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The CBD consumer market is projected to generate more than $ 26 billion in sales by 2025. That means more product selection, but also more competition. As CBD becomes more mainstream, creating a campaign that stands out from the crowd will be critical to growth and continued success. If done right, a digital marketing Campaign can increase sales, increase brand and product awareness and acquire loyal regular customers.

Immerse yourself in data

In a saturated digital market, using data effectively is a non-negotiable key to success. The tool will help you identify, attract and retain companies effectively.

To begin with, market research provides basic guidelines for building your product and campaign. The more detailed you get, the more specific, targeted and effective your campaigns will be right from the start. Here are a few key takeaways from New Frontier Data every CBD marketer should know:

• Eighteen percent of Americans have tried CBD, and users always tend to be young, with 18- to 34-year-olds being the most common users. However, the over 55 age group is twice as likely to consume daily.
• The three most popular form factors for CBD are, in order, oil / tincture, food / edible, and topical / external. Gummies are becoming increasingly popular.
• The COVID-19 pandemic caused a huge spike in CBD consumption, especially in gummy bears. About half of Generation Z and millennials were more likely to use CBD during the pandemic.
• Another side effect of the pandemic: online purchases of CBD almost doubled, increasing from 29 percent in the first quarter of 2020 to 47 percent in the second quarter.
• The top three reasons to use CBD are pain relief, stress relief, and anxiety relief.
• Among CBD users, more than 50 percent always or normally use well-known brands, while the percentage of those who try new brands and those who never notice the brand are both around 25 percent.

Finding your target audience is a critical aspect of data collection. A common mistake among CBD marketers is promoting their product to the THC audience. Although there is overlap, the CBD audience is much more focused on wellbeing, while THC has a large recreational user base. Creating thorough and targeted audience profiles is time consuming, but it pays off a lot.

To build these audiences, use first-party data. This is data that you collect yourself, which gives you complete control over the methods of collection and security. First party data can include email addresses, website browsing activity, information communicated to you through surveys, and more. This data will help immeasurably in profiling and realigning existing customers, as well as building similar audiences for new customer acquisition.

First party data continues to be valuable for the duration of your campaign and beyond. Metrics such as impressions, frequency, cost-per-acquisition, reach, website visits, views per specific page, completion rate / rewatch, micro-conversions, cost-per-user, cost-per-add-to-cart, attribution / cross Device, Conversion / View- Through and more you get detailed insights into the effectiveness of your marketing and enable micro-adjustments to achieve the highest possible return on advertising spend.

Follow the rules

CBD marketing has the added complication of being banned – formally or informally – from some of the busiest digital platforms in the world. These include Google, which specifically bans CBD marketing, as well as Facebook and Instagram, which officially allow it, but meeting their compliance standards is virtually impossible. Everyone knows someone who accidentally crossed a very vague line and risked their entire presence on a network.

Some marketers may be tempted to try their luck on these platforms, but if your goal is sustainable and effective campaigns, you’d better use that energy to maximize your efforts where they’re welcome. For example, this can help alleviate the lack of strong content Google ads and organic search engine optimization. This is especially important as consumers looking for CBD products are likely already interested in buying and most will never get past the first page of Google. To reach a young audience on social media, Snapchat generally accepts CBD ads better and offers fewer opportunities to jump through valuable behavioral insights and campaign revenue.

Digital marketing options

Most importantly, CBD marketers still have access to programmatic advertising. While several different media formats are used programmatically, once an ad or website has been approved, it’s generally easier to scale to other platforms.

Programmatic is valuable to CBD marketing as it allows you to target almost anyone you like through platforms like this – which means it really pays off to be a data scientist here. The key lies in using a multichannel strategy approach. To get the most out of programmatic campaigns, study a variety of ad types, including display, native, audio, pre-roll, and connected TV ads.

When you get started with programmatic, use first-party data to assess how much you know about your customers and who your most valuable users are, then build predictive models to find more people who are like them to your audience to expand. The data reports and analysis provided by programmatic platforms are very valuable and help you continuously optimize campaigns.

The appeal of ads and the snappy text won’t resonate unless you reach the right audience. Compliance with the regulatory line and a data-forward approach are the basic building blocks for campaigns that will stand out in this crowded industry.

Scott Waldmann is Senior Account Executive at the digital marketing agency Adtaxi. Prior to joining Adtaxi, he held sales and marketing roles in a variety of industries including e-commerce, CBD, health and beauty, technology, and brick and mortar retail. He enjoys traveling and cooking in his spare time and believes that helping other people is the key to achieving goals.