Despite the increasing legalization of CBD across the world, CBD products remain difficult to advertise on the internet. In fact, none of the three leading digital ad platforms — Google, Facebook, and Instagram — allow ads for CBD. However, not all is lost. Here are two effective strategies for promoting CBD products online.
CBD Content Marketing
Content marketing includes articles, videos, blog posts, social media posts, e-books, infographics, and many other types of content. These days, content marketing is the cornerstone of any successful online marketing strategy, and advertising CBD is no different.
Creating useful content about CBD allows you to:
- Improve SEO by helping your site rank for relevant CBD-related keywords
- Build trust with customers and encourage them to engage with your brand
- Demonstrate your authority in the CBD space, improving the reputation of your business
- Boost conversion rates
- Create new leads who discover your content through search engines, social media, and other sources
Another reason why content marketing is especially effective for CBD is that people have a lot of questions about this beneficial cannabis compound.
Common Google queries include whether CBD is intoxicating, its legal status, how it differs from THC, how it works, its benefits, differences between the various types of CBD products, and questions about CBD-related terms such as full-spectrum extracts and CBD isolate.
This not only allows you to bring in customers searching for answers on Google but also makes it easy to create a content marketing plan. An added benefit is that in many cases, people already intend to buy a CBD product and just need more information before they can do so. In other words, there’s a high commercial intent, so creating content that ranks for these keywords in Google is bound to increase your sales.
On top of it all, content marketing is not pushy and creates a two-way conversation between customers and companies.
Native Advertising
Another effective strategy to market CBD online is to use native advertising. Simply put, native advertising refers to ads that match the form of the media in which they appear. For example, they might take the form of recommended articles or videos.
Much like content marketing, native advertising works because it doesn’t feel like traditional advertising and engages users, especially since the information is related to what they’re curious about (in this case, CBD and cannabis).
Many native advertising services can be used by CBD brands, including Outbrain, Taboola, and Mantis. These services allow CBD companies to display native ads on relevant, popular websites.
The Future of CBD Digital Advertising
If the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill is any indication, hemp and CBD will continue to become legalized around the world. As attitudes towards cannabis continue to shift, it’s quite likely that traditional advertising will loosen restrictions around ads related to CBD and cannabis as a whole.
Regardless of when this happens, content marketing and native advertising already provide you with two effective ways to market CBD online.
I’ve seen the effectiveness of content marketing first hand by seeing my CBD articles rank on the first page of Google for popular keywords, improving SEO and bringing in thousands of new customers for the brands I work with.
Need content for your CBD website? I’m a CBD writer, let’s talk.