The hemp oil industry has been rapidly growing in the recent years, and the companies in this space need effective marketing strategies to stand out from the crowd. If you are looking to promote your hemp oil business online, there are several effective strategies you can use to reach your target audience, build meaningful relationships with customers, ultimately affecting your bottom line in a positive manner.
In this article, we’ll go through our top 5 picks when it comes to hemp oil marketing strategies.
1. SEO: Grow your organic traffic
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical aspect of any digital marketing strategy, and hemp oil businesses are no exception. SEO helps improve the visibility of your website in search engine results pages, which can drive more traffic to your website and increase brand awareness. In the hemp oil industry, where competition is fierce, ranking high in search engine results pages can be the key to success. By optimizing your website content for search engines, you can improve your organic traffic, generate more leads, and ultimately increase sales.
One of the most important elements of SEO is using relevant keywords and meta tags. This involves identifying the keywords and phrases that your target audience is likely to search for when looking for hemp oil products and incorporating those keywords into your website content. Meta tags, such as title tags and meta descriptions, provide search engines with information about the content on your website and can help improve your search engine rankings. By including relevant keywords in your meta tags, you can increase the chances that your website will appear at the top of search engine results pages.
In addition to optimizing your website content for search engines, it’s also important to create high-quality content that resonates with your target audience. This means providing valuable information and insights about hemp oil products, as well as creating engaging content that encourages visitors to stay on your website. Creating high-quality content can also help you build backlinks to your website, which are links from other websites to your site. Backlinks are an important factor in search engine rankings, as they signal to search engines that your website is a credible source of information. By creating valuable content and building backlinks to your website, you can improve your search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic to your website.
Below is the backlink profile for a CBD & Hemp client we’ve been worked with since 2020. The graph shows the gradual increase of both referring domains and backlinks over time, while improving the DA (Domain Authority) and increasing the SERP rankings.
2. Email: Build meaningful customer relationships
Email marketing is a crucial tool for businesses in the hemp oil industry to build relationships with customers and increase sales. By collecting email addresses from visitors and customers, you can create targeted email campaigns that offer valuable content, promotions, and special offers. With email marketing, you can stay top-of-mind with your customers and keep them engaged with your brand without incurring high costs.
To build a successful email marketing strategy, it’s important to focus on list building and segmentation. You can build your email list by offering something of value to visitors, such as exclusive content or a special offer, in exchange for their email address. Once you have your list, segment it based on customer behavior and preferences, allowing you to send targeted and personalized content. Email automation and nurturing is also a powerful tool for building relationships with your customers. By sending automated and targeted email campaigns, you can engage with your customers at each stage of the buyer journey and move them closer to making a purchase.
Using a robust email marketing platform that offers advanced automation, segmentation, and analytics capabilities is also an important factor. Here at Canesta, we work with a few different email softwares, but when it comes to automation, segmentation and top-notch reporting, Klaviyo is the winner, no question. Thus working with a Klaviyo expert you can take advantage of the platform’s advanced features to create highly targeted and effective email campaigns. A Klaviyo expert can help you optimize your email campaigns for conversions, track your results, and make data-driven decisions to improve your email marketing strategy.
Klaviyo Performance Report
3. Paid Ads: Drive sales and create brand awareness
Paid advertising is a powerful way for hemp oil businesses to increase brand awareness, drive sales, and stay ahead of the competition.
While paid advertising can be an effective way for hemp and CBD businesses to reach new customers, it’s important to note that there are restrictions on advertising these products on certain platforms. For example, Google and Facebook have strict policies regarding advertising hemp and CBD products, and may not allow these products to be advertised on their platforms.
Google’s policy states that it allows ads for topical hemp products but not for ingestible CBD products. Additionally, hemp and CBD businesses must comply with strict regulations and provide documentation to show that their products are legal and approved for sale. Similarly, Facebook’s policy prohibits the promotion of ingestible hemp or CBD products, as well as medical or recreational marijuana products.
