If you’ve been struggling with finding the right CBD advertising solutions for your cannabis brand, we have 5 reasons why you should be using native ads and/or sponsored content ads in your CBD marketing strategy.
CBD Advertising & Cannabis Marketing Can Benefit From Native Ad Campaigns
CBD advertising as well as cannabis advertising is very challenging but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.
In fact, it can be relatively easy to setup and execute a successful cannabis or CBD advertising campaign for your brand if you’re open to lucrative alternatives to Facebook Ads and Google Search Ads.
One of the best examples of successfully advertising CBD products is to use programmatic display advertising on popular websites.
This CBD advertising channel also provides the ability to retarget/re-market to everyone who visits your website, with customized display ads on website’s they visit after your site.
In this article, we’re going to focus on yet another opportunity for approved cannabis and CBD advertising known as native ads or sponsored content advertising.
Here are 5 reasons why your cannabis and/or CBD brand should use native ads as part of your online advertising strategy.
1. Native Ad Platforms Allow For Cannabis and CBD advertising Placements
The best thing about using native sponsored content ads in your digital advertising strategy is that native ads/sponsored content ad platforms like Mantis and Outbrain allow for cannabis and CBD advertising!
You read that right. CBD and cannabis companies are allowed to place cannabis and CBD ads on popular websites using the ad networks listed above.
So why fight with Facebook over and over again trying to get your Instagram ads approved when you can use the same creative and content in native ads on popular websites – and have your ads approved asap?
All you need to get started with native advertising and sponsored content ad placements is compelling, information, & conversion optimized content on your website, and an experienced cannabis advertising agency to manage & optimize your campaigns.
2. Native Ads Are Cost-Effective For Cannabis & CBD Advertising
One of the major benefits for your CBD advertising strategy is that the cost of running native ad campaigns for cannabis products is significantly lower than using Google search ads or Bing search ads.
While both search platforms and native ad platforms sell advertising placements on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, native platforms offer lower CPCs than search platforms.
For example, CPCs for Google search ads for Cannabis Flower run between $2.50 – $20. While native ads have CPCs that start as low as $0.30.
Back to why using native ads for cannabis & CBD advertising is a good idea, it’s also important to note that the CPC model means you will only get billed when a user shows interest in your product, service, or offer.
So unless they’re interested enough to click on your ad for your CBD or cannabis article in order to keep reading on your website, you won’t pay a cent!
In addition, native ads provide you with full control of the ad title/article’s title, the accompanying thumbnail image, and the landing page content (that is, the destination URL where you want users to go after they click on your cannabis or CBD advertisement.
The benefit here is that native ads allow you or your cannabis/CBD marketing agency to craft your messaging to target only your target audience. The people that will be most interested in your products.
Below is an example to illustrate how this works and the benefits for your cannabis or CBD advertising strategy.
Let’s say you are a company that sells indoor grow boxes (or CBD products) with prices starting at $299 (or $79), and you want to run a sponsored content ad titled “3 Best Indoor Grow Boxes Starting at $299.”
In doing so, only people who are interested in growing indoors, and people that have a budget over $299, should feel inclined to click the sponsored article. In other words, this is your target audience/best customer for this CBD or cannabis advertising campaign.
If you lack the time to create compelling artwork, by using native ads, this is not an issue. In fact, many cannabis and CBD brands use their existing blog content, written by experienced cannabis and CBD content writers as a starting point for creative for a native campaign.
If you’re unfamiliar how to do any of this or lack the resources to optimize and maximize your CBD advertising spend, please reach out and contact us for a free 30-minute consult.
3. Native Ads Can Help Grow Your Company’s E-mail List
To understand how this works consider this user journey.
A potential customer clicks on your sponsored content advertisement that was strategically placed on a relevant website by our CBD and cannabis advertising team, and they land on your website content/blog article.
Here they can continue reading the rest of the information an educational content that you advertised in your sponsored content ad.
This is the ultimate opportunity for your CBD or cannabis brand to capture valuable information from this prospective customer.
They are clearly interested in CBD and the information you promoted with the sponsored content ad and now you’ve created some brand awareness with this prospect and are developing some brand trust as they read your content.
The first thing you need to do is to strategically ask them for their email address. ABC – always be closing. If you don’t ask, you won’t get. It’s as simple as that.
Here’s a prime example of how you can use this type of lead generation, i.e. email capture, and grow your email marketing database from your own website.
Add a Modal Popup on Entrance or Exit
Once thing I share with all clients is to consider adding an unobtrusive, modal popup once the users enters your site or upon exiting your site to capture the email address of your prospect.
An affordable and effective solution is from OptinMonster. If optimized correctly, this conversion optimization tool kit helps you convert and monetize your website traffic, grow your email list, and increase online sales.
