When it comes to marketing, cannabis brands face many rules and regulations Strict restrictions on paid media options can put cannabis businesses at a disadvantage when trying to reach potential customers.
While these rules and regulations may change in the future, there are other solid marketing techniques cannabis brands can implement. One such effective strategy is “influencer marketing.”
While influencer marketing can be effective for many reasons, it is not regulated in the same way as traditional marketing techniques, meaning it it the perfect option for cannabis businesses.
Influencer marketing is a kind of social media advertising that uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers who have a huge social following and are considered as experts within their niche.
Influencer marketing works because of the solid trust that social influencers have built up with their following, and recommendations from them serve as a kind of social proof to your brand’s potential clients.
Influencer marketing is simple and effective. An organization partners with an influencer, who then market the company’s products or services through their social media feeds.
Payment may be in the form of a free product or a paying contract. Some influencers get promotional codes that they can share with their followers. They may receive a percentage of each sale that uses the code.
Many brands work closely with their influencer marketers to create effective social media posts. In this way, brands can be sure social media posts properly reflect marketing messages and brand values.
Influencer marketing is both new and evolving, so many businesses are still learning how to implement it. One of the essential things is develop a solid influencer marketing strategy.
The right influencer marketing strategy can help you avoid the pitfalls of influencer marketing tactics. These involve:
- Hiring wrong influencers.
- Marketing with the messages that don’t resonate with the target audience
- Paying high for too little.
If you choose a strategic marketing plan, you will be able to find the right people, create the right marketing messages, and prove high ROI for your marketing efforts.
Narrow Your Target Market
Choosing a target market should steer decisions about influencer partnerships. If your business is trying to attract new audience, then they may want to choose people outside of their group.
The perfect example might be a cannabis business that has just manufactured CBD topicals. While the CBD health benefits are still being investigated, some early research suggests it might help with skin problems like acne and eczema. Other studies are investigating its use as an anti-aging ingredient.
This brand has traditionally targeted people interested in CBD products for its medical benefits, such as reducing pain or insomnia. For this new product, though, they want to reach women concerned with both health and beauty.
To reach this target audience, they might look to connect with a beauty influencer who already has a strong following.
Knowing and understanding your target audience is key to shaping the direction of cannabis marketing strategy. A brand may try to reach more than one audience at a time by partnering with multiple influencers.
Choose the Right Influencers
Choosing right influencer for your marketing is very important. By choosing the right people, the business will team up with dedicated partners who reflect business values. With the right influencer, you can be sure that you are reaching the right audiences.
The initial thing to do is take the time for deep research. Consider your target market. Now look for professional influencers who are popular in these niches. There are many ways to get right information about who is considered influential in a niche. Firstly, you need to conduct a survey.
If you already have customers in the target market, ask them about who they follow. You may even ask if they have heard of a particular person. Second step is to check lists of “famous influencers” for particular niches.
Many online marketers make the mistake of taking a “go big ” approach to their influencer strategy. They hire influencers who only have large numbers of followers. It is quite common for brands to refuse to work with someone who has 10,000 followers. They will only partner with people who have 50,000 followers or more.
Bigger isn’t always better, and this is particularly true in the influencer field. That’s why online marketers should also think about their reach and engagement level. Reach is a measure of how far online posts go. They may only have huge number of followers, but their posts may travel far beyond this inner circle. They may be boosted by other, larger personalities, or they may have a sizable following across platforms.
Engagement measures how much someone’s fans interact with them. Someone who has 40,000 followers but gets just 2000 likes on most of their posts doesn’t have engaged audience. People follow them, but they don’t interact.
Building and Managing a Strong Relationship
Another important thing to consider is just how much control to give the influencer. Some marketers are happy to give influencers free rein. Doing so means they don’t need to create content or messaging themselves. Others want to have full control over the creative process, so they can keep influencers on-brand.
