5 Ways to Market Your CBD Business
Starting an online CBD business may have some marketing challenges involved. If you are wondering how to market your new CBD company, here are 5 ways to get your name and brand out there.
- Identify Your Target Market
Because of CBD’s effectiveness as an alternative treatment for a wide array of conditions related to depression, anxiety and pain, millions of consumers all over the world are indulging in CBD products these days.
However, marketing a CBD brand can be especially challenging, considering the fact that many people are still not aware of the difference between CBD and THC (the other natural compound prevalent in cannabis that has psychoactive effects).
Promoting your CBD products to everyone can be money and time consuming, and ineffective. Grouping your potential buyers based on certain categories (age, gender, lifestyle, usage rates) will help you focus your marketing efforts.
Before defining your CBD marketing strategy, you should think about what motivates each type of consumer when buying CBD products. For example, you can focus on the younger audiences that use CBD as a relief for anxiety and insomnia, or athletes (many of them take CBD for inflammation and muscle distress), or arthritis sufferers.
It is crucial for your marketing to reach the right people. Take time and do research about who you want your audience to be.
2. Develop a Brand Identity
As the market becomes oversaturated, you must differentiate your CBD products from other brands by creating a distinct identity.
Again, you should know the ins and outs of your target audience. Collect information that provides an insight into your customers thinking and buying patterns and use it as a guideline to develop your CBD brand identity.
A brand is more than a logo, color, or tagline. Everything you do and create should appropriately and consistently reflect your company’s personality. It will emotionally connect with your customers and what you stand for and can deliver.
3. Business Plan and Budget
Every successful business needs a budget. A budget is like a roadmap where you can define the goal of your company, anticipate future needs, spending, profits, and cash flow. It will allow you to track expenses, and how much revenue you need to grow your business. A well-crafted budget will point your business in the right direction.
Also, you will need a budget to ask for a business loan or raise funding from investors. You will probably need to provide a detailed budget that outlines your company’s income and expenses.
4. Build a Presence Online
If you already managed all the paperwork and selection process, it is time to build your website. Having a website is more important now than ever. A website makes your CBD company look more mature and professional and gives you more flexibility and options to sell your products.
Nowadays, everybody can build a simple website, even for free. On the other hand, if you want a custom design and programming, hire a professional. It will allow you to save a lot of time that you can spend on focusing on other aspects of your business.
One of the most important things is to find a reliable credit card payment processing, which can be tricky for CBD companies as the payment gateway landscape has been changing a lot in the industry, so make sure you are working with a system that allows CBD products.
5. Pay for Advertising
Now it is time to finally bring the buyers. If you are wondering how to market online, you have probably considered paid advertising.
Although you cannot freely use Google or Facebook to sell your CBD products, as they ban them from their advertising platforms, you can still maintain a strong social media presence with two viable options that have the potential to bring in a lot of profit.
The first is SEO, including content marketing, that will help your business rank above others in search engines. To be successful with SEO, you just need to do a little research to find the right providers or hire an SEO professional to audit your website.
The second one is starting an email list (after your website is well-ranked through your SEO efforts) so you can offer discounts or even free information about CBD and all the changes regarding the industry.
6. Bonus Strategy for Marketing Your CBD Business
WillowCBD recommends using affiliate marketing to drive customers to your website. If you aren’t familiar with affiliate marketing, it’s simply a business strategy that leverages influencers in an industry to bring qualified traffic to your brand and if a sale is made on your site, then the affiliate receives a commission. The biggest benefit of affiliate marketing is that it is performance based, meaning you only pay when a sale is made. Setting up an affiliate program is quite simple as there are numerous third party applications that integrate with your e-commerce application to automatically attribute sales to specific affiliates. Join WillowCBD’s affiliate marketing program if you are interested in being an affiliate or checking out an example of how to setup an affiliate program.
