Top 10 CBD Sales Mistakes Commonly Made and Easily Fixed

October 18, 2023

Being a specific niche, CBD requires you to be quite creative with your marketing. That's why a lot of CBD business owners make the same mistakes, relying only on their product quality and CBD popularity. These are good starting points, however, they aren't enough for successful CBD marketing. To promote CBD effectively, you need a strategic and pitfalls-free approach. So, looking for ways to leverage your CBD sales, make sure you aren't making the following mistakes.

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1. Being Unclear with Target Audience and Its Problem

CBD is quite popular in the modern wellness market. It is widely used by customers suffering from different health problems and also by those who want to support their well-being with natural and herbal ingredients. Plus, it may be used as an immune-boosting tool, which makes CBD even more demanded in pandemic-times.

However, relying on CBD popularity and trying to sell it to a large and not-segmented audience can't be the right approach. Cannabis sales, as well as the sales of any other product, should be carefully tailored to the specific audience and its needs.

Since CBD may be helpful with quite a variety of health issues, and thus, can be used by different target groups, you have a lot of opportunities for target audience definition and segmentation. For example, you may focus on those suffering from chronic pain, and tailor your marketing campaigns to the users with different but still specific health issues.

Such an approach will allow you to build more effective communication, based on empathy and the desire to help.

2. Ignoring FDA

Food Department Administration is the authority whose opinion is a must to be taken into account when developing CBD marketing strategy. To date, this agency approved only one cannabis-powered medicine. This is Epidiolex that is used to treat seizures in patients with a severe form of epilepsy. As for any other CBD products, FDA obliges manufacturers and resellers to make no medical claims, if they are not directly backed up by scientific research.

Most scientists also agree that despite the CBD potential, it is not yet fully researched and understood. Thus, you can't directly state in your marketing materials that CBD is helpful for specific conditions. Instead, you can say that it might be helpful, according to the research you are referencing to.

Always keeping FDA requirements in mind is one of the best things you can do for your CBD business and its marketing since the agency also has the right to test the product's compound and send a warning letter.

3. Hiding Lab Tests Results

According to the US federal laws, as well as state-specific regulations, each hemp processor should follow the specific cultivation and production practices, plus assure the quality of the final CBD product with the independent lab test results. These results should be freely available to potential customers as well.

Thus, hiding your lab test results is one more mistake you can make in your marketing, and thereby significantly decrease your CBD sales. Modern customers are well aware of the opportunity to request lab tests since they want to know what they are going to consume. Making your lab tests publicly available is one more evidence of your brand transparency and honesty, and one more opportunity to back up your marketing claims.

So, take one more look at your website UI design and find the prominent place to place the lab tests. Most CBD sellers place them right on the product pages or create a separate category on the website.

4. Having No Content Strategy

As well as with any other product promotion, content strategy is a must-have document. However, a lot of CBD business owners continue creating content chaotically, in hope that it will streamline the CBD sales process. Content development strategy for cannabis sales requires a lot of efforts since it will be effective only when it is compliant with the following rules:

Each article should correspond to the CBD sales funnel stage. That is, there is no point in explaining CBD products' types to those who don't know what CBD is and what effects it may promise.
Each content piece should proceed from the users' problem and be enriched with specific keywords. For example, you may take the keyword "CBD for pain" and come up with dozens of different and specific articles around this topic, for example, revealing the effects of CBD for chronic pain, muscle pain, back pain, and so on so that each user may find his/her specific problem and discover how CBD may help.

That is, your content strategy should be logical and focused on the real questions of your users. Doing this way, you will be able to wisely balance between SEO and the concerns your users have, and this is already half the battle.

5. Missing Local SEO

There are a lot of SEO specifics when it comes to CBD sales, and local SEO is one of them. Some business owners ignore local SEO and consider this part to be unnecessary since they have no physical store presence. And this is a huge mistake since you are missing a great share of prospective leads looking for CBD offerings near them.

Even if you have no physical store but still ship your CBD products to multiple locations, you should cover them with relevant keywords. Otherwise, your potential customers will never find out about the opportunity to order CBD from you and get it delivered. It might be an option they are just looking for, and a local SEO strategy will help you to reach out to them.

