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Ultimate Guide to CBD Marketing
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With the legalization of marijuana happening left, right, and center, it was just a matter of time before the cannabis industry enjoyed unprecedented growth. The legal cannabis market in the US alone is projected to be a $20 billion dollar business by 2020.

One specific subset of the cannabis industry is all the rage right now, so much so that it is turning into a multi-billion-dollar industry on its own. According to market analysts, the CBD oil segment is expected to be worth around $20 billion by 2024.

As a consequence, more and more players are entering this market.  It is already an uphill battle trying to differentiate your CBD e-commerce business from your competitors.

It therefore becomes obvious that brands need to adopt a proper CBD marketing strategy if they are to rise to the top of the graph and stand apart from their competition.

To that end, we’ve put together a comprehensive cannabis and CBD oil marketing guide to give you a holistic picture of how to market your CBD brand like a pro in 2019 and beyond.

 

What is CBD?

Cannabidiol – often abbreviated CBD – is a popular compound that is extracted from the flowering tops, leaves, and resin of two strains of the cannabis plant: industrial hemp and marijuana. You can read more about it here.

CBD belongs to a broader class of compounds called cannabinoids that are found in abundance in the cannabis plant. There are around 113 known active cannabinoids on the plant; THC is the most prevalent, with CBD right behind it.

Unlike THC which, when ingested or smoked, is known for delivering the “high” feeling typically associated with marijuana, CBD doesn’t produce a sense of euphoria, hallucination or psychoactivity when consumed.

The marijuana plant has plenty of THC — or Tetrahydrocannabinol; it is also a decent source of cannabidiol.

 

How big is the CBD market?

A doctor holding medical supplies for CBD marketing

The CBD market is already huge, and it is growing rapidly-thanks to increasing acceptance by consumers, continued research into its benefits and favorable legislation like the federal Farm Bill 2018.

Conservative figures say CBD sales will rake in more than $1.8 billion annually by 2022, an impressive jump from sales of approximately $500 million in 2018. For a couple of years, experts have forecast that the CBD consumer market will soon outperform the entire legal cannabis industry.

However, a closer look at performance trends shows that the CBD market in America is actually following in the footsteps of the legal marijuana market, which is estimated to be worth over $23 billion in the next half decade or so.

 

Why has CBD become so popular?

Why are millions of consumers indulging in CBD products these days? The following noteworthy benefits may explain its popularity:

 

CBD is not psychoactive. This is the overarching property that makes CBD be perceived as more acceptable and safer than other cannabis products. As already mentioned, unlike THC, CBD doesn’t have any psychoactive effects when vaped, smoked, ingested, or applied to the skin. In short, anyone can use it without the risk of getting high, which is a big plus.

 

It’s legal. Perhaps the most defining reason why CBD has enjoyed a popularity wave is that the sale of CBD products became completely legal after passage of the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (aka Farm Bill 2018). You cannot say the same about other cannabis products in the US, such as marijuana, which has yet to be legalized in the majority of US states.

 

It’s an effective alternative treatment. There are hundreds of scientific research studies and reviews showing that CBD is indeed effective in addressing a wide array of conditions related to depression, anxiety, and pain. Here are some demonstrated CBD benefits:

  • CBD oil fights pain. Studies have shown that CBD is a promising alternative treatment for the pain associated with a number of conditions: migraines, Multiple Sclerosis, muscle spasms, arthritis, lupus, digestive problems, cancers, and much more.
  • CBD oil soothes depression. CBD has been found to increase the levels of happy-feel hormones such as serotonin. These biochemicals promote calmness and deactivate the compounds responsible for sadness, hopelessness and other symptoms of depression.
  • CBD oil helps with cancer pain relief. CBD has shown great potential for alleviating pain related to cancer and cancer treatments, for example: chemotherapy.

If that isn’t incredible enough, scientists and researchers have carried out studies that seem to suggest CBD can be a potential treatment for many cognitive decline and brain-related conditions such as: Huntington’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, PTSD, bipolar disorders, Parkinson’s Disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), and more.

In fact, the first-of-its-kind CBD-based drug for epilepsy, Epilodex, has recently been green-lighted by the Food and Drug Administration.

 

 

To read the full article, click here: https://www.digitalauthority.me/resources/cbd-marketing/

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The ABCs of CBD Marketing
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US-based CBD brands can now sell on Shopify, opening up the industry to the platform’s serious potential to propel growth. Find out what you need to know when marketing your eCommerce CBD business.

