How To Find Customers – Brand Awareness
We are brand new online shop selling CBD products, it’s been over a week now since we are up and running but we haven’t got any customers? How can you help us to gain real customers and what are your rates?
* A Previous website enquiry we received.
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CBD Oil has become so popular in the eyes of budding entrepreneurs that it is almost comparable to the famous Gold Rush of the 1900s. Because CBD is a relatively new product, there is a misconception that selling CBD should be easier than trying to sell a more established product that has been around for decades. This has led to an influx of newly created CBD brands with no prior planning to drive brand awareness.
Launching a brand and website with no further publicity other than a couple of posts on social media isn’t going to create 100’s of sales within the first week, regardless of the product you are selling. You need to create an actual and substantial amount of traffic to your website to begin making sales. As referenced by invespro.com, the average UK conversion rate for making a sale in 2019 sat at 3.81%.
From our experience, you will require a minimum of 15 visitors a day to begin making sales via your CBD website. As the number of website visitors increases, as long as your website is optimised for conversions, you will start to see an increase in sales.
So how do you find these visitors?
Depending on your target audience you must choose a relevant channel to begin to build a community. You must ask yourself ‘where does your target audience pay the most attention?’.
Search Engines – Do they use search engines to shop and find their CBD Products?
Facebook Groups – Are they a member of CBD group? For example Simply CBD Users Support
Instagram – Do they spend their time browsing social media? e.g Cannaray IG
Targeting Everyone
When scoping a new project, two key questions we ask are as follows:
1.) What is your product range?
2.) Who are your target audience?
The vast majority of the time, the answer we are told to our second question is ‘Everyone, 18 – 70-year-olds who want to use CBD and improve their health’. This is a crazy strategy on many levels!
Who Does Your Branding Appeal to? Why age matters.
If you are targeting an age group of 18 – 70 years, branding your CBD products to appeal to all age groups is going to be a tough task. What appeals to 18 – 30 years is unlikely to appeal to 50 – 70-year-olds. For this example, we have chosen two of the top UK CBD brands, Orange County CBD and Green Stem CBD.
Orange County CBD is bright and in your face, with their Vape products tightly linked to the famous TV series ‘Breaking Bad’. Their name is synamouns with California that is renowned for its relaxed vibe and relationship to Cannabis.
While Green Stem’s branding is more reserved, one key difference is while the term CBD is clear on their packaging, on the bottle of CBD it does not hold a dominant space. While speaking to a team member of Green Stem, I was told that while there is still a stigma related to CBD and drugs, people of a more mature demographic feel more comfortable having their product seen in their home.
What Type Of CBD Products Are You Selling
The type of CBD products plays an important role when deciding who to target. For example, someone who is looking for help to ease their anxiety or to sleep better is unlikely to choose a balm infused with CBD. However, someone who is active and looking for a product to ease muscle pain, or someone who struggles with joint soreness would more than likely choose a balm.
What Platform Will Your Target Audience Use
If you continue to target everyone, this makes your continued marketing campaign more complex. This means you will need to create content for all platforms to reach your audience.
For example, if you are looking to target a younger demographic (25 – 34 years old) Facebook and Instagram would be the best place to create ongoing content. If you have a female orientated product, then Instagram would be the best place to create content with 57% of it’s user base being female compared to Facebook’s 44%. However Pinterest dwarfs Instagram’s female user base, dominating with a staggering 78% registered female users.
Information sourced from Sprout Social
Knowing who your target audience is, what appeals to them and where their attention is spent ensures you can create marketing material that directly appeals to their wants and needs. Targeting all genders and ages will water down your approach and hampers your efforts to building a strong brand identity.
Having No Unique Selling Point
Premium, Trustable & Transparency are buzz words we have heard from tonnes of CBD companies. Choosing a target audience and pinpointing the unique selling point of your product are two vital steps to creating a successful CBD brand. What truly makes your CBD Oil, Gummies or Balm different from the other ones already available?
- Will your branding appeal to a different demographic than the majority of brands?
- Is it tailored towards a specific issue? Such as anxiety, pain or sleep?
- Is the price point of the product range different from your competitors?
Ensuring you know your target audience, having a unique selling point and knowing where your target audience pay the most attention sets you up to create a killer CBD brand.
A Strategy Of Knocking Down Others
The CBD industry has a bad reputation in terms of offering nefarious products. While there have been reports of low-quality products, all their industries have their bad eggs. What makes this worse is CBD companies who keep shouting about the bad eggs. There is nothing wrong to have a USP that promotes your brand and product as transparent and trustworthy. However, slating the industry as charlatans does no good for the future of the CBD industry as a whole.
Unfortunately, some CBD companies really don’t help, posing CBD as a wonder drug to all illnesses and making the loosest of claims. Claiming CBD has any medical benefit is a big ‘no no’ in accordance with the MRHA. It is super tough for CBD companies to promote their brand, especially when they have some of the most compelling customer feedback that they are unable to use due to restrictions.
Making False Claims
Some CBD brands really do let the team down! We recently held a Q & A and was asked to review a website of the person asking the question. On the website, they had placed a banner to document where CBD had been featured, not their brand, just CBD in general. Whether to include this feature on the website was the client’s idea or of the marketing agency, while they think it adds a level of social proofing, it actually leads to mistrust.
‘CBD has been featured by’ is completely misleading. You can use this technique for literally almost any product or subject matter. This concept of social proofing is disingenuous and provides some CBD brands with more ammunition to shout how distrustful other brands are.
It is a bizarre way to present social proofing to say the least.
