In today’s market many CBD brands find themselves in a precarious position. The green rush is well underway and the iron is hot to build a successful CBD brand but there are still so many roadblocks and hoops to jump through. From compliance issues to building a brand that can stand out from the crowd, there are many things keeping CBD brands from feeling fully confident in their ability to scale. FieldTest has made it our mission to relieve some of this stress and make your push to CBD world domination as easy and effective as possible through high-performance advertising. If you have questions as to how to get started in this world you’re not alone, but fear not for FieldTest is here to help!

These five steps will help you get a confident and effective start in the complicated world of CBD marketing:

Step 1. Know Your Brand’s Strategy

The first place any CBD brand should look to set themselves up for advertising success is their own brand presence. Our friends at Hawke Media cover this in their Guide to CBD Marketing as well! So much of what makes a CBD brand successful is creating a one of a kind brand with a unique presence both on and offline that leaves customers with a positive impression that will last. This means having unique branding and an easy to navigate website with quality products on highly shoppable pages. When you’ve put all these pieces together you’ll be in a much better position to ask yourself the important questions that will help you run a successful CBD ad campaign. Who is your brand designed for? Where are your customers located? What are their interests? 

The CBD audience is unquestionably large and ever-expanding, but more often than not you will find that being selective and precise in your approach delivers better campaign performance. For example, while it may be true that both 20-something college students suffering from hangovers and millennial working moms suffering from post-yoga joint pains could benefit from CBD, you’re likely going to get the best performance out of an ad campaign that focuses in on only one of them. Not that you can’t get some crossover, but people are much more likely to buy from a brand that feels like it is personally tailored to them and their interests. Make these audience decisions early, let them be your guide in building your brand and you’ll get much better results down the road!

Step 2. Create and Curate Engaging Content

Now that you’ve built out your brand presence and landed on your key audiences, it’s time to produce some content that will appeal to them. A lot of brands in the CBD space start this process by creating a landing page to answer the question: Just what is CBD and how does it work? This is an excellent way to showcase your unique voice while informing and leaving a lasting impression on newcomers to the space. Another way brands produce content is by considering and answering specific question their audience may be asking. See how thinking about these things early on makes your job easier now?

For example, say you decided you want to pursue the urban millennial yoga mom audience. From the offset you know exactly who you are speaking to when you create content! You can create a blog that showcases stories that sound similar to theirs, case studies of CBD’s benefits that resonate most with them, or create specific promotions based on their interests. Come up with recipes for luxurious CBD-infused post-workout baths, write a blog post about how your products help relieve stress after a long day at work, the opportunities are endless! Remember that nothing catches a customer’s eye like a beautiful image so be sure to include some high quality imagery along with these articles to grab your audience’s attention. Now you have a strong foundation for your top of funnel as you can easily begin promoting this content to your desired audience and start gathering data on what works best. This is where your long-term campaign success all kicks off!

For a deeper dive into CBD blog ideas check out Hawke’s article Why Your CBD Brand Needs a Blog

Step 3. Check for Compliance

All your early planning won’t amount to much if you don’t also ensure you’re fully compliant. Laws are changing rapidly and hopefully in the near future we will see most of the restrictions preventing CBD brands from realizing their true potential fall away, but for the time being there are several regulatory hoops you must jump through. These start at the federal level with the potential to get more and more restrictive depending on your state and city. All hope is not lost, however, and we’re here to tell you that CBD advertising is still  possible! Here at FieldTest we’ve run dozens of CBD campaigns nation-wide by adhering to some simple starting rules.

First, you MUST be federally compliant to advertise. That means your website must be age-gated, meaning you must have a pop-up window that asks whether the viewer is of legal age to purchase your product. Secondly, no images of cannabis flower or use can be present on your site. This includes pre-rolls, vapes, and edibles. Sorry, no hero images of a customer enjoying a nice puff of your proprietary CBD flower blend or biting into a big delicious CBD edible. Packaging shots, on the other hand, are all good! Don’t underestimate your audience, they’ll get the same message from a picture of someone holding your vape pen’s packaging at a dinner party that they would from a picture of that same dinner party all puffing away.

Third, you cannot make any specific claims of health benefits. This is due to the FDA still considering cannabis and its extracts to be a narcotic, making verification of the benefits of CBD a no-go, at least in the eyes of lawmakers. This may seem like a stake in the heart of your advertising efforts, but it’s just a simple hurdle to jump over. This means instead of advertising that CBD will definitively cure your anxiety and relieve your chronic back pain, simply state that CBD promotes ‘a centering feeling’, ‘relaxation’ and will help ‘unwind after a long day at work’. It’s all a matter of crafting language that expresses the benefits of CBD while not making any prescriptive statements. It’s entirely possible to get the point across and still remain compliant as long as you know the steps and are careful to follow them!   