 

With Shopify’s announcement that US merchants can now sell CBD products on its platform, brands across the country have a new opportunity to tap into an industry set to reach $22 billion by 2020.

For the uninitiated, CBD is cannabidiol, derived from the hemp plant and used in a range of products from pain relief creams to dietary supplements, cosmetics, and more. With its meteoric rise in popularity, it’s an industry ripe for eCommerce takeover.

However, even though hemp-based products are in high demand, navigating in this space can be tricky, and brands are taking creative approaches to growing their business. Like all direct-to-consumer brands, those selling CBD products can turn their Shopify stores into a massive success by being smart about their marketing strategy and encouraging existing customers to spread the word.

Here are three key tips for effectively marketing CBD products online:

1) Turn your best customers into your biggest advocates

Most shoppers would rather buy a product recommended by a friend or family member, and 60% of loyal customers recommend the brands they love. So, with the odds in your favor, the smartest thing to do for your CBD brand is set up a referral program.

You can add the option to refer directly onsite, so shoppers can share as they checkout, or you can send a post purchase email promoting referrals. By incentivizing referrals — offering 15% off for referrer and referee, for example — you not only encourage the natural phenomenon of word-of-mouth marketing, but you also have control over the acquisition cost and don’t have to go through traditional advertising channels.

Make sure shoppers have to option to share referral links privately, since the one-to-one effect really makes a difference. A personal link sent through Facebook Messenger or email is up to 15x more effectivethan just posting it on Facebook or another social platform.

Once a customer refers a friend, the benefits continue to grow: the LTV of a referred customer tends to be 3x higher than that of an average shopper, since they feel more connected to the brand from the get-go.

2) Start small on social

Influencers are your friends when traditional social advertising is not. But it’s not just any influencer who can bring high-intent traffic to your CBD store. Look for micro-influencers who post unique, high-quality content and whose followers are engaged. CBD products are often highly personal, and when influencers have hundreds of thousands of followers, the experiences they share with those products are unlikely to resonate as deeply across such a broad follower base.

Once you have a few micro-influencers who love your products, make sure you nurture those relationships. Treating your influencers like friends rather than business opportunities helps strengthen their connection to your brand and encourages them to create better, more engaging content.

 

To read the full article, click here: https://www.yotpo.com/blog/cbd-shopify/

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Facebook Alternatives: 7 Alternatives to Advertising on Facebook to Consider
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Alternatives to Facebook Marketing

Listen to your Grandma: Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.

Sure, your Gran probably wasn’t talking about Facebook marketing, but her wisdom holds true.

For some time now, the cost of advertising on Facebook has increased while impressions have gone down.

Facebook Advertising Costs

Relying too much on one form of customer acquisition is dicey for any business. You’re bound to get caught with your pants down at some point.

Plus, you’re missing out.

People don’t just use Facebook. In fact, the average internet user has an average of 7.6 social media accounts!

There are also tons of other advantages to diversifying your advertising channels, such as cross-channel retargeting.

Bottom line, diversity brings security and advantages.

In this article, you’ll get an overview of seven channels that are great alternatives to Facebook.

Let’s dive in.

Post Contents [show]

Facebook Alternative #1: Google Ads

Google Ads is one of the best alternatives to marketing on Facebook.

In fact, Google is the only digital advertising channel that receives more U.S. digital ad spend than Facebook.

This is unsurprising when you consider that Google processes more than 4.5 billion search queries each day – that’s over 70,000 search queries every second.

You can use Google Ads to advertise on their Search Network and/or their Display Network.

Advertising on Google’s Search Network is when you bid to place your ads on Google’s search engine results page, or “SERP.”

Here’s an example from footwear company Vivobarefoot:

Google Ads

Next, advertising on Google’s Display Network lets you place ads on websites which use Google AdSense:

Google Network Ads

There are numerous benefits to using Google Ads, such as:

  • Advanced targeting
  • Budget control
  • Highly measurable
  • Fast results
  • Remarketing tools

Google Ads is based on a pay-per-click auction system.

In essence, advertisers bid on keywords, and the highest bid wins the advertising opportunity. Then, advertisers pay Google each time someone clicks on one of their ads.

To get started, check out our guide: Google Adwords Tutorial: A Step-by-Step Guide to Your First Campaign.

