines like Google & Bing. The bonus of CBD SEO is that it’s free – meaning there is no paid advertising spend required in order to get results.

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2. CBD Blog Content Marketing

This CBD marketing idea performs best when combined with your CBD website SEO strategy discussed above.

SEO and blog content marketing for CBD work hand-in-hand to build your website’s relevance, authority, and trust with users and with search engines.

When crafting a blog content marketing strategy for your website, our recommendation is to ensure that your CBD content & copywriting fills an informational/educational need for your audience, not just a marketing need for your brand.

Use free and paid keyword research tools to find the long-tail CBD search queries that your target market is typing into Google, and use those CBD keyword phrases as blog content topics.

The more high-quality blog content you have on your website, the better the chance of Google scoring your site high on relevance and authority metrics, and boosting your site’s search engine rankings.

However, your blog content must be in-depth to be high-quality. A 500-word blog article just won’t cut it. 

It may not be worth it to save money on hiring an inexperienced freelance CBD copywriter. You’ll likely be much better off hiring a CBD content writer that understands SEO copywriting and the CBD industry. 

You should aim to publish a minimum of 3-6 x 1,200-1,500 word SEO optimized blog articles on your website each month in order to develop your site’s domain authority, relevance, and trust.

Pro Tip: We recommend using blog content writing combined with sponsored content advertising in order to help amplify your blog content on popular websites, drive more highly qualified traffic to your website, and improve your search engine rankings.

We discuss sponsored content advertising later in this artcile in point #5 of the top 5 best CBD marketing ideas using paid advertising.

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3. Email Marketing Newsletters & Drip Campaigns

Using email to connect with your new and existing customers is probably one of the best CBD marketing ideas out there.

However, I’m not sure many CBD businesses are making use of this lucrative tactic to market their CBD products and grow their business.

Email marketing for CBD companies can be an extremely profitable CBD marketing idea for your online store.

It’s one of the most effective ways for you to educate your customers on CBD and the features & benefits of your product line. You can also stay in touch with existing customers and offer them special deals and reasons to come back to your online store.

Ninety-Two percent of adults who use the internet use email. Sixty-One percent of adults check email daily.

91 percent of US adults like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with (MarketingSherpa)

Email is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in helping your business acquire new customers. (McKinsey)

This completes the top 3 CBD marketing ideas that require zero ad spend. Let’s move on to using paid advertising for your business.

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The 5 Best CBD Marketing Ideas Using Paid Advertising

Digital advertising, particularly on search engines, is one of the best ideas for marketing CBD because platforms like Google and Bing attract “bottom of the funnel” customers, who are actively searching to buy CBD online, directly to your website and your CBD products.

I’m sure you’d agree that when someone wants to learn about a CBD brand or product, or when they want to purchase CBD, they are going to Google (or Bing) to search for an answer to their question or a product for their needs.

They most certainly do not go to Facebook or Instagram, let alone TikTok when they want to buy CBD or do any pre-purchase research.

That’s why search engine marketing, including CBD SEO as well as paid Google Ads for CBD, are two of the most effective CBD marketing tactics for new and existing businesses. 

Most all of our CBD oil marketing ideas include using a search engine organically (i.e. SEO) or for paid advertising (i.e. search ads).

For this article, we’ll split our 8 CBD marketing ideas into 5 tactics that require paid advertising and may have some content restrictions, and 3 purely organic tactics that require no paid advertising and therefore have no content restrictions.

Let’s start with our first CBD oil marketing idea, digital advertising, and break it down to the 5 most effective CBD advertising options.

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1. Advertising CBD on Google Search

Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords, may have some advertising policies that restrict advertising for CBD products and services, but believe it or not, Google actually does allow for CBD advertising on their search network only, as long as you follow certain unpublished rules.

To be clear, Google has a few advertising options/channels which include the Google search network, the Google Display Network, YouTube, and Google Shopping.

In our experience with CBD advertising on Google since 2017, we’ve come to understand that Google will not allow CBD ads on their display network, YouTube, or on their shopping network.

However, in the EU, we have had success with getting CBD ads approved and running live on Google Shopping. This is possible in the USA as well but there are a few additional challenges.

For all intents and purposes, CBD business owners should know that you can advertise CBD on Google but you need to know the do’s and dont’s. We highly recommend you hire an experienced CBD advertising agency or CBD advertising expert to manage your Google ad campaigns.

We have several CBD case studies showing our success with running CBD advertising on Google search. Check out the CBD Case Study for Google Ads in the UK, this CBD case study for Google Ads in the USA, as well as this one also covering Google Ads for CBD in the USA.

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2. Bing Search Advertising & CBD Products

Using Google Ads as a CBD marketing idea is typically the first choice for many when considering CBD advertising, but did you know that using Bing search ads for CBD can be the ideal complement to your CBD PPC ad strategy and fill any gaps in your brand’s online presence.

With Bing Ads accompanying your Google Ads campaigns, you can expand your CBD brand’s reach into new and unique territories. And even though Google has more search volume, Bing boasts higher positioning, less bidding competition, and generally a lower cost-per-click for CBD-related terms.

According to Statista, in February 2021, Bing accounted for 6.7% of the global search market, while Google took 86.6%.

That 6.7% is actually pretty huge especially when you consider that Bing search provides good conversions and has a user base that shouldn’t be ignored.

This 6.7% of search users accounts for millions who use Microsoft Bing every day.

