3 Tips To Finding CBD Influencers On Instagram That Fit Your Brand

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How To Find Top CBD Influencers on Instagram

As you already know, Instagram is the best social platform to promote and market CBD oil and other CBD products. Many cannabis brands are actively using CBD influencers on Instagram to help sell CBD oil.

When it comes to influencer marketing, Instagram is also the most popular social media platform for brands and influencers to collaborate.

According to Statista.com, 78% of social influencers used Instagram to collaborate with brands worldwide (January 2018).

To be successful with using Instagram influencers as part of your CBD marketing stratgey, you need to align your CBD brand with the right type of influencers who have a ton of engagement on their posts.

High levels of engagement is everything when it comes to marketing CBD oil Influencers on Instagram. Partnering with the right CBD influencer on Instagram can generate positive and authentic social engagement and turn followers into returning customers.

Instagram is one of the most highly engaged social platforms today. A recent study found that Instagram has the highest interaction rate of all social media platforms.

If you’re wanting to sell CBD products online and need effective ways to market CBD oil on social media, we have 3 essential tips to help you find the best suited CBD influencers on Instagram for your business.

2021 UPDATE:

Over the last few years we’ve realized we can generate significantly more ROI for our clients using paid advertising tactics for CBD products as compared to using paid influencer marketing. We actually do not offer this influencer marketing service anymore because of this reason.

Instead, we highly recommend that you consider using Google search advertising combined with programmatic display/video advertising & retargeting for your CBD products. 

Check out the 4th BONUS tip we added to this article to learn where and how to advertise CBD products on Google search and on popular websites.

Image with CBD products. Define Your Goals is step 1 to find CBD influencers on Instagram. How to sell CBD on social media. How to sell CBD products online. CBD oil marketing tips.

1. Define Your Goals For CBD Influencers on Instagram

Yes, we need to start with you and your CBD brand/business first. We’ll get to number of followers and other essential engagement metrics in the next steps.

The 2 main questions you want to ask yourself are:

  • Why do we need CBD Influencers to help market our CBD oil on Instagram?
  • How do we intend to use CBD influencers on Instagram?

For starters, in my opinion, your top 3 goals for using CBD influencers on Instagram are:

  1. Increase awareness for your CBD brand and products.
  2. Generate online CBD sales or increase sales and in-store dispensary traffic.
  3. Increase your Instagram audience/followers

Therefore, you should choose Instagram influencers who can help you reach these 3 goals.

So for example, if you want to increase the number of followers on your CBD business account, your CBD marketing team should create and implement IG contests or quizzes using a specific branded CBD related hashtag.

For this marketing strategy to be successful, you’ll need a CBD influencer who will eagerly take part in any contesting or quizzes and encourage their followers to do the same.

However, to achieve your online or in-store sales goals you may need to use promo codes and partner with CBD influencer in an affiliate marketing campaign.

In this case your CBD influencer should have an audience that is likely to buy your CBD oil.

Image with CBD products. Use hashtags to find cbd influencers on instagram is step 2. CBD marketing on Instagram. Ho wto find Influencers for CBD on social media.

2. Research and Explore Relevant CBD-Related Hashtags

Hashtags are a super important social marketing tool to help you get your CBD content in front of people who are interested in buying CBD products.

Not only that, hashtags are an ideal place to start to find CBD influencers on Instagram that will be right for your CBD oil.

Instagram makes this easy for CBD bands because their policy states that influencers need to use #sponsored or #ad hashtags in posts related to an influencer marketing campaign. This is to distinguish promotional content – i.e content that the influencer may have been paid to promote.

I suggest you follow these two hashtags in particular when you’re on the hunt to find potential CBD influencers on Instagram.

Our cannabis social media marketing team thinks of hashtags as being similar to keywords for SEO. I’ve talked about that topic in other articles about marketing CBD online here and here.

So if you were thinking of keywords to use when implementing a dispensary SEO strategy, you’d use the most popular keyword search phrases that are most relevant to your CBD products, right?

In this case, use the same logic when researching hashtags to find CBD influencers.

For example, if you sell CBD oil to women for skincare specifically, you’d want to search to find potential CBD influencers using tags like #cbdskincare (38,411 posts), and #cbdbeauty (17.6k posts).

Screenshot of hashtag research for CBD marketing on Instagram. How to find CBD influencers on Instagram. CBD marketing agency. Cannabis marketing and SEO agency.

You’d need to search through top users who are posting about #cbdskincare and other relevant tags, who have at least 10,000 followers or more, and identify those who best align with your CBD brand identity.

You also may find CBD friendly users who have a micro-influencer following (10,000-99,000 followers) but are currently not promoting any CBD oil or other CBD products by using relevant but broad hashtags that have way more posts on Instagram.

For example, related broad tags like #skincare (35 million posts), #skincaretips (888,000 posts), #skincareproducts (817,000 posts), and others will help you find new & potential CBD influencers on Instagram.

