If you are riding the wave of a new trend, your successes and failures largely amount to the innovation of your marketing. The emergence of the CDB sector has been unrivalled in recent years. It seems like an age ago that an ingredient was so prominent to a product’s success. In this blog, we’ll look at what you can and can’t do with CBD marketing, CBDos and CBDon’ts.
It’s all a bit novel 🤓
As an extract, CBD is classed as a novel food and has ‘novel food status’. This means that for the ingredient to be used within a product. An application must be made by the business owner, and the certificate granted is valid for that product only.
Packaged up properly 🥡
Within the supplement sector, packaging is paramount. As well as driving sales, your packaging also needs to give all the necessary information about your product. Marketing CBD right now is important, people want to know what they have been missing and what benefits introducing the product to their lives could have. Here are some of the critical factors that MUST be included in your packaging.
- You must NOT include any medical claims
- You must have the term ‘food supplement’ in your packaging
- The term ‘CBD’ must be mentioned
- Include the recommended daily dosage
These are just some of the essential things to think about when designing your product packaging. If you are setting out to create your own CBD marketing and packaging, make sure you do your own research into the legal side of things.
The design and marketing process needs to be well-thought-out and formulaic; otherwise, you could be redesigning something you love over-and-over again. This would be costly and time-consuming. Our advice would be to use an innovative design company when it comes to your package design. They will already know all of the do’s and don’ts and will be able to provide you with a design that legally ticks the boxes.
Marketing road-blocks 🚧
CBD is legal and isn’t psychoactive like its cousin THC, meaning you can’t get high from it. Some of the marketing heavyweights of the world, like Facebook and Instagram, don’t take too kindly to it being marketed on their platform.
Native adverts that appear on Facebook basically appear with like-minded content. Meaning your advertising is placed alongside other products of a similar nature, and this is where Facebook doesn’t allow CBD marketing.
CBD products were being found repeatedly amongst health-related products and were generating sales off the back of being medicinally beneficial. One of the rules of CBD marketing is that you can’t make these claims as there is little to no medical proof of any positive health benefits. Hence why if you attempt to market your CBD products via the Facebook Ads platform you’ll fall flat very quickly.
The same applies to Instagram, as it’s Facebook-owned, and it wouldn’t make much sense if they didn’t set a precedent. However, all is not lost, your product can be marketed on social media; it’s just knowing how and where to do so. For example, Instagram is not against the use of influencers to market CBD products, so an influencer marketing campaign is well within your legal rights. So let’s get thinking outside the box.
Getting paid 💷
The ingenuity doesn’t stop at digital marketing. Once you have all that boxed-off and you’re selling products, you might have another problem with getting the money you’ve earnt. Most payment process systems are a little tetchy when it comes to accepting payments in the CBD market. Once again, we know what’s coming next, ‘but why, it’s legal?’ Well, the answer isn’t actually in the product itself, it’s more around the idea of fraud in new-founded business sectors.
It is notorious that when a new sector finds its feet, there will be people trying their best to utilise it for fraud. This is due to the volatility of an industry in its infancy and happens across many varying sectors at different times. So don’t worry, we think this will eventually pass once the validity and stability of the CBD sector is sufficiently evident. For the time being, we would advise finding a payment system who already hosts other companies with similarities to yours.
What’s next? 🤔
Truthfully, when a sector is in its infancy, there is endless potential in what you can achieve. There are no leaders, just everyone on a level playing field and we love this. Getting your marketing and business processes perfectly inline from the very start could be the difference between gross success and falling just short of what you want to achieve. Why would you not hire a thought-provoking digital and design agency to come along on your journey with you?
As a design agency in Manchester, we are ready to help you get your new CBD brand up and running. Get in touch to discuss the start of your new venture or how to improve what you already have.
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