Facebook Alternative #2: Instagram

Instagram may be owned by Facebook, but it’s a different beast entirely.

Instagram has experienced massive growth in recent years and now has more than one billion monthly active users.

Plus, more than half of Instagram’s users visit the platform at least once per day, making it a brilliant alternative to Facebook.

So much so, that many advertisers are shifting ad dollars from Facebook to Instagram.

In fact, performance marketing agency Merkle recently reported that ad spend on Instagram was growing at four times the rate of ad spend on Facebook.

Specifically, year on year during Q2, Instagram’s ad spend went up 177 percent compared to Facebook’s 40 percent increase.

And there’s more.

This advertising channel is ideal for businesses outside of the U.S. or those looking to expand internationally, as 80% of the platform’s user base lives outside of the U.S.

Unsurprisingly, most of Instagram’s users are Millennials. In fact, 31% of Instagram users are 18 to 24 years old, and 30% are 25 to 34.

You can run five different types of Instagram ads:

  1. Photo ads
  2. Video ads
  3. Carousel ads
  4. Slideshow ads
  5. Stories ads

AirBNB Instagram Ads

It’s also easy to get started with Instagram ads if you’re currently advertising with Facebook. This is because Instagram ads are managed through Facebook’s ad manager.

To learn more, check out: Instagram Ads: How to Successfully Sell Your Products.

Facebook Alternative #3: YouTube

YouTube now has nearly 1.8 billion monthly active users.

It’s Google’s most popular service, with viewers watching more than 1 billion hours of video each day.

Here’s the crazy part…

YouTube on mobile alone reaches more 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S.

This advertising channel is well worth exploring, especially as video content is expected to claim 80 percent of all web traffic by 2019.

And according to “The State of Video Marketing in 2018,” 81 percent of people are convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. Plus, 76 percent of businesses say video helped them increase sales.

When it comes to marketing, YouTube is a suitable alternative (or addition) to Facebook, with advanced targeting, remarketing capabilities, and plenty of other features.

There are six types of YouTube ads you can use:

  1. TrueView ads
  2. Non-skippable instream ads
  3. Bumper instream ads
  4. Sponsored card ads
  5. Overlay ads
  6. Display ads

These various advertising formats allow you to get extremely creative with your messaging and content.

For example, check out how Nike showcases their brand personality in this six-second bumper video ad:

YouTube also allows you to set your video campaign objective from one of the following:

  • Leads
  • Website traffic
  • Product and brand consideration
  • Brand awareness and reach

YouTube Ad Types

To get started, check out: YouTube Ads for Beginners: How to Launch Your First Campaign.

 

To read the full article, click here: https://www.oberlo.com/blog/alternatives-advertising-facebook

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Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World’s Largest E-commerce Search Engine
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A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as “set it and forget it.” 

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

 

To read full article, click here: https://moz.com/blog/amazon-vs-google

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10 Link Building Lies You Must Ignore
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Even though link building has been a trade for more than a decade, it’s clear that there is still an enormous amount of confusion around it.

Every so often, there is a large kerfuffle. Some of these controversies and arguments arise simply from a necessity to fill a content void, but some of them arise from genuine concern and confusion:

“Don’t ask for links!”

“Stick a fork in it, guest posting is done!”

“Try to avoid link building!”

SEO is an everchanging industry; what worked yesterday might not work today. Google’s personnel doesn’t always help the cause. In fact, they often add fuel to the fire. That’s why I want to play the role of “link building myth-buster” today. I’ve spent over ten years in link building, and I’ve seen it all.

I was around for Penguin, and every iteration since. I was around for the launch of Hummingbird. And I was even around for the Matt Cutts videos.

So, if you’re still confused about link building, read through to have ten of the biggest myths in the business dispelled.

1. If you build it, they will come

There is a notion among many digital marketers and SEOs that if you simply create great content and valuable resources, the users will come to you. If you’re already a widely-recognized brand/website, this can be a true statement. If, however, you are like the vast majority of websites — on the outside looking in — this could be a fatal mindset.

In order to get people to find you, you have to build the roads that will lead them to where you want. This is where link building comes in.

A majority of people searching Google end up clicking on organic results. In fact, for every click on a paid result in Google, there are 11.6 clicks to organic results!

And in order to build your rankings in search engines, you need links.

Which brings me to our second myth around links.

