With the exponential growth of online and physical stores, the loosening of regulations and the expansion of product offerings, the CBD commercial landscape has been radically transformed in recent years.
The upcoming holiday season offers you the opportunity to capitalize on these trends for your in-store customers. But just how do you set yourself apart from your real and virtual rivals? This guide to marketing CBD products can help.
Get to know your customers
When you really come to understand who your patrons are and why they are so passionate about CBD-infused products, you will have the first piece of the retail success puzzle. What’s more, the holiday season is the perfect time to meet their gift-buying needs.
Therefore, your job is to determine the factors that are most important to your clients so that you can furnish them with the targeted information and merchandise they are seeking – not just for themselves, but for their friends and family as well.
The point of sale system furnished by your CBD merchant account provider can be extremely helpful in giving you insights into buyers’ past behaviors and preferences. The reports you create using your POS tools can also let you know which items are lagging in sales, enabling you to change your inventory or merchandise display strategies.
You can then either order less or lavish additional exposure on specific items. You might also deploy these details in the creation of a historically-based gift guide that can help your in-store customers to refine their picks and choose the perfect products for everyone on their gift list.
Leverage email
It might sound old-school, but email remains a highly effective way to segment and target your customers in a way that reaches them from anywhere. This is especially true if you already have a CBD customer loyalty program, since you have a ready-made list of enthusiastic CBD buyers who are well-acquainted with and positive about your brand.
Email can help you to guide established and even potential buyers through every phase of the sales channel.
It starts with awareness of your products because word-of-mouth buzz can escalate through a marketing campaign, progress as interest grows, moving into stages of serious consideration and intention to buy, evolving into evaluating the purchase and comparing it with competitors, then finally, a sale.
Personalized, intelligent email communications can address the needs and priorities of people at every stage of the sales channel process.
These electronic communications also help you create a sense of urgency during the holiday season. Configure your POS’s customer relationships software to send out personalized messages to various segments of your customers at regular intervals, to create a sense of excitement about your products and special seasonal promotions.
It’s a great way to entice people to make the trip to your shop. Additionally, harness the power of email to gather post-purchase customer feedback that will enable you to constantly refine your marketing strategies, not only for this year but for the future.
Put these techniques to work, and you will quickly come to realize that email is still powerful.
Take advantage of social media
While you are prohibited from buying paid ads to promote your CBD products on social media, that doesn’t mean that sites like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and TikTok are completely off limits.
In reality, you can get a lot of mileage and sales from the creative use of your regularly updated social media pages. That’s because these vehicles give you numerous opportunities to introduce yourself and your brand, while simultaneously providing a forum for information dissemination and customer engagement.
During the holiday season when people are looking for unique gifts, social media pages often are the sources of inspiration that eventually lead to purchases. Much of the creativity can come from your own customers and their organic testimony about your CBD offerings.
Support these with your own rich, credible information about your top sellers, and you can look forward to a surge in sales during the lucrative final quarter of the year.
Create a sense of urgency
The holiday season provides some automatic deadlines that prod customers to complete their shopping journey by a set date. You can make the most of this by creating limited-time promotions, discounts and deals.
Publicizing these throughout all of your channels, i.e., email, online and via social media, will help to bring that all-important foot traffic into your shop. Then you can further entice shoppers with your innovative displays and compelling information to make additional sales and even capitalize on impulse purchases.
In addition to your carefully curated displays and layout, be sure that you provide a stellar buying experience at the register.
Giving people a variety of in-store payment options, i.e., credit and debit cards, digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay and even buy now, pay later (BNPL) will demonstrate your commitment to providing the perfect buying experience for everyone no matter how they prefer to pay.
Offer unique holiday product options
Finally, this time of the year gives you free creative reign. Now is your chance to reconfigure your offerings in ways that change the look and feel of even your most established products.
For instance, be creative about how you curate merchandise. Suggest bundled deals and product pairings that might well inspire customers to branch out from their usual buying behaviors.
Flash sales give customers short-term access to one-time low prices while targeted deals for loyal customers help to cement relationships with your brand. Another idea is to combine some of your bestsellers into bundles, perhaps also adding an item that you want to promote so that it gains extra exposure with your tried-and-true clients.
All of these strategies are further bolstered when you make your physical store into a place where customers can expand their knowledge about the CBD world as they interact with you and your helpful and friendly staff.
By doing so, you can transform a boring payment transaction into the opening conversation in an ongoing dialogue between your brand and the shoppers without whom your store would not survive.
It is, in fact, these relationships that can continue to grow and thrive into next year and beyond, helping to form a strong foundation that can support your shop now and into the future.