To make local SEO work for their benefit, most CBD business owners create either internal web pages or landing pages tailored to the specific location and fill them with meaningful content and location-based keywords like "CBD near me" or "buy CBD in Massachusetts".

6. Copying Competitors

Copying competitors has never been a winning strategy. Such an approach leaves no room for brand identity development and finally harms your business. However, let's be honest - it is quite challenging to stand out of the crowd in the CBD niche. Thus, here you may adhere to the commonly accepted practices - monitor and analyze your competitors' activities, and brainstorm the ways to approach CBD marketing in a more creative and effective way. Proceed from the core values of your business and the problems of your customers to find better marketing solutions that will work for them.

7. Outreach to the Wrong Influencers

Relying on social media PR only is one more mistake a CBD sales department can make, especially when it is on the way to cooperate with the wrong influencers. At a time when almost everyone who knows how to create valuable content, engage and retain an audience can become an influencer, the search for the right influencer can take a long time. And this is a real minefield for marketing and PR mistakes. Here's what you can do to avoid them.

Use dedicated apps to search for influencers, such as UpFluence. It allows you to segment influencers in much the same way you segment your target audience.
Start collaborating with micro-influencers. Even though they have fewer followers, they have a closer relationship with them. Plus, micro-influencers are always more beneficial to your marketing budget.
Choose influencers who already have a positive experience with CDB. This way you will spend less time building trust between your brand and them.

8. Not Even Trying with PPC and Social Media Ads

Cannabis sales laws prohibit direct advertising of CBD products on Google and social media. But there are still ways to overcome these restrictions if you have a clear idea of what they prohibit and how to segment your target users in such a way that they understand that this is just CBD advertising. For example, Facebook allows for targeting people with carefully defined interests, and you may easily come up with your target audience portrait using these filters. To cope with the direct ban of CBD sales and advertising on Google and Facebook, you just need to slightly repurpose your product and advertise it as a herbal painkiller or immune-boosting tool.

While these restrictions are quite difficult to deal with, you still may give PPC and social media ads a try. Even if there will be no significant sales boost, you will be able to reach out to the prospective leads and continue commutation with them via email.

9. Having No Backlinks and Guest Posts

There are quite a lot of mistakes you can make with SEO, and your business niche even doesn't matter in this case. Google is a smart fellow. With the aim of instantly delivering top-notch content, it complicates its ranking algorithms quite frequently. However, there is an ever-relevant tanking factor - the presence of high-quality do-follow backlinks. For the successful SEO promotion of your CBD store, they matter as well, and there are two ways to create them organically.

Create valuable CBD content. In the case of CBD, valuable content stands for logical, SEO-optimized, problem-centric, well-researched, FDA-compliant, and scientifically powered articles. It will also be good to list proven facts and statistics, create stunning graphics and infographics, plus add an appropriate video. Such a mix will firstly drive prospective leads to your website making them dwell on your pages (improving behavioral factors), and secondly, it will generate backlinks and social shares.
Publish some guest posts. The main benefit of guest posting is the opportunity to get do-follow backlinks from the authoritative website and attract new users to your website at once. Don't miss it but look for the reputable semi-niche websites accepting guest posts and regularly create high-end content for them.

10. Missing Affiliate Marketing Opportunities

Getting started with an affiliate network is one more way to automate your CBD sales process. What's more, it requires less time and costs compared with any strategy we have discussed since you are going to share a part of your profit in exchange for somebody else's efforts towards your CBD sales. There are a lot of solutions that allow for instantly getting in touch with those ready to promote your product, plus this is one more opportunity to get more backlinks. In the latter case, the owner of the affiliate website should place the link to your products right in the content instead of creating clickable banners.

Conclusion

Cannabis sales have a lot of specific rules to comply with. Following a mistake-free marketing path will be even easier if you have a reliable CBD marketing agency nearby. CBD Local SEO will be happy to assist you with the online promotion within any of the strategies we've discussed. You are welcome to utilize our CBD marketing experience to streamline your CBD sales, boost conversions and increase brand awareness. Get in touch with us right now for more actionable insights!

If you would like us to assist you with Fixing your Sales Mistakes just press "Book an estimate" button and we'll reach out to you shortly.