2. You don’t need links to rank

I can’t believe that there are still people who think this in 2019, but there are. That’s why I recently published a case study regarding a project I was working on.

To sum it up briefly, the more authoritative, relevant backlinks I was able to build, the higher the site ranked for its target keywords. This isn’t to say that links are the only factor in Google’s algorithm that matters, but there’s no doubt that a robust and relevant backlink profile goes a long way.

3. Only links with high domain authority matter

As a link builder, you should definitely seek target sites with high metrics. However, they aren’t the only prospects that should matter to you.

Sometimes a low domain authority (DA) might just be an indication that it is a new site. But forget about the metrics for one moment. Along with authority, relevancy matters. If a link prospect is perfectly relevant to your website, but it has a low DA, you should still target it. In fact, most sites that will be so relevant to yours will likely not have the most eye-popping metrics, and that is precisely because they are so niche. But more often than not, relevancy is more important than DA.

When you focus solely on metrics, you will lose out on highly relevant opportunities. A link that sends trust signals is more valuable than a link that has been deemed important by metrics devised by entities other than Google.

Another reason why is because Google’s algorithm looks for diversity in your backlink profile. You might think that a profile with over 100 links, all of which have a 90+ DA would be the aspiration. In fact, Google will look at it as a suspect. So while you should absolutely target high DA sites, don’t neglect the “little guys.”

To read the full article, click here: https://moz.com/blog/10-link-building-lies-you-must-ignore

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Email Attack Protection Best Practices and Anti Spam Techniques
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The costs of email attack is devastating for businesses. These costs include financial loss and payout, but also the negative branding and reputational harm. The average cost of a spear or phishing incident runs upwards of anywhere between $1.6 and $2 million dollars. Part of the reason that this is the place where businesses are vulnerable is that it is up to each individual employee to read and interpret emails to make sure they are legitimate.

email attack main image

Most of the time, large businesses are hacked when a small or medium business that they do business with has been put under email attack. The cybercriminals use this channel to get to the data of the larger company as well. The types of the breadth of email phishing attacks vary. A few examples from 2018 exemplify the scale of phishing attacks. These include rentals during the World Cup in which people wanted to gain personal information through promising free trips or lodging to the World Cup. Another example is email account takeovers where the behavior of the customer is studied.

Verizon conducted a report and found that about 50 percent of the people who receive a phishing email, actually click on the link. The email attacks lead directly to data breaches and possible identity theft. This spear fishing represents an evolution of email attack from broad and general to targeted and focused.

Information Gained

Cybercriminals have different reasons for wanting to gain entry into a customer database or other dataset. These include malware, authentication credentials discovery, and corporate information requests.

Malware is a general term for any type of malicious email attack that puts a virus, spyware, or worm on a computer. Authentic credentials discovery is a prime way that identity theft happens. The email attack is designed to access databases full of private information. Cybercriminals often want some level of corporate information including proprietary or patent information.

To read the full article, click here: https://www.motocms.com/blog/en/email-attack-protection-antispam/

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In-depth On-Site SEO Checklist for 2019
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  • Not everything is a ranking factor. Some are for usability, accessibility, and branding. And some of these may not apply to you.
SEO Internet Marketing quote

1. Meta Tags

  • Title Tags – You should include a title with every page on your website. It provides web crawlers with context for indexing and ranking while providing visitors with an insight into your content. Your title should be kept under 70 characters. Doing so will keep your titles from being shortened at the tops of browsers or tabs where they are normally displayed
  • Description Tags – Optimize the description portion of your markup by ensuring there is a maximum length, with spaces, of no more than 200 characters. Though the description has no value for search ranking, it adds usability and can either drive traffic to or away from, your website. Anything over that character count can result in your descriptions being truncated, or maybe not even being used within SERPs.
  • Geo-Targeting – Include Geo-meta tags, which provide context for localized searches. Mobile searches rely heavily upon this metric. Use www.geo-tag.de to automatically generate Geo-meta tags.
Geo targeting code example
  • Language – Ensure you are using appropriate language tags. W3C recommends the use of an HTML attribute instead of the old method of using a meta entry.
  • Multiple Locations – Multi-regional and multilingual sites should reflect their versatility with easy to discern navigational elements, multi-regional meta tags, and text to help visitors get to the part of the site most appropriate for them.
  • Hreflang Attribute – HTML markup using the hreflang attribute should be utilized to allow browsers and search engines to control for language automatically.
  • Canonical Tags – Employ canonical tags to keep from being penalized for duplicate text. In situations where your website’s information needs to appear in more than one place, this coding element lets Google and other search engines know you are not trying to game the system.
canonical tag code example
To read the full article, click here: https://www.amberddesign.com/onsite-seo-checklist/
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Shattering Gendered Marketing
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In industries where products have been historically marketed based on gender, some brands are beginning to shun stereotypes and embrace neutrality