The “right” strategy probably falls somewhere between these two points. Influencers know their target audiences, so letting them design posts is the perfect thing. That way, they can create engaging content that resonates with their audience.
Letting influencers do whatever they want can lead to online posts that don’t fit perfectly with a brand’s image. Suppose cannabis brand has an image as a friendly team focused on holistic medicine. A beauty blogger who is always sarcastic may not create informative content in line with the brand’s image.
Giving this influencer free rein will likely result in content that resonates with their audience, but it may detach your own customers. A middle ground is required.
Treat professional influencers like your partners. They want to create informative and quality content for their audience, and they probably believe in your brand name too. Concentrate on building a relationship with them, not micromanaging their creative process. Always work as a team to create a content calendar. Ask for final approval of any content related to your brand they post online.
Understand Your Competitors
To create a successful influencer marketing strategy, it is important to know what your competitors are doing. Analyze the online platforms they are active on and what kind of content is working for them. Know if they are getting appropriate audience reaction and response on social media. Take lessons from the mistakes they are making and avoid them in your content plan.
Design the Content Strategy for Your Influencer Marketing
Every social media platform allows you to post and share content in effective ways. Create a solid content marketing strategy depending on the social media platform you choose. There are many different content strategies you can choose to meet your brand goals like- giveaways, online contests, guest blogs creation, discount codes, create engaging content, powerful video techniques, and brand account takeover by professional influencers.
Review the Online Content
Before uploading content online make sure to review your content thoroughly. It takes seconds for influencer campaigns to go wrong on social media and hence, it is important to review. Even minor points like spelling errors and punctuations can have an impact on the target audience reaction.
The idea behind having an influencer marketing plan in place is to obviously promote. But going overboard with the same thing can do the opposite work. Creating quality content that has something for the target audience will give you better results. Many online platforms now support video content. Make the best use of it.
Measure Marketing Results
The last step in any marketing strategy is getting some metrics in place. How will you know if your influencer marketing strategy is working? Impressions, engagements, clicks and sales are some of the points to consider.
It is quite easy to measure sales if the influencer has their own discount code or something similar. Whenever a customer checks out using that code, you know the sale was brought in by the influencer.
Clicks tell you how many people arrived via the influencer’s links. Engagements might include comments and likes on the online posts, as well as people who then follow your brand. Impressions give you the idea of the reach of any given post. This includes video views and similar measurements.
Sales are the perfect measure of how well an influencer marketing strategy is “working.” Impressions are less useful. If your goal is to reach more audience, then knowing how many people are seeing your posts may determine your “success.” If you want to improve your social media following, then engagements might be a useful metric to consider.
When you measure, you can prove your ROI. Some benefits of influencer marketing, such as goodwill and brand name visibility, are harder to measure. They usually come hand in hand with high scores on other performance metrics.
By creating an influencer strategy, you will be well on your way to developing successful partnerships and getting a higher ROI on your influencer marketing.
Many marketers are still learning influencer marketing, and the industry is still evolving. The right marketing strategy can help you avoid common missteps. Instead, you will be able to do influencer marketing the right way, right from the beginning.
Every influencer marketing strategy has a purpose. No matter which product or service you are promoting there has to be a real motive behind it. Influencer marketing is not just for promoting a newly launched product or service.
Your campaign can also be for improving brand awareness, connecting with a different audience set, promoting special discounts, conveying about a product update, etc. Check that your business goals are set for each influencer marketing strategy.
Final thoughts
Having an effective influencer marketing platform eases out the whole process of planning an influencer marketing strategy. At Power Funnels, we can help you design effective influencer campaigns for your brand.
We provide effective solutions for influencer marketing, social media analytics, and competition tracking. Brands not only give desired shape to their influencer campaigns but also measure them with the right tool. Additionally, the social media analytics solution helps get insights on content performance and audience engagement. Contact us today to take the next step in growing your cannabis business using digital marketing tactics.
