Are you challenged when it comes to how to market CBD oil, CBD products, and CBD accessories online? Looking for ways to avoid strict CBD advertising regulations but still increase your online visibility of all channels? These 5 powerful CBD marketing tips will help you to efficiently sell your CBD oils. As a BONUS, check out tip # 6 we added in Q1 2021.
UPDATE: Read an updated version of this article here:
Top 5 CBD Marketing Tips For Every Cannabis Business.
How To Market CBD Oil & CBD Products To Increase Revenue
The total U.S. consumer sales of CBD (cannabidiol) from 2014 to 2016 increased from $108.1 million to $262.2 billion (USD), respectively, according to Statista.com.
They estimate that by 2020 CBD consumer sales will total around 1.15 billion U.S. dollars.
This super great news for all CBD business owners wanting to sell more CBD oil online via an e-commerce website.
However, in order to sell CBD online, you need to understand how to market CBD online with and without advertising. The latter being way easier than the former.
There are a number of proven digital marketing tactics to help you market CBD oil online. Social media marketing is an obvious given when it comes to brands and influencers selling CBD oil. Especially when it comes to marketing CBD oil on Instagram.
We’ll discuss how to market CBD oil using social media platforms but we’re also going to discuss other proven CBD marketing tactics that use digital channels outside of just Facebook and Instagram.
This article outlines 5 practical CBD marketing tips to help you effectively market your CBD oil.
1. CBD Content Marketing Using Lead Magnets
One proven digital marketing tactic to use when marketing CBD oil is to offer a lead magnet in exchange for an email address.
The lead magnet provides value to the user, and their email address helps you nurture this potential customer into a paid customer.
Let’s define what a lead magnet is: A lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their email address or other contact information.
Lead magnets usually offer a piece of digital, downloadable content, such as a free PDF checklist, report, eBook, whitepaper, video, etc.
Lead magnets are one of the best ways to get more email subscribers. This resource could literally be a game-changer for your CBD oil business. We discuss email marketing as a good way to market CBD oil later in this article.
A good example of a lead magnet to market CBD oil would be something like “10 Ways To Overcome Anxiety”, or “7 Ways To Overcome Post Work Out Pain”. The idea is to create a valuable resource that you provide to potential future customers at no charge.
The strategy is that the user may find the information useful enough to be convinced to make a purchase from your CBD oil store and may even share it with friends who can also become future customers of your CBD products.
You’d need to promote this lead magnet to a relevant audience using organic social media or paid advertising on social media or Google search.
For example, you’d use a lead ad campaign objective on Facebook or Instagram to market this CBD related lead magnet. You could also place this lead ad on Facebook Messenger.
These types of ads will capture leads directly from the social media platform you choose in exchange for the lead magnet. So make sure your lead magnet is super informative and valuable to the user.
If you use Google search to promote the lead magnet, you’d want to drive relevant users from your Google PPC search ad to an optimized landing page on your website where they can download the lead magnet while providing you with an email address.
You should also promote the lead magnet on your CBD website to encourage clickthroughs and downloads for any relevant visitors on your site.
Top 3 Benefits To Using Lead Magnets to Market CBD Oil
1. Increase awareness of your CBD brand and CBD Products.
2. Build your brand credibility.
3. Increase your email marketing list.
2. Content Marketing Using CBD Focused Blogs
Let’s face it. Advertising CBD oil online is a potentially risky challenge, to say the least. But fear not, you can successfully market CBD oil without a paid ads campaign.
Content marketing is an excellent digital marketing tactic to target cold prospects and get them into your conversion funnel because many people are actively searching for:
- Information on CBD products
- Information on different types of CBD oils
- Health benefits of CBD oil
- Where to buy CBD oil near them
- Where to buy CBD oil online
Your prospective customers are likely searching for answers using the above keyword search phrases along with hundreds of other semantically related search queries, right?
So in order to effectively market CBD oil to these prospective customers, you need a CBD content marketing strategy to help you provide relevant content in search results and drive prospective CBD customers to your website.
There are a few ways to approach content marketing to help market your CBD oils. SEO optimized blog content marketing is a very effective tactic to use to market CBD oils and other CBD products.
Publishing relevant blog articles on your website that answers the questions your target market has about CBD products, helps you market CBD oil online without advertising.
