Every business wants new customers. During a Pandemic with people at home and waiting for their next steps, it may feel like your CBD business will take a turn downward, but this is the perfect time to build a stronger foundation.
Customers take a journey from awareness through advocacy. They experience needs and wants and turn to the internet to find answers and solutions. They reach out to Google, or Bing, or Safari, and ask questions:
How can I feel less anxiety?
How can I strengthen my immunity?
What options are there for non-opioid pain relief?
These are your superpowers as a CBD business owner.
By taking some time right now, you can formulate a better plan of action. Over the next couple of weeks, we will help you to outline that plan.
Creating Your One-Page Marketing Plan
There are four areas of planning that you must be prepared to address to reach out and attract these three customers above. Today I will outline the four areas, and then I will post a new blog for each section with more details and resources.
The One-Pag Marketing Plan Overview
A marketing plan does not have to be long and complicated to be effective. If you can zero in on your CBD business’s core elements that get customers excited about you, you will have enough organic leads to keep you busy and growing for years to come.
Let’s break down the four areas:
- Your Market
- Your Message
- Your Sales
- Your System
Your Market: Part 1 of Your Marketing Plan
Here is where you step back and do something uncomfortable: explore the reasons you are in this CBD business in the first place. In a digital economy, your customers find it hard to trust you, or any company that operates over the internet. After 30 years of navigating the world wide web, everybody has experienced some kind of “rip-off” moment to make them more cautious about trusting the information and the companies that they discover online.
Build trust. The best way to build that trust is to tell your customers who you are, what you value, why you do what you do, and what, specifically, your unique position in the marketplace is as compared to the thousands of competitors eating away at your profits. And these elements must be written out and shared throughout your website, product packaging, social media messages, and all sources of content-consistently and repeatedly. This portion takes time, so you want to dive deep and get it all out in writing before going on to the next step.
Your Message: Part 2 of Your Marketing Plan
Now comes the part that everyone jumps into first: your messaging. You hire a slick ad company and start throwing out images and catchphrases with pictures of your bottles and salves, and the clicks start coming…at least until the ads budget runs out. Am I right?
Your brand voice carries a powerful tool within it. It is the foundation of part 1 laid down in concrete. Every message, every post, every visual must somehow convey to your audience that you value and stand behind your products and services. If you build your messaging on a foundation of values and your reputation, people will knock each other down to learn more about who you are. Messaging determines where you post, what you post, and how often you post about your brand.
Your Sales: Part 3 of Your Marketing Plan
Sales seem like an obvious part of any marketing plan, but this part can be very deceiving. Digital media is fluid. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are always tweaking and responding to the needs of their customers. Technology is continuously improving. Digital marketing people spend a good portion of their workweek training and learning about all the new technology changes and data-driven advice on how to showcase your business better. The amount of information they filter through in a week would put most business owners in lockdown. So yes, read the latest Forbes article on how and where to post for the most engagement, but how you attract and capture leads, nurture those leads, and ultimately convert them to your CBD products is part art and science. Trust the experts.
Your System: Part 4 of Your Marketing Plan
Your system is all of the above outlined into a finished and workable one-page marketing plan. But this final step is all about customer service. Following your customer’s journey from awareness through consideration; then the actual purchasing process; then their experience with your brand and products; and finally, how they feel about you when dealing with problems and everyday experiences. This final system is critical in a digital economy because consumers today feel compelled to share their experiences. They will share under your guidance or all on their own. You must know where to look, how to ask, and write it all out long before the first review is posted on Google.
Where to start
The plan one-page plan couldn’t be simpler. So why do so many CBD companies fail at attracting and retaining loyal customers? It usually isn’t one single thing that does it. It is taking the time to formulate your plan, step-by-step, in writing. Entrepreneurs take action, but successful business ones start with a solid plan of action to guide them in the fast-paced digital economy, in good times and bad.
Stay tuned for Part 1 of the plan, and in the meantime, for those of you who want to get ahead of the class, here are some online training that might just help you get there faster.
