Building Brand Trust is Step 1 of an Effective CBD Digital Marketing Stratgey
The secret to selling CBD online worldwide is to focus on building trust in your brand and increasing awareness of your products with your target customers before focusing on sales. A sales-first ideology is far too idealistic when it comes to CBD marketing. Here are 5 secrets to building brand trust that you should implement in your CBD digital marketing strategy asap.
Developing brand awareness is imperative for any new brand, but developing brand trust and customer loyalty is a vital first step for a successful CBD digital marketing strategy.
Some CBD entrepreneurs may believe this, but we’ve found that the majority of start-up CBD companies have actually planned to sell their CBD products in the USA, UK, and EU, without considering the significance of developing brand trust.
The secret to CBD marketing, in my opinion, is based on logic and the logic looks like this:
Potential customers can not buy your CBD products if they are not aware of your brand and people will not buy CBD from any business if they don’t trust the company & have not yet developed a relationship with your brand.
Would you buy a relatively brand new wellness product, that happens to be a cannabinoid from the cannabis hemp plant, from a brand you didn’t trust? If you’re a first-time CBD buyer, would you even know what CDB is let alone what a cannabinoid is?
My guess is no. And, based on hands-on experience from marketing CBD online in the USA, Canada, UK, and EU, as well as the wealth of data that this work provides, I can almost guarantee the answer is no.
Therefore, before any CBD company can think about sales and profitability, the initial digital marketing strategy needs to be laser-focused on creating awareness, developing brand trust, and building customer loyalty.
In this article, we’ll list the 5 secrets of CBD digital marketing strategy to develop brand trust and win customer loyalty.
The Importance of Brand Trust in Your CBD Digital Marketing Strategy
Before we get to the 5 secrets to crush step 1 of an effective CBD digital marketing strategy, let’s start with a question for you to illustrate the importance of brand awareness & trust.
How many brands do you use on average each day? I bet if you think about it for a second you’ll be surprised when you realize that more than a dozen different brands are embedded in your daily routine.
Here’s my list for example.
The first thing I do in the morning to start the day is to turn off the alarm on my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. Next, I’m using an Oral-B toothbrush to brush my teeth with Crest toothpaste.
Soon I’ll be in my kitchen making coffee or tea depending on the day. If it’s coffee, I may use my Nespresso machine and drink my coffee in a stylish mug I bought from Ikea.
It goes on and on for the rest of the day and into the next.
So now the question becomes, how many of the brands that you use each day do you really trust? Before you answer, let’s define exactly what brand trust is in the CBD space.
What Is Brand Trust in The CBD Digital Marketing?
Brand trust is a valuable intangible asset for your CBD brand that is determined by your potential customer’s expectations of how your CBD products can deliver on their promises to help the customer with their daily wellness needs.
Let’s face it, the CBD industry is jam-packed with many players and all consumers live a fast-paced life. So, CBD brands are in a race to gain potential customers’ trust through CBD education and CBD products that meet their expectations.
To achieve this, businesses need a data-driven approach to make every customer interaction valuable.
It’s important to note that developing trust isn’t something that can be reached easily, but once your brand succeeds in being reliable & trustworthy, people will purchase your products again and again, without question.
Or until something better comes along.
Why Is Brand Trust So Important For CBD Digital Marketing Strategy?
CBD is first and foremost a brand new wellness product. Cannabinoids are new for many of your potential customers.
This whole industry is new and customers need to be (and want to be) educated in order to develop trust with CBD, the product, and the CBD brand that educates them best will be the company that wins the most awareness, trust, and ultimately revenue.
In addition, all consumers have had previous bad experiences as buyers. Modern consumers in the digital and social media age are quickly drifting away from traditional marketing channels and using their inner circles and social media platforms to learn about new brands and new products.
CBD consumers will search for proof at every step of the process, starting with reading lots of information & education about CBD, looking at reviews about different CBD products and CBD brands, which may or may not convince them to make the purchase.
According to Salsify, a consumer needs to read on average 100 reviews until they’re confident enough to purchase a product online.
The Global Consumer Insights Survey made by PwC asked over 22,000 consumers which factors influence their purchase decision (other than price). Trust in the brand was ranked number two.
To sum it all up, yes, brand trust is critical to your CBD business’s growth and can/will absolutely most definitely influence your revenue.
Now let’s take a look at how you can build a CBD brand that potential customers are going to trust.
5 Tactics to Build Trust For Your CBD Brand
According to the Edelman’s Trust Barometer report from 2019, consumers have a tendency to distrust. Only 34% of the respondents say they trust most of the brands they purchased and used.
So how does a CBD brand use digital marketing to cut through all the obstacles?
Like in any honest relationship based on trust, there are a few rules which need to be followed.
1. Gauge Your Brand Sentiment
Any effective CBD digital marketing strategy starts with understanding how your target audience feels about your products. With this knowledge, you’re better equipped to identify where there may be room for improvement in your product or your CBD marketing tactics.
The best way to get this data is to get constant feedback from your potential and current customers and use that data effectively to craft your CBD digital marketing strategy.
How do you get customers’ feedback? Implement the following digital marketing tactics in your CBD marketing:
- Online reviews
- Social media
- Tracking systems on your product’s website
Here are some examples of useful tracking systems you should use as part of your CBD digital marketing strategy.
(i) Live Chat
Implementing a live chat tool on your CBD website can be super useful to your customers and super effective for your bottom line.
There are plenty of high-quality 3rd party live chat providers for you to choose from so there’s no need to create your own live chat infrastructure.