Now, there are some ways to go through that, such as using Google Shopping for topicals. It’s important to note that this is really grey area, and even though you advertise just topicals in the Ad platform itself, if your website has other products, such as capsules, pills or tinctures, it’s possible that the Google Merchant Center account will be suspended for violation of the advertising policies.
To navigate these restrictions and effectively advertise hemp and CBD products, it’s important to work with a marketing expert who has experience in the industry and a deep understanding of the regulations and guidelines.
There are other platforms that have not so huge reach, but still can have a positive effect on your traffic and sales, and can be a vital part of the marketing mix. TikTok is a good example of this. While TikTok doesn’t officially have hemp or CBD listed for North America (they do for some countries in the EU), they still ban these substances on their platform. One workaround is to create educational content that highlights the benefits of hemp and CBD products without promoting specific products or making medical claims. For example, businesses can create videos that showcase the health and wellness benefits of hemp or the different ways that CBD can be used in daily life. These videos can help educate consumers and build brand awareness without running afoul of TikTok’s advertising policies.
And finally, you can do advertising on adult websites. Yes, you’ve heard me, these naughty and indecent places online. There are online advertising networks specializing in providing ad inventory for adult websites. These platforms offer a rwide range of ad formats, including display, native, and video ads. Usually the pricing model in these networks is cost per impressions (CPM) and varies based on number of factors, including the ad format, targeting options, and the quality of the ad. When it comes to targeting you can pick and choose between geographic, demographic, and behavioral targeting.
4. Affiliates: Focus on partner diversity
Affiliate marketing can be a valuable strategy for hemp oil businesses looking to expand their reach and drive sales. By partnering with affiliates, businesses can leverage the audience and expertise of their partners to promote their products and reach new customers. Affiliates can include influencers, bloggers, and other businesses in the hemp oil industry who have built a loyal following and can promote your products through their networks. To create an effective affiliate marketing strategy, it’s important to identify relevant affiliates who align with your brand and audience, and to establish clear guidelines and compensation structures for your partnerships. By working with affiliates to promote your products and services, you can build your brand and increase your reach in the competitive hemp oil industry.
Some examples of hemp-friendly affiliate platforms include HempAffiliate.com, which offers a network of affiliates who specialize in promoting hemp and CBD products, and RevOffers, which provides a platform for businesses to connect with top-performing affiliates in the health and wellness industry, as well some of the most popular platforms like ShareASale.
5. Co-Marketing: Create strategic partnerships
Co-marketing is a strategy that involves collaborating with other brands or businesses to create mutually beneficial marketing campaigns. By working together, businesses can expand their reach and leverage each other’s networks to reach new audiences. In the hemp oil industry, co-marketing can be a valuable strategy for building strategic partnerships and increasing brand awareness. Through co-marketing partnerships, businesses can share the costs and risks of marketing campaigns and tap into new markets that they may not have been able to reach on their own.
Successful co-marketing campaigns in the hemp oil industry have included collaborations between hemp and CBD brands and fitness, health and wellness, and beauty brands. For example, a hemp oil brand may partner with a fitness brand to create a co-branded campaign that promotes the health and wellness benefits of using hemp oil as part of a fitness routine. Similarly, a CBD brand may partner with a beauty brand to create a co-branded campaign that promotes the skincare benefits of using CBD oil. By leveraging each other’s expertise and audiences, both brands can benefit from increased exposure and customer engagement.
To create effective co-marketing partnerships, it’s important to align with brands that share similar values and goals. This ensures that both parties are working towards a common objective and can create campaigns that are authentic and resonant with their target audiences. Additionally, it’s important to establish clear goals, expectations, and metrics for success, and to create mutually beneficial campaigns that provide value to both businesses and their audiences. By working together and leveraging each other’s strengths, co-marketing partnerships can be a powerful tool for building brand awareness and reaching new audiences in the competitive hemp oil industry.