Instead of paid ads, you’re using SEO optimized blog content marketing to get your content to rank on page 1 for relevant CBD related search queries.
Top 3 Benefits For Using Blog Content Marketing to Market CBD Oil
1. No need to use paid advertising campaigns with a media spend.
2. Increase the online visibility of your CBD brand.
3. Drive more website traffic from organic search results on Google and Bing.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing may not come to mind when you’re thinking about how to market CBD oil, but don’t discount it because email is still a competent digital marketing tactic.
If executed strategically, email marketing can be a highly lucrative way to market CBD oil products and accessories.
Next to Instagram, the Inbox is still one of the most popular places that people visit daily on their phones and on the internet.
I’m sure that when you are planning how to market your CBD oil you’re looking for simple yet effective ways to reach CBD customers on mobile phones.
Email marketing is one of the easiest ways to directly reach your target market on mobile, with little investment. Just think about it.
According to this report, in 2019, the number of people in the US who use email on their phones projected to grow to 251.8 million monthly users, from 232.8 million in 2015.
How do you market CBD oil online? Implement a CBD education focused email newsletter populated with relevant blog content, product reviews, and new product announcements to drive CBD curious consumers to your website and e-store.
Another benefit to using email marketing to sell CBD oil is that you now have access to one of the most effective ways to keep your customers and prospects informed and interested in your CBD products.
Believe it or not, people often seek out email marketing campaigns from their favorite brands and local stores. This means CBD users will likely do the same for their favorite CBD brands and CBD dispensaries.
Nielsen reported that 28% of US online shoppers subscribe to store or product emails in order to stay informed.
Another study stated that:
- 59% of respondents said they would sign up for regular email updates when a reward is offered
- 41% indicated they would share personal details and purchase behavior.
- 50% of moms on Facebook said they’d be willing to share brand content on Facebook.
Top 3 Reasons To Use Email Marketing to Market CBD Oil
1. Stay in touch with your customers and prospects.
2. Keep your customers informed on your CBD oils and other products.
3. Reach targeted people on any device.
4. CBD Influencers & Affiliate Marketing
If asked, “how do you market CBD oil?”, CBD businesses will swear by using Instagram influencer marketing. This one is a given to market CBD oil.
Your CBD brand needs high levels of engagement on Instagram in order to get your content in front of the people and to get an edge over competing CBD brands.
We like the idea of using micro CBD influences combined with an affiliate marketing program to market CBD oil on Instagram.
If you’re already using influencers to market your CBD oils, consider offering the most successful influencers an affiliate marketing program as a further incentive to talk about your CBD oil with their followers.
This way, not only are you able to create a long term sales funnel, but you can also potentially reduce your overall influencer marketing spend.
You can also look outside of social media platforms to find the right influencers to market your CBD oils. Instagram may be the place to be but don’t forget about bloggers.
There are plenty of CBD related blogs and health & wellness-related blogs that publish awesome content to thousands of people who are interested in CBD oil and its benefits.
It’d be wise to research the most popular CBD related blogs and make a list of the top 10-20 bloggers who fit your CBD brand best. Their brand should have synergies with your brand as they will ultimately help you market your CBD oil.
You could hire them to write content for your CBD blog or a sponsored post on their site. You could also offer bloggers a mutually beneficial affiliate marketing program.
This would help you increase your brand awareness to a new targeted audience as well as potential increases in website sales for CBD oil.
Top 3 Reasons To Use Influencers & Affiliate Marketing to Market CBD Oil
1. Ability to expand the reach of your CBD brand to highly qualified people.
2. People trust influencers so you don’t need to push your product and can remain compliant.
3. Create a long-term sales funnel.
5. Use SEO To Market CBD Oil
I have to add search engine optimization (SEO) as a way to market CBD oil because I feel it’s one of the absolute best and safest way to get your target demographic to your website and into your conversion funnel.
Full disclosure, I’ve been “doing SEO” since 2004 and I do own and operate an SEO agency along with this agency whose website you’re on now, so I may sound biased 🙂
I look at it this way, your target market is online right now searching for information on CBD oil and other CBD products or accessories.
If you agree with that, then we’re on the same page.