Step 4. Build Out High Performing Creatives and Target Your Audiences

It’s finally time to get selling some CBD! If you’ve made it this far and you’ve followed the steps above you’ve likely got all the pieces in place to pull off a high-performing digital ad campaign. If you’re still looking for ideas on how to promote your CBD brand give Hawke’s article 6 Ways to Promote Your CBD Brand a look. This is where we come in. With a fully compliant website, a beautiful and unique brand, and some well thought out content intended to resonate with your potential customers you'll have no problems getting a full funnel digital ad campaign started in no time!

Your first step will be getting the architecture in place to gather your advertising data. As soon as you can, drop the FieldTest tracking pixel onto your website so you can track your traffic and learn more about your site visitors for marketing purposes. You should also add a purchase tracking pixel to your confirmation page to capture revenue and order ID during your paid ad campaigns. This data can be used in future campaigns to create Lookalike audiences to further the scale of your marketing efforts.

Next it’s time to start building your ads! Using FieldTest’s ad platform, simply select New CBD Campaign, paste the links to your content into our ad builder and come up with some fun headlines to match. Remember, these will be highly targeted ads so you should try to come up with ad copy that will resonate with your desired audience! Be sure to take the full funnel into consideration as well, awareness campaigns are important but they should always push people down to the next stage of the funnel towards conversion. (read more about your sales funnel here)

Once you’ve built some ads it’s time to put your early audience decisions to work and build out your targeting. This can be as simple as choosing which devices you want to target and in which cities and states, but since you’ve laid so much early foundation let’s go ahead and pay it off. Again, we’ve decided to target yoga moms so select women ages 30-59 and search for yoga in the interest bar. Once you’ve found a few segments that seem appropriate select them and you’ll have a good yoga audience going, but targeting doesn’t stop there! Think of some other interests that might resonate with your target audience and search for those in the interests search bar. Fitness, healthy eating, holistic medicine, pilates, all segments that may be interested in your brand offerings. Remember that these targeting segments are tied to the specific campaign you are running so don’t forget to experiment and A/B test in other campaigns. Maybe one campaign focuses on the feeling of restoration CBD gives you after a workout and is targeted to a fitness-interested audience. Another campaign can be focused on the relaxing benefits of your products and be targeted to stress relief intenders. Now you can watch how each performs and make educated decisions on your next advertising moves!

For more information on how to effectively use the FieldTest ad platform, check out our Platform Guides page

Step 5. Set Your Budget and Timing

You’ve followed every step, crossed every t and dotted every i and now you have a full suite of beautiful, compliant, content-driven ads ready to be delivered to your highly-curated custom audience segments. It’s time for the moment of truth, but there’s still one question left to answer: How much money should I spend on these campaigns? At FieldTest we believe that anybody at any budget level should have the ability to advertise online, in fact we allow anyone to flight on our platform with no minimum spend, but the simple fact is that marketing is an investment and you must be prepared to invest if you want to maximize returns. We recommend that you start with at least $2,000-$5,000 per month in awareness marketing in order to drive as much audience interest as you can. This allows you to gather the largest possible data footprint in order to maximize down-funnel marketing. Using the data earned by investing in top of funnel you’ll build out what’s called a ‘retargeting bucket’, a group of people who have visited your site and shown interest in your product who you can then ‘retarget’ with ads using specialized language intended to convert them to customers. The more traffic you drive at top of funnel the larger sample size of audience behavior you’ll have and the more effective this retargeting bucket will be later down the line!

If you’re not quite ready to invest at these recommended budgets don’t worry! You can still run a successful ad campaign, you’ll just have to test your buying against shorter flight dates to gather more information for future marketing efforts. We recommend clients with smaller budgets spend a bit quicker, testing creatives on a 10-14 day timeline rather than a full test month. This is because the less you spend, the fewer ads you’ll serve, the less information you will be able to gather from reviewing creative and placement performance. By spending in quick bursts you’ll get the most bang for your buck in data insights, which in turn will help you plan more effective campaigns down the road. We designed our platform to be able to accommodate any client with any budget size because we believe that any budget can give our clients positive results, but the goal of any marketing campaign should be to achieve positive ROI and scale!

Conclusion

The CBD market is growing more and more crowded all the time. Every day it seems like a new brand appears to compete in this new and exciting boom industry. That doesn’t mean you can’t stand out from the crowd as long as you take the right steps! Prepared marketers will understand the opportunity that getting ahead of the crowd on advertising presents, with new audiences of loyal customers just waiting to be tapped into by the right CBD brand. These steps above will not only help you to get started in the world of digital advertising, but will be your guide to driving new levels of revenue and effectively achieving scale.

Get in touch below to find out how FieldTest can help you pump up your revenue and scale your business with digital ads