Marketing on TikTok has become one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness and bring all different kinds of products to life. Recently, Cannabombz, a CBD company, saw a spike of 50x its normal daily sales after posting one single TikTok. With more than 689 million monthly active users, there is still an evergreen opportunity for cannabis brands to make their products viral and interact with consumers more closely.
“TikTok just presents a huge opportunity right now,” Kyle Dulay, Co-Founder of Collabstr, said. “The platform is super young, the amount of organic exposure on there is unmatched, and more mature platforms such as Facebook or Instagram do not offer the same type of exposure as TikTok. With other platforms, in order to get higher impressions, you have to pay a premium to run ads, but on TikTok, you are rewarded for just creating high quality content. It is a huge opportunity that I do not see a lot of brands using.”
Focus More on Content Rather Than Products
In order to successfully market your cannabis brand on TikTok, Dulay suggests that companies focus more on creating unique content and less on selling their products. Cannabis is unwelcomed on many social platforms, and you can get banned if you post only about your merchandise, so one strategy to get around that is by creating content that is unique about your brand.
For example, if you sell CBD bath bombs for consumers who suffer from insomnia, one good way to market that item is rather than talking about CBD, discuss those who have sleeping problems and provide some reasons for maybe why they cannot sleep at night. Your audience can convert into paying customers so they can follow what you are talking about and give solutions to certain problems.
Partner with Cannabis Influencers
“Once you have your own TikTok page, start posting content yourself because it is good to have a presence so this way once you start using influencers, they can link back to your page, which will include your website and a small bio about your company,” Dulay said. “Next you need to figure out the niche market you plan on targeting. While staying away from cannabis, go to the search bar and type in whatever ailments your products can help alleviate, such as insomnia or pain relief, and see who else has posted content on those topics. Reach out to them, describe your product, and soon you can have 20,000 followers.”
It all goes back to focusing on the value that you can bring to viewers. Do not focus on finding cannabis consumers who do not even have certain ailments that you are trying to target, but instead, identify your demographic and let the world know how you can help them solve their problems.
7 Marketing Tips
Respect My Region offers 7 additional tips and steps for marketing cannabis on TikTok in 2022:
- Identify current viral hashtags and trends and get creative to see how you can relate those trends to your brand or products and vice versa
- Research the posts and videos being created for specific trends and keep track of the actions, sounds, and songs that are being done or used in videos you feel relate to you, your brand, or your product
- Research what other successful cannabis brands are doing on TikTok and look at what they post and do the best
- Start creating content that is simple or easy to shoot and edit (one per day)
- A great place to start is by making your own version of what other accounts have already done
- It is highly recommended that you never show weed flower, vapes, glass rigs, and pre-rolled joints. It is super easy to get deleted, which is why brands should use funny props and mimic certain actions
- Leverage three-to-five hashtags in each post and make sure that they are relevant to the trend and your brand locally. For example, if you are a local dispensary, use the hashtags: #foryou, #venturacounty, or #porthueneme
- Publish original content one-to-four times per day and make sure to select trends that do not already have tens of thousands of video examples. You want to participate in trends and publish content when it is one of the first 1,000 videos
As with any social media marketing tactic, it is no easy task to get your brand name out there. Right now, TikTok is where most of the viewers are at and the platform continues to grow daily. In order to help get the most results for your effort, try these marketing tips.