So, if your potential customers are regularly searching Google or Bing for information using search terms like these, you want them to find your content, right?:
- why use cbd oil
- why use cbd oil for pets
- why use cbd in vape
- why take cbd oil
- should i take cbd oil for anxiety
- cbd oil for sleep
- cbd oil side effects
- cbd oil for pain
- buy cbd oil online
- cbd oil for sale near me
- cbd gummies near me
- etc…
If you want your content to show up for terms like the above as well as other semantically related search queries, your website content (consumer-facing) and code (Google facing) need to be optimized with a comprehensive SEO and keyword strategy.
That’s what SEO does. It helps to get your content found on page 1 for the search results that are most relevant to you selling CBD oil.
If you’re considering a content marketing strategy to help market CBD oil you’ll also want to consider having an SEO strategy to optimize the content you produce.
After all, if your content can’t be easily found online for relevant searches, does it really exist? What’s the point of creating content that doesn’t rank on page 1 on Google and Bing?
If you’re concerned about your website’s SEO, we offer a complete and comprehensive 27-point website marketing and SEO audit. This is essentially a yearly medical “physical” for people.
An SEO audit will diagnose the overall health of your CBD website and offer recommendations of what can be done to improve search engine rankings and increase organic traffic. Contact us for more information.
Top 3 Reasons To Use SEO to Help Market Your CBD Oil
1. No need to worry about strict CBD advertising regulations.
2. Drive CBD focused traffic to your website and into your conversion funnel.
3. Improve online branding and credibility.
6. 2021 BONUS TACTIC: Google Search Advertising & Programmatic Display Retargeting
I wanted to add a bonus tip to this article to share 2-CBD digital marketing tactics that we’ve had success with over the last year.
The first thing to understand is that it is possible to advertise your CBD products on Google search (and Bing search) and our digital advertising team now has an 88% success rate for getting Google search ads approved for our clients, and we can do the same for you!
Google search campaigns for CBD products are ideal for both prospecting and customer acquisition campaigns. We’re able to target people who are actively searching to buy the CBD products you are selling. We target keywords with specific purchase intent.
For example, we’ll bid on semantically related keywords like “buy cbd oil for pain”, “buy cbd capsules for sleep”, “buy cbd edibles for anxiety”. Or even more specific long-tail search terms like “buy cbd 3000mg for pain”. The key here is that we’re targeting people in the evaluation and/pr the purchase stage who are looking to purchase CBD.
The second tactic I want to mention here is programmatic display and/or video advertising & retargeting on popular websites. The main reasons for this are two-fold:
- Our DSP partners allow for CBD advertising so ad approval is not an issue!
- Conversion rates
Good conversion rates for most e-commerce industries outside of CBD range from 3%-5%+. Good conversion rates for CBD range from 1%-3%.
This means that retargeting all website visitors that do not purchase with customized display and/or video advertising after they leave your website is absoltley necessary in order to encourage them to return to your site to complete the sales cycle/online transaction.
It’s imperative to include display ad retargeting campaigns with your Google ads campaigns in order to get maximum return on investment and a steady stream of recurring revenue.
Top 3 Reasons To Use Google Ads & Programmatic Display Ads to Advertise Your CBD Oil
1. Target “warm & hot” people in the evaluation & purchase stages while they are activley searching to buy CBD products.
2. Retarget all website visitors who did not purchase with custiom display and/or video advertising on the website’s they visit after your site.
3. Build brand awareness & brand trust – both are needed before you can get the sale.
We Can Help You Market CBD Oil!
The CBD oil business is new and is thriving globally. Almost every CBD entrepreneur is looking for the secrets of how to market CBD oil and increase sales from their CBD products.
ColaDigital.ca can help you with data-driven CBD marketing strategies to help you sell your CBD products from your website or CBD dispensary retail store.
We’re professional cannabis marketers with 20+ years of traditional & digital marketing experience who are motivated to help CBD companies grow their respective businesses with effective CBD marketing strategy.
If you’ve been struggling with how to market CBD oil online and in retail stores, we can help you craft and manage a CBD friendly digital marketing strategy designed to increase online visibility, social media engagement, and revenue from your CBD products.
Please tell us about your project by using the form below, or contact us here to book a free consultation call.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!
