Can I Market My CBD Brand on Social Media? The Answer Might Surprise You
As FieldTest’s profile in the CBD industry grows, we’ve noticed client’s asking a standard set of questions. One of the first questions we get asked when a new CBD client reaches out to us is how they can leverage social media to promote their brand and build awareness. It’s true that social media presence lends credibility to a brand and opens them up to new customers, but many social platforms have decided to make this a challenge. Some social platforms block CBD brands from advertising and others don’t even allow CBD brands to use their platforms at all. This presents a real challenge to brands who want to scale but don’t want to leave a helpful tool like social media on the table.
Luckily all is not lost! We’ve found a lot of success for our CBD clients by marketing on social in a number of ways that you might not expect. In this post we’ll discuss how your CBD brand can scale its marketing while utilizing all available channels safely and effectively.
Understand your marketing stack
A foundational piece of unlocking your ability to market on social media is to understand where social fits in your marketing stack. Your marketing stack is analogous with your marketing funnel and will be comprised of many layered parts, each as service to a stage of your funnel. If you’re not familiar with the marketing funnel take some time to check out our blog post about it here to get caught up!
Every brand’s marketing stack will be unique based on that brand’s particular needs. Generally speaking the upper funnel will be serviced by social media, PR, experiential marketing, native advertising, some blog content and media (earned and owned). The mid-funnel will be a little more in-depth. Here informative owned media, video content, downloadable content such as ebooks and interactive content convince purchase intenders that the product is right for them. In the lower funnel retargeting will remind the most qualified purchase intenders of product,promotion and brand messaging to drive home the sale.
It’s important to make sure that your marketing stack addresses each of these stages in a way that’s effective and helps ensure that your customer journey is one that always leads down to the final sale.
So how do I make my marketing stack work for me?
As we mentioned before your marketing stack should be custom suited to the needs of your brand. Generally speaking social media would be considered part of the upper funnel, but how do you get yourself on social media while still remaining platform-safe? The answer lies in the next stage, with your earned and owned media. See, when you promote your brand on social media the way a non-CBD brand might you'll be shut down for promoting prohibited products. However, by promoting your owned and earned media you circumvent those restrictions, so long as your content doesn’t break any rules. For example, we’ve seen brands achieve this by creating a page on their website devoted to third-party reviews of their products. Another strategy that works well is promoting good press that mentions your product. Press and reviews can be achieved organically or by contacting industry review sites directly. We’ve also seen brands do well by writing high quality branded blog content with a focus on lifestyle. By writing a blog post about a subject your customers can relate to you allow yourself the ability to promote it on social media and direct traffic to your site.
What do I do after I market on social?
Once you’ve gotten your platform-safe content live on social media your job is not yet done. Your upper funnel is now being serviced but you still have to ensure that your mid and lower funnel stages are taken care of. Luckily FieldTest is here to help with those. Social media is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to digital advertising and while it does provide substantial brand lift - we’ve seen campaigns with a social media element perform as much as 15% better in key KPIs - without an open web element you’re missing out on the majority of web traffic (check out our blog post on the subject here).
For a good example of what a fully functional marketing stack looks like look no further than our good friends at Lowell Smokes. Lowell came to us with a degree of success already achieved. They had a beautiful website, plenty of content and earned media already under their belt and a desire to expand their reach with social and online ads. We helped them build out a landing page that could be promoted in digital ads and helped them promote some of their best press hits on social. The result was a successful launch of a CBD pre-roll line. You don’t need to have all the pieces in place immediately, but it’s important to know that there are marketing options for CBD brands at every stage of the funnel.
Here at FieldTest we like to tell our CBD clients the trick to achieving success is to be clever with your marketing and strategic in your advertising. This means sometimes you have to think creatively to work around the barriers put in place by platforms and then utilize all available tools to promote your marketing effectively across the open web. We’re always excited to help budding CBD brands make their mark on the industry and we look forward to continuing to help them achieve advertising success.