It’s particularly important to optimize for Bing if you’re targeting an American audience. In fact, one-third of online queries in the U.S. are powered by Microsoft properties when you factor in Yahoo and voice searches.

If you’re already using Google Ads as one of your CBD marketing ideas, you should consider splitting or increasing your media budget to include CBD search campaigns on Bing search as well. 

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3. CBD Advertising on Facebook 

The amount of impressions and engagement a business can get on an Instagram or Facebook Ad is absolutely insane as compared to the reach your brand gets on daily organic posts on either platform combined.

So there’s no doubt that many entrepreneurs’ first CBD marketing idea is to try and run ads on Facebook and/or Instagram. This can typically be a big mistake 95% of the time.

While it actually is possible to run certain types of CBD ads on Facebook, there are a few points you should consider before proceeding with this CBD marketing idea.

First off, if your goal is to increase e-commerce sales on your CBD website, Facebook is the worst place to start because:

1. They have arbitrary restrictions that are managed by an algorithm and not monitored by a reasonable human being that can get your Facebook account banned.

2. If your account does get banned, you can start over with a new Facebook profile and ad account but you’ll need a new credit card, a new email address, a new Facebook profile, a new Facebook business page, and you may even need to create the new account from a different IP address than the account that was banned because Facebook can & will track all these items.

3. Pretty much no one, ever, has the intent to purchase CBD when they open up their Facebook app. 

The key to CBD advertising on Facebook is to take the “All Hemp” approach and advertise hemp-based/hemp-derived CBD topicals only, without mentioning “CBD” in the ad copy, landing page, website, SEO metadata, and product labels. 

You may have heard of this approach before which includes replacing the word CBD with “hemp” on all product packaging (images only) as well. 

This approach has been used by Medterra CBD, Charlottes Web, and many other companies who sell CBD products and want to advertise on Facebook.

Facebook’s advertising policies actually allow for the advertising of hemp-based topical products only. This means hemp-derived creams, lotions, salves, sticks. Nothing that is ingestible like oils, tinctures, edibles, gummies, capsules, etc.

The catch is that there can be no mention of CBD on your landing page or website. This means you need some additional infrastructure that includes a “clean”, CBD-free website or landing page with e-commerce.

To be clear, you can not have a “clean”, CBD-free website or landing page that links to your main CBD site to process the final sale. The e-commerce (final sale) must be completed on the “clean” site that is free of the word “CBD” in all the areas mentioned above.

This can be cost-prohibitive for many CBD companies with a limited marketing budget who have recently invested in a CBD e-commerce website. You also must be working with a payment processor who will allow you to sell CBD on multiple domains/website addresses.

When it comes to the best CBD marketing ideas for your business, we wouldn’t recommend Facebook advertising as your best option. 

Instead, we highly recommend using programmatic display advertising for CBD because you can do everything you can do with Facebook Ads (custom audiences, look-a-like audiences, retargeting, dynamic product retargeting, etc), but instead of on social media, the display/banner ads play on the world’s most popular websites – who allow for CBD advertising!

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4. Programmatic Display Advertising For CBD

If your CBD business offers online shopping and you’re looking for an alternative to Facebook advertising, programmatic display ads are a fantastic & cost-effective solution to create brand awareness, product trust, and drive high-quality traffic to your website from popular websites.

According to MarTech Advisor, “Programmatic advertising for CBD and cannabis advertising is the real-time buying and selling of ad inventory through an automated bidding system.”

Programmatic advertising enables CBD marketing agencies to purchase ad slots for digital out-of-home (DOOH), online, streaming, TV, OTT, video and voice ads on some of the world’s most popular websites.

This type of advertising differs from search and social advertising because instead of buying ads individually ahead of time, our partner’s programmatic platforms provide us with hundreds of thousands of available advertising placements instantaneously.

We use algorithms to help us decide where to run ads, when to show them, and how much to pay per click.

These platforms also aggregate a ton of lucrative consumer data from all providers, which allows us to target our CBD ad campaigns by audience interests and attributes.

For example, we can specifically target people ages [any age range here] living in [any city name here] with a known interest in CBD, organic supplements, and a healthy, natural lifestyle.

If you’re looking for an ideal, cost-effective CBD marketing idea, we’d highly recommend using programmatic display ads.

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5. Sponsored Content Advertising

Sponsored content advertising on popular websites for CBD products is allowed via the Outbrain advertising network. We partner with Outbrain to offer our clients experienced sponsored content advertising management.

Outbrain is a popular 3rd party native advertising platform and calls itself the “world’s leading premium discovery platform”.

Outbrain offers CBD advertisers programmatic native ad placements on premium websites like CNN, Ha’aretz, Le Parisien, Time, Fortune, ABCNews.

These highly targeted placements use proprietary data to help CBD marketers drive results, whether they are looking to generate awareness, engagement, or conversions.

We use sponsored content ads to drive traffic to your website blog articles to get potential customers into your marketing funnel and to create awareness and trust with your brand.

We target people who are interested in CBD and organic, natural supplements with native advertising that links to your blog content. 

This type of advertising typically targets the top of the funnel or people in the awareness stage.

If you’re looking for CBD marketing ideas to drive high-quality traffic to your site, build your audience exposure, and increase leads and conversions, sponsored content ads are for you.

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We Can Help You Implement a Strategic CBD Marketing Plan

If you’re interested in any of the 8 CBD marketing ideas listed above, we’d be happy to create and implement a customized strategy for your business and budget.

Please contact us to request a quote or call us for a free 30-minute phone consultation.

We’re Ready To Help You Grow!

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