CBD Branding & Marketing: Why Is It So Important for Your Business?

Although the CBD industry is relatively new, competition is still fierce. This means that you will need to make sure that you create a CBD brand that will truly stand out from the crowd. Of course, it’s important that you create high-quality, innovative products, but you need to make sure your potential customers are able to find them too. That is where CBD branding and marketing come in.

Why Do You Need a Solid Marketing Strategy?

As we mentioned, competition in the CBD sphere is intense, and with so many options, it’s easy for potential customers to become overwhelmed. To make sure consumers choose your brand over your competitors, you can use CBD branding and marketing techniques to pique their interest. You can tailor your marketing and branding so that they speak directly to your target audience.

It’s essential to form a marketing strategy early on, as it will act as a roadmap for your team. Based on your market research, you will know where your target audience spends time on the internet and what they’re interested in. Therefore, you can decide what platforms and techniques to use, and how to help potential customers find your brand.

Having a solid plan in place will also help you avoid wasting time, energy, and money advertising your products in a place where your target audience won’t find them. For instance, if you’re aware that your target audience tends to spend time on Instagram, rather than Facebook, you can allocate more time and resources to building a presence on Instagram instead of wasting time on Facebook.

Essentially, you should make it as easy as possible for customers to find your store, and your marketing strategy will outline how you will do this. It will also outline how you will use marketing techniques to retain customers.

When Talking About CBD Products, You Should Avoid…

There are rather strict rules in place when it comes to advertising CBD, in the UK and EU. This framework is in place to help protect consumers. For instance, you cannot make any medical claims when advertising your products. This means that you cannot imply that your products will prevent, cure or treat any illnesses or medical conditions. This is not only misleading, but it is also unethical.

Do Not Make Unsubstantiated Claims

Current guidelines also state that you cannot make unsubstantiated claims about your products either. This means you can highlight the potential uses and benefits, but you cannot guarantee that they will provide the customer’s desired results. You will also need to provide scientific evidence to support your claim.

For instance, if you mention that CBD can be used to support a healthy sleep cycle, you will need to provide legitimate evidence to support this. We suggest researching all online content thoroughly to make sure that you only link to sound university-based and medical research studies.

Only Share Fact-Based Information

We believe that informed customers make better decisions when purchasing CBD products. When customers have realistic expectations and factual information to hand, they can choose a product that suits their needs. Then, they are more likely to have a better experience and return to purchase the product.

On the other hand, if they have unrealistic expectations, they are more likely to be disappointed, and will not return as a customer. Therefore, we recommend being factual and truthful when marketing your products. Sharing exaggerated or misleading information with your customers will reflect poorly on your brand, making you appear untrustworthy.

How to Use Customer Testimonials

In your CBD branding and marketing, you can use legitimate testimonials and general feedback. However, you must let customers know that this is based on anecdotal evidence.

It is also worth noting that whilst you can offer customers product recommendations, you should never offer medical advice. Instead, you should direct customers towards a medical professional.

Make Sure to Include a Medical Disclaimer

All of your CBD branding and marketing materials should include a disclaimer. You should advise customers that CBD is unsuitable for anyone who is pregnant or breastfeeding. Likewise, you should also advise consumers that CBD can interfere with certain medications. Instruct customers to seek medical advice before trying your products if they are taking any prescription medications.

To find out more information on CBD advertising restrictions, you can take a look at this document, produced by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Please refer to appendix 10 for information specific to CBD.

How Can You Use CBD Branding and Marketing to Boost Your Business?

When you are creating your CBD branding, you should choose a style that will appeal to your target audience. You should consider:

• Colour palette
• Logo
• Shapes and textures
• Font
• Tagline
• Tone of voice and diction

For instance, if you are planning on marketing your products as luxury or premium products, you may want to opt for sleek, chic, and minimalistic designs. In contrast, if you are targeting a younger demographic, perhaps college students, you may want to incorporate fun colours and patterns that will pique their interest.

Consistency is key with CBD branding and marketing. You should ensure the same tone and aesthetic is maintained throughout your social media platforms and e-commerce store. The same branding should appear on your product labels and packaging too. This creates a united identity that your customers will instantly recognise.

Pairing effective branding with high-quality, informative content on your social media pages and websites helps customers form an association between your company and trustworthy products.

How Can You Use Marketing to Boost Your Business?

You might be wondering “how do I make my own CBD brand stand out from the crowd?”. Well, the answer is clever CBD branding and marketing. Let’s delve into how you can market your products effectively.

The main marketing techniques that we recommend are:

• Content Marketing
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing

Content Marketing, SEO & SEM

We have all typed questions and queries into search engines like Google, but have you ever wondered how Google decides which websites to show us? Well, that’s where SEO comes in. Google wants to match customer queries with trustworthy sites that will answer their questions properly. To do this, they index each site based on its content. Therefore, if you want Google to show your site to potential customers, you’ll need to play by the rules.

