If you’ve never had a client question the legality or the psychoactivity of CBD products, consider yourself fortunate. Here’s why CBD education should be the first step with clients.
When you work in an industry, you often acquire the “curse of knowledge.” This means that because you spend all day knee-deep in the ins and out of your business, you often begin to assume that people know much more about your industry than they actually do. The CBD business is not immune to this, and it’s something that often adversely affects CBD marketing.
Here’s the truth: Most consumers know much less about CBD products that you may imagine. By at least one recent estimate, 35% of men and 49% of women interviewed said they had less than “some” familiarity with CBD. Another 15% reported never having heard of CBD.
Those numbers should give pause to anyone involved with CBD marketing. Why? Because those numbers mean about 50 million Americans have yet to even hear about CBD products, while another 125 million or so are relatively clueless about CBD. Many confuse it with cannabis, think it is illegal or are unaware of its benefits and applications.
Smart marketers aren’t going to simply sit back and wait for these consumers to type “CBD legal” or “CBD law” into their search engines. Instead, they will take an active role in addressing client education.
Why Client Education is Crucial
An absence of knowledge isn’t the only reason why education is critical — the other key factor is the nature of the product. The cannabis industry has taken an extremely aggressive approach in terms of providing potential customers with education about their products. Today’s cannabis dispensaries hire qualified “budtenders” who gently walk new consumers through the various strains of their products and the effects they have on the human body. Consumers can also scan bar codes from packages into kiosks to get self-serve educational information.
While CBD and cannabis are distinct products retailed in different contexts, education should also play a key role within this category. Though CBD is not psychoactive, many consumers do not know this. Many others don’t believe it entirely, until they’ve experienced it themselves. The association with cannabis remains at the front of their mind.
By taking an equally aggressive approach to product education via marketing and branding, it’s possible to put the minds of the “CBD curious” at ease and convince them to try products in this space for the first time. It’s also important, however, to proceed with all due caution, given the state of CBD marketing rules.
What to Know About CBD Marketing and Educational Awareness
When using CBD product marketing or branding to educate consumers, it’s essential to do this in a manner that comports with all relevant laws and regulations. One key example: Brands cannot advertise their products in a way that makes illegal health claims. The FDA has cracked down on dozens of CBD brands that have made unsupported health claims when marketing their products.
It’s more than possible to educate and market while remaining on the right side of federal regulators, as there is a plethora of valid scientific data available that attests to the clinical performance of CBD. Brands should reference this data and carefully outline educational information that is supported by the scientific literature, rather than making hyperbolic health claims that have no basis in medically established fact.
A well-designed and smartly executed educational component that stays on the right side of existing rules can be a powerful marketing tool, as it will resolve many of the lingering doubts CBD curious consumers may have. Once these consumers understand that CBD is non-intoxicating, federally legal in 50 states and comes with a variety of medically validated benefits, any hesitance to try CBD products may quickly dry up.
Why Bigeye is the Preferred CBD Marketing Agency
At Bigeye, we were developing compelling cannabidiol marketing campaigns before most other agencies had even heard the letters “CBD.” If you’d like to work with true domain experts, we encourage you to reach out to Bigeye today.