For example, try LiveChat, ChatBot, or Drift, to connect with website visitors/potential customers in real-time.
Curious customers who are ready to buy CBD but have a few questions first will be able to contact you directly from your website without having to search for your contact page, email address, phone number, or social media profiles.
This benefits your CBD digital marketing process because questions from potential customers will show you where they encountered difficulties. The guesswork is removed.
This type of data helps you determine if there may be issues with converting users on your product pages, category pages, or your homepage. Paying attention to these customer questions will help your business improve the digital marketing conversion rates for your CBD products.
(ii) Emails
After a customer purchased online a product or service from your company, you can send them an email after a while and ask for their feedback.
An example would look something like this:
Hi John Smith,
Help us improve your life by improving our products and your shopping experience by taking this survey. Your feedback is important to us so we hope you will take 60-seconds to answer 3 short questions. We appreciate your time and feedback. – Your Friends at AcmeCBD.
2. Analyze & Refine Your Website’s User Experience/Customer Shopping Experience
According to Hotjar, a website tool that helps to improve the user experience (UX) on your website, “customer experience is the result of every interaction a customer has with your business.” So basically, everything from a customer’s interaction with your advertising, website, to receiving the product they purchased from you.
Customers are able to form an opinion about your brand and your CBD products at every step of the way along the consumer sales journey, and this experience will influence their purchase decision in the future. The same goes for every other CBD brand.
This is precisely why providing an excellent customer experience is extremely important. This is the key to increasing the number of positive reviews and reducing negative reviews and/or returns.
Most importantly, an excellent customer experience will increase customer loyalty and satisfaction which will ultimately increase your revenue.
According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, the respondents placed the customer experience in second place after the product experience:
Personalizing the consumer experience and their purchases can help you improve the overall customer experience of your brand.
Over 40% of the PwC’s survey respondents said they were happy having a retailer monitor their shopping patterns and purchases. They even expect a retailer to have up-to-date information on how they interact across all social media and other platforms.
In addition, a study from Oracle shows that millennials are ready to pay 20% more for an exciting customer experience. In comparison, 42% of customers are willing to purchase from a company that has new and innovative ways to deliver their services.
Millennials demand flexibility and freedom of choice, so they will do their own research and often purchase from Direct to Customer (DTC) brands. Being more comfortable with technology, this will be their first impulse.
3. You’ll Win With Authenticity & Transparency
If your CDB digital marketing is focused on building brand trust, your brand needs to be trustworthy. To be trustworthy, your brand must present itself as honest.
Therefore we highly recommend that you share content that shows your brand’s culture and values. Tell the story of your brand and maybe try to pair parts of the story with customer testimonials.
When it comes to CBD reviews and ratings, consider that sometimes a rating of 4 to 4.5 stars out of 5 will be more trusted by consumers as it appears more real.
Never pump up the numbers in a fake manner. It’s understandable to also have negative reviews, as long as you address them. Always be true to your brand reviews, because, people can spot ‘trust-washing’.
A CBD brand’s authenticity addresses almost exclusively people’s emotional parts of the brain. Therefore, always consider a human approach to your CBD product in your CBD digital marketing strategy. For example,
- Be honest about your mission and values
- Have transparent policies
- Have transparent lab reports and COAs
- Be consistent
- Always be reliable and deliver on promises
- Provide great quality & great value
- Treat your customers with respect and consider their privacy
- Personalize their purchase so they will feel more connected to your brand
Keep in mind that when a customer chooses your CBD brand, it is their way of expressing themselves. So, by being true to your brand’s values, you’re true to the customers’.
4. Master Being Consistent With Your CBD Brand
Once you manage to reach your target audience through various CBD digital marketing tactics, your brand needs to continue to manage/pamper the relationship. You can not let them slip away.
This can be done through brand consistency, which is going to help you create a context for people. Words and visuals are two of the basics for marking a CBD brand’s personality.
Here are the essentials to develop consistency:
- Create a visual brand identity.
- Establish your CBD brand’s personality and build your voice and message around it.
- The messaging should be consistent on every channel, whether it’s email, social media, website, or digital advertising.
- Create branding guidelines available for all the employees (logo, color palette, fonts, brand’s voice, and tone).
- Consistency also refers to how frequently you publish or send out email newsletters. For example, you can keep in touch with your target audience by sending them newsletters on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis.
- If email marketing newsletters and drip campaigns are part of your CBD digital marketing mix, you must increase the use of personalization. Just think of how many emails you get per day and how many of those you ignore.
- Start your email with a catchy title. This is going to help you get your viewers’ attention from the beginning. The newsletter should contain useful information like CBD education, competitive advantages of your product, features/benefits, and a special offer/discount deal.
The key is to be consistent with the style and design, so you become a familiar voice for your audience.
5. Lead With Education
We’re saving the best for last here. Since we’ve been marketing CBD since 2017, we have learned that the best way to sell CBD in the USA, UK, EU, and Canada is to lead with education.
Developing and gaining brand trust and loyalty takes time. It will not happen quickly. It’s a process and requires a tremendous consideration of the target customer and their experience with your brand throughout their purchase cycle.
If you strategically use the tips above to create CBD brand awareness, you will set your business up for the long term.
People will only purchase a brand new wellness product from a brand they know and trust. There are many CBD brands for customers to choose from. You need to create awareness and develop trust in order to convince customers to buy from you.
If you need help with experienced and professional digit marketing strafed for your CBD business, please reach out. Call us for a free 30-minute consultation or email us to request a quote.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!