Some SEO guidelines are straightforward, but things can get rather complicated. For instance, you can make sure written content contains ‘keywords’ i.e. phrases that people are likely to search for. However, ‘stuffing’ your content with keywords or posting plagiarised content is frowned upon. You will also need to make sure that you regularly update your site with engaging, customer-focused content that will add to their experience.

Investing time and money in SEO and content marketing is a wonderful way of getting organic traffic to your site, but it can take time to build up your reputation with search engines. Luckily, you don’t need to do all of this by yourself, you can hire copywriters and SEO experts who are experienced in the CBD industry to help. Working with a professional is also beneficial, because they will be well-versed in CBD advertisement restrictions, and therefore, they won’t make any bogus claims on your site.

As we mentioned, it takes time to build up your reputation with search engines. However, you can invest in paid search engine marketing (SEM) options like pay-per-click (PPC) ads that will help you boost traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs).

Social Media Marketing

Dedicating time and effort to building a presence on social media is a wonderful way of building up a reputation as a trustworthy retailer, with high-quality products. You can use your platform to share engaging and informative content with your followers, and potential customers. This way, they can see how your products work and how they can benefit from using them.

Equally, you can offer insight into how your CBD business works, showing transparency and nurturing trust. Social media offers the opportunity to directly interact with customers too. You can use it to build rapport with your target market, offer tailored product recommendations, and guide them to specific products.

You can also encourage them to give you feedback about your products or their buying experience. Having a direct channel of communication with your customers will help you to identify pain points with products or their buying experience, which you can then improve.

How to Build an Online Presence

When you are building your online presence, you should always make sure to share engaging content that will benefit your potential customers. This content will need to be in line with the CBD branding that you have used on your products and online store. This ensures consistency across all platforms.

It’s almost impossible to build an online presence overnight unless one of your posts go “viral”, but there are marketing techniques that can help you hit the ground running. For instance, influencer marketing can help boost brand awareness. This means working with others who have more built-up platforms to promote your products. However, you should always make sure that the influencer or content creator is a good fit for your brand. They should be someone your target audience relates to and follows on social media.

Social media platforms often offer paid advertising options for businesses. This means that you can pay the platform of your choice to show certain posts to certain demographics of people. However, there are some restrictions when it comes to targeted and paid ads on social media platforms, but we’ll come back to that shortly.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most underrated and underutilized forms of marketing out there. It’s one of the best ways you can deliver information about your products directly to your customers – by sending it to their inboxes.

To get started, you should add a pop-up box on your online store, that appears when customers visit. To encourage customers to sign up for your email newsletter, you could offer them a discount code for their first order. This encourages them to place an order too.

Once you have accumulated an email list, you can send out information about new product launches, seasonal special offers, loyalty rewards, and discount codes. This will help with customer retention, and you can provide customers with valuable information about your products.

Restrictions for CBD Branding and Marketing on Social Media

As we mentioned, there are some restrictions in place when advertising CBD on social media platforms. Let’s take a closer look at what this means.

Facebook and Instagram

As both Facebook and Instagram come under the Facebook umbrella, they have the same advertising restrictions. Unfortunately, this means that at the moment CBD businesses cannot avail of the promoted ad features on either platform.

However, you can use hashtags to make sure your target audience finds your page. Once you have more than 10,000 followers, you can also use the link button in Instagram stories to direct customers to specific pages on your online store.

You can use your platform to inform customers about new products and how to use them. Equally, you can share informative content about the CBD industry in general, to educate followers about advancements in research etc. You can even repost user-generated content (with permission) to help build engagement within the community.

To take your social media CBD branding to the next level, you can use graphic design platforms like Canva to make purpose-made graphics for each of your social media platforms.

Twitter

Unfortunately, it is a similar situation when it comes to advertising CBD on Twitter – paid and promoted ad features are not available for CBD products. Like Facebook platforms, the option may be there for you to use, but the post will more than likely be removed. Ignoring guidelines may lead to repercussions, such as having your account removed or restricted.

However, you are free to post informative content about your products on your own page, to build brand awareness. You are also free to share behind the scenes insights into how your company runs, and engage with other users in the CBD community to build rapport and awareness.

Conclusion

Building a successful hemp business online has never been easier, especially if you know how to form effective CBD branding and marketing strategies. By now, you will have a very good understanding of what you will need to do to form your own strategies, based on your products and your target market.

But, how much does it cost to start a CBD brand? Well, this will depend on how you’re planning on marketing your products and your experience. For instance, if you are a social media whizz, you will be able to build a presence online with very little cost. In contrast, if you have little experience, you may have to outsource to get the ball rolling. This will be slightly more expensive.

If you’re a complete beginner when it comes to CBD branding, we’re also here to help. The Cannmed team has operated in the CBD industry for many years, and we have accumulated a wealth of knowledge that we would love to share with budding entrepreneurs. Our expert team are delighted to talk through your needs and ideas to help come up with solutions tailored to your unique brand.

To get in touch with us, simply fill out the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible. We can’t wait to hear from you.

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