A third option to using hashtags to find CBD influencers on Instagram is to search the platform for popular users (10,000 followers or more) using hashtags that closely describe the type of CBD users your brand appeals to.

Examples here include using tags like #wellness, #Wellnesswednesday, or even “painmanagement”, and “painmanagementtips”.

Using this technique will equip you with a highly qualified target “hit-list” of CBD influencers to approach with your CBD influencer marketing program.

Image with CBD products. Step 3 is to focus on CBD instagram influencers who have high rates of engagement on their sponsored posts. Cannabis marketing agency. Dispensary SEO.

3. Look For Real Engagement on Instagram

As mentioned at the top of this post, engagement is everything when it comes to marketing CBD oil on Instagram. In fact, your Instagram engagement rate is probably the most important key performance indicator for CBD influencer marketing.

Search Engine Journal reports that “the average engagement rate for an Instagram influencer was around 4.36 percent in 2017, with influencers having less than 1,000 followers registering the highest engagement rate of 8 percent.

The engagement rate goes down as the number of followers increases. However, sometimes this metric can be misleading as popularity does not always result in conversions. You must first determine how authentic the engagement is.”

One of the best ways to get insight into the authenticity of a potential CBD influencer on Instagram, is to analys their followers and most importantly, the comments on sponsored posts in their feed.

For example, look for stuff like this. Typically, broad, stereotypical comments like “great shot!”, “nice pic”, “looking good”, or a single emoji point to fake engagement.

Real engagement can be seen when users leave relevant and conversational comments. Real followers tend to ask questions back to a brand or make a personal statement about the brand.

Real followers will tag their friends in comments. Spambots can’t and don’t engage with content this way.

Real engagement from real followers will lead to increased reach, increased engagement, and increased sales for your CBD oil and/or other CBD products.

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4. UPDATE: Bonus Tip: An Alternative To Instagram With Less BS

I can understand you really want to advertise your CBD brand on Instagram. I get it. It is possible – but it is very challenging and is arguably not sustainable/reliable.

Facebook & Instagram do allow you to advertise hemp-based topical products only. The only restrictions are that you can have no mention of CBD in your ad copywriting, your ad creative, your landing page, your product labels, and on your e-commerce page – the page where the sale takes place.

If you follow these guidelines, we can absolutely help you run experienced and managed “CBD” ads on Facebook & Instagram. Even better, these campaigns can be sustainable and reliable and can run for as long as you’d like to run them.

However, if you don’t follow these guidelines, you may get your FB ads approved for a few days/weeks, but you will inevitably get shut down and lose your business page, ad account, and lose all of your advertising data, that you paid for.

That’s why we offer the following two highly effective alternatives to Facebook & Instagram advertising for your CBD products:

i. Google Search Advertising:

We have been managing successful Google ads campaigns for cannabis & CBD/hemp companies in Canada, United States, and UK since 2017, and we can do the same for you. We have an 88% success rate for getting Google CBD ads approved, as of Mach 2021. These campaigns include text ads on the Google search network. See our case studies here.

Your ads are shown to people who are actively searching to buy CBD online. We target “warm” people in the evaluation and purchase stages of the sales cycle at the time when they are actually searching Google to find CBD to purchase.

When people are actually looking to purchase CBD, they are not on Instagram or Facebook. When someone is looking to buy CBD online, they are more than likely on Google searching for a solution. This is why we highly recommend using Google search ads for CBD marketing instead of social media platforms.

Follow this link to learn more about our Google search advertising management services for CBD & Cannabis companies.

ii. Programmatic Display and/or Video Advertising/Retargeting on Popular Websites:

Display/banner advertising on some of the world’s most popular websites is an essential tactic for every CBD company. Believe it or not, our DSP partners allow for display and/or video ads for CBD products including CBD oils, tinctures, extracts, edibles, and topicals, so ad approval is not an issue. It’s easy to start driving highly-qualified traffic to your website.

We are able to target people by demographics and interests with custom advertising just like we would on Facebook & Instagram. We’re also able to retarget all your site visitors, target look-a-like audiences, and custom audiences (email lists), also just like FB & IG, but with no risk of disapproved ads or getting shut down.

If you want to get started with a CBD advertising campaign with retargeting right away, with no BS, contact us to set up and manage your programmatic display advertising.

Image with CBD products. ColaDigital.ca can help you find CBD influencers on Instagram.

We Can Help You Find CBD Influencers on Instagram!

If you’d rather focus on producing and selling more CBD oil and other CBD products, my team and I can help you with your CBD influencer marketing strategy.

This includes sourcing and vetting top influencers that best fit your CBD brand to setting up and managing Instagram marketing campaigns for your CBD products.

We also offer complete social media content creation/management, social media advertising, and website/blog content writing services.

Please contact us using the form below.

We’re ready to help you grow!

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