The CBD market is abundant in opportunities, but that automatically means abundant competition. And it’s not just a matter of competition in terms of quality, but competition for potential consumers’ increasingly divided and fleeting attention. Even if you have the absolute best CBD product that money – and perhaps even not a lot of it – can buy, that’s no good if it doesn’t get noticed.
So how do you get your product noticed on the CBD shelf?
For starters, make a product worth noticing. Quality should always be first – without it, nothing else matters.
Then, you have to prove it. How do you do that in a notoriously underregulated industry, as is the CBD one? With third-party testing, the voluntary initiative that has become the good players’ stamp in this field.
Then, you get to the actual part of getting your product noticed, or in other words, marketing, and more specifically, your product’s design.
Granted, the room for creativity in the CBD industry might be a little smaller, since the labels needs to accommodate important technical information. But that should just make your graphic designer say, “challenge accepted.”
There’s no one-size-fits-all in advertising. It’s all about your target audience, your USP (unique selling point), and the message you’re trying to communicate. So how do you figure those out?
Well, that depends. Does your product offer great value for money – find a way to communicate that – perhaps with a more down-to-earth design and message – to your target audience, which would be deal hunters, every-day consumers, and CBD rookies. Do you cater to athletes and premium users with very specific needs and exceptionally high standards? Make it known – with a sleeker design and a more daring message.
Does your product and/or company a unique story, like being a vet, for instance? Do you have unique experience – as a terpene expert or an extraction wizard? Say all that.
Generating product-related content is another trend that can’t be neglected. By providing valuable, informative, and engaging CBD-related information, you can build your authority and take your consumers on a more seamless, gentle, roundabout journey rather than selling them things right off the bat and likely scaring them away. Content marketing has consistently proven to be very effective and cost-efficient across virtually all industries.
And speaking of the online world, don’t forget that your CBD products don’t even necessarily have to be on a physical shelf. E-commerce offers many universal benefits as a business model, and some particularly relevant to CBD.
The obvious benefits are the ease for customers and the reduced overheads for you, which respectively allows you to reduce your prices and improve your bottom line. But CBD e-commerce gives consumers a chance to do thorough research, delve into the third-party lab reports, and weigh products’ pros and cons against each other on their own, personal scale. This leads to better choices, and ultimately to repeated customers.
Besides great content marketing, your e-commerce site needs to be optimized to run like a well-oiled machine. Every lag, every discomfort, like a scarcity of payment methods, mean lost customers.
Some of these strategies might sound like modern mumbo-jumbo to some old-school CBD manufactures who just want to sell CBD. But at the end of the day, CBD is a business – a booming one at that – and good business might start with quality products, but it goes way beyond that.
Image Credits: SurFeRGiRL30 / flickr