The key is to strategically optimize this popup so as to not be an obtrusive or annoying user experience. In my opinion, timing is everything.
For example, don’t you dislike it when you’re searching to buy something from some new brand, on a website you’ve never been to before, and as soon as you land on the site, you get a popup asking for your email address?
Aren’t you thinking, “I don’t even know who you are or if your company’s what I want…why would I give you my email address?”. I know I’ve thought this many times and now find it mildly annoying.
So, an idea we had was to strategically optimize the popup based on the average time spent on the homepage by all visitors – as well as by the average time spent on the site per visit from each user.
This way, our client isn’t annoying to new visitors and is asking for an email address by providing the right value, to the right user, at the right time.
In this case, our client has an average of 2:30 spent per user per visit. Typically, most users spend approximately 0:50 on the homepage before clicking through to other internal pages on the client site.
Therefore, we decided to implement a customized modal popup to show to all first time site visitors after 42-seconds.
In other words, we set it up so the prospect is on the site homepage for 42-seconds before we show them a custom popup, with some super value, in exchange for their email address.
Our conversion optimization tactic was to offer the prospect their ideal product for their unique needs, as well as the ideal dose of the product that’s best suited for them. We also offered a compelling discount offer if the prospect buys the recommended product now.
After adding this conversion optimization feature to the client’s site, we increased email capture from 5-10/week to 35-50/week within the first month.
It is a proven fact that consumers who click on sponsored ads and then continue to subscribe to a newsletter or alerts, are the same people who eventually become customers.
These types of website visitors are already engaged, but it’s up to you to sell them on why your cannabis and CBD products are different. This usually doesn’t happen overnight; it may take weeks or even months to win over a customer.
Look at it this way, while it is great to have someone purchase cannabis or CBD from your online store on the first click, the reality is that not everyone is an impulse-buyer when it comes to cannabis and cannabinoids.
4. CBD Advertising Using Native Ads Can Build Lucrative Audience Lists For Retargeting Campaigns
If there’s one thing my team and I have learned from marketing and advertising cannabis and CBD products since 2017, it’s that we/you will sell much more cannabis and CBD products through retargeting campaigns than through initial prospecting campaigns.
Retargeting or remarking as it’s called on Google Ads, is a digital marketing tactic that has proven to be super-duper effective when it comes to selling products online.
In fact, website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are more likely to convert by 70%.
So, in addition to capturing emails from site visitors for your email marketing strategy, you can also continue to stay connected with that user as they browse their favourite websites across the web via a retargeting ad campaign using native ads and programmatic display ads.
The best news is it only costs a few cents to drive an interested reader to your website using native ads (and programmatic display ads), so it is beneficial for your cannabis/CBD brand to invest in driving as many targeted users as possible for future remarketing efforts.
It’s easy to start creating audience lists for all website visitors to be used in retargeting campaigns. It’s as easy as having us, or your web developer, add a retargeting pixel (i.e. a short snippet of code) on your website.
If this is something you’d be interested in but you need some help in implementing and strategizing a campaign, please feel free to contact us for a free quote.
5. Amplify Your SEO & Content Marketing Strategy With Highly Qualified Traffic From Native Ads
Using Native Ads/Sponsored Content Ads will help you increase the amount of highly qualified traffic from popular websites to your website blog content. This in turn will provide an incredible boost to your SEO strategy.
Google ranks all website on the basis of authority, relevance, and trust in a particular niche. Therefore, you want your site to be authoritative, highly relevant, and trustworthy when it comes to cannabis and/or CBD products.
This requires a customized SEO, keyword, and content marketing strategy to be implemented on your website, in addition to high amounts of qualified traffic that spends time on your website and engages with its content.
While SEO will drive traffic from organic search, SEO is a long term process and this strategy will take time, 6-12 months, to see significant ROI.
However, you can boost your SEO and increase qualified website traffic by using strategic native ad and sponsored content placements on popular websites and add a second traffic source in addition to organic search.
If targeted correctly, your sponsored content ad will be seen on popular websites by people who are interested in cannabis & CBD products and are unaware of your brand, as well as people who know your brand and have previously visited your website.
Google will see this traffic from both organic search and from popular websites. They’ll see that this is relevant traffic as users are spending 1-2 minutes plus on the website and viewing 2-3 pages on average per visit.
This is how using native ads and sponsored content ads to amplify your blog content will help your search engine rankings, overall SEO, and will contribute to online sales.
We Can Help You With Experienced Native Advertising For CBD & Cannabis Products!
Are you ready to start advertising your CBD products online and need an alternative to Facebook and Google? If so, we can help you now!
We have been running native and sponsored content ads for our CBD clients since 2018 and we can do the same for your brand.
Call us for a free 30-minute consult or email us to request a quote.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!