In a 1955 print ad, the household brand Lux presented a woman dressed in a sensible apron and pearl earrings, surrounded by a mountain of dishes. “Get out of the kitchen sooner!” read the text above her. An overlaid image depicted her husband and child relaxing outdoors. In another ad, released 31 years later in 1996, car manufacturer Daihatsu offered an image of a man driving a van full of smiling women below the words, “Picks up five times more women than a Lamborghini.” The logic behind such advertising, of course, is that women are in charge of housework and family care, while car purchases are left primarily to the men.

In today’s social climate, it seems unlikely that people would stand for such egregious stereotyping, but products such as dish soap and cars are still aimed at consumers based on gender demographics—brands are just subtler in their approach. For children, gender stereotyping is on full display in retail. A pink convertible or a doll might be listed for girls online or in stores, while a blue truck or a baseball bat may be labeled as boys’ toys. It’s a relatively modern phenomenon: According to an Atlantic article by sociology professor Elizabeth Sweet, less than 2% of toys were explicitly marketed to either boys or girls in Sears catalog ads in 1975. By 1995, gendered toys made up roughly half of the Sears catalog’s offerings. For adults, brands might aim targeted online ads for household products to women, while a sports equipment company might only portray men in their commercials.

But this pink and blue divide also persists because brands have traditionally operated on the belief that consumers are making purchasing decisions based on their gender. Marketing to a person’s gender not only risks alienating other potential consumers—ones who don’t conform to traditional gender roles or interests—but it also shows a failure by the company to mine for deeper insights about its audience.

 

To read the full article, click here: https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/shattering-gendered-marketing/

To read full article, click here: https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/shattering-gendered-marketing/
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Is There Magic in the Mashup of Data and Creativity?
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I have always been curious about how people generate ideas for radical innovation. It’s why I have a wide variety of books on the topic on my shelf, from Melissa Schilling’s Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World to Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. I’m intrigued by the role of data in the innovation process— leading to another set of books in my collection, including Peter Verhoef and co-authors’ Creating Value with Big Data Analytics and Frank Bien and Tomasz Tunguz’s Winning with Data. In fact, I teach a course on this very topic in our business analytics master’s program at the University of Montana.

Certainly, marketing has excelled in developing sophisticated techniques to measure customer reaction to new concepts, whether new products or advertising messages. And now we have access to Big Data, characterized by the plethora of types (e.g., sentiment analysis, click streams, credit card usage) and sheer volume, real-time generation and analysis.

McKinsey’s Brian Gregg, Jason Heller, Jesko Perrey and Jenny Tsai wrote about the relationship between data analytics and innovation in a 2018 post on the company’s website. The authors called it a myth that “‘ideas and numbers’ have always had an uneasy alliance in marketing. … Creativity is an instinctual process of building emotional bonds with consumers. Bring in too much quantitative analysis and the magic dies.” Even Marketoonist Tom Fishburne has captured the stereotype. In one cartoon, professionals—presumably marketers—quip to a painter, “Now let’s optimize the creative by adding puppies, emojis and an incentivized call-to-action.”

To read full article, click here: https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/is-there-magic-in-the-mashup-of-data-and-creativity/

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UPS Study Reveals Consumer Concerns, Efficiencies In Online Shopping, Research
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Consumers have a host of concerns moving into this year’s holiday shopping season, spanning from search engines and marketplaces to privacy and returns, according to the UPS 2019 Customer Experience Study of 18,000 customers in 15 countries.   

The report focuses primarily on business-to-consumer (B2C) online shopping, and also shares some business-to-business (B2B) research findings.

Globally, 65% of online shoppers express extreme concern about data privacy. In Europe, consumers show a preference for a payment method with increased security such as PayPal, Alipay, and WeChat Pay. Anxiety about security rises with age. Some 73% of online shoppers age 65 and older feel extremely concerned about online shopping security.

To read full article, click here: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/339103/ups-study-reveals-consumer-concerns-efficiencies.html

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