At Adfire Health, we use programmatic advertising to help our clients successfully market their cannabinoid products. Unlike some ad networks and industry giants like Facebook and Google, who have restricted CBD product marketing, we can run CBD campaigns across millions of sites. Running display ads programmatically offers a huge benefit to suppliers, including increased brand awareness, higher return-on-investment (ROI) and increased sales. However, many CBD brands don’t know what programmatic advertising is, much less how to leverage it.
What is programmatic advertising?
Put simply, programmatic is the automation of buying and selling media via real-time-bidding (RTB). Instead of marketers contacting publishers to buy space for their advertisements and negotiating prices manually, the whole process is done automatically in real-time by software. Programmatic software relies heavily on data to only serve advertisements that have the highest chance of conversion.
The programmatic process looks something like this:
Step 1
We load our client’s ad and set the campaign’s target and budget requirements
Step 2
A user navigates to a website with media space available
Step 3
That website initiates an auction to sell the ad space
Step 4
Our programmatic software identifies the consumer as a target based on his or her browsing history and places a bid for the space
Step 5
We win! Our ad is placed on the website before the site even loads
Step 6
The user sees the ad, growing his or her awareness and consideration of the CBD brand
How can programmatic help advertise CBD products?
Programmatic is such an effective tool, 85 percent of display ads are now bought programmatically. Its benefit comes from its use of data. Right now, data is our biggest resource when it comes to marketing. With the use of data, programmatic can help you reach new audiences, retarget interested audiences and more.
Reach New Audiences
By tapping into the ever-expanding well of data, you can easily reach new audiences with your CBD brand. Instead of advertising in print or via expensive mailers, which are somewhat shot-in-the-dark initiatives, programmatic can systematically reach those groups you might not have reached yet, that are likely to be interested in your products.
Some of the groups you could target with programmatic might be:
Yoga and alternative medicine audiences
Those that frequent alternative medicine publishers and healthy lifestyle sites are likely to be interested in hearing about how natural CBD oil can improve health.
Audiences 60+ years old
Older audiences not only have a higher net worth than younger audiences, they often have health issues CBD is said to help with.
Audiences nearby
If you have a physical location, programmatic can serve ads to those who are in your area or who have visited stores like yours nearby with a feature called geofencing.
We help our customers identify untapped audiences in order to spread their brand awareness and consideration. From there, programmatic makes it easy to segment and target audiences with specific attributes. Each of these audiences may need a different message. That’s where hyper-targeting comes in.
Strategically Hyper-Target
Using the fuel of data, programmatic can produce segmented audiences based on thousands of attributes. Not only can you hyper-target based on very specific criteria, but you’ll also be able to create super specific ads to serve those groups.
Perhaps you’d like to reach a new audience of 60+ years old who suffer from insomnia. Because you have a physical location, you’d like to target only those within 10 miles of your store. You can easily make this a segment and then market to this group using a creative, designed just for that group. That ad will speak to how CBD oil can help with insomnia and be attractive to a senior audience.
That advertisement will be quite different from how you market to younger audiences or audiences with different attributes, such as those suffering from nausea. Using audience-specific tactics and hyper-targeting will help increase your conversion rates, leading to greater sales.
Retarget Interested Audiences
If a user has seen an ad of yours, visited your website or even abandoned their shopping cart at your online store, it’s a valuable strategy to retarget them. If audiences are already aware and interested in your products, they are highly qualified customers that are more likely to convert.
Usually, it takes six to eight exposures to make a sale. We can set rules for programmatic software to serve users the same ad five or six times. On the fifth time of seeing the ad, a user may click through to a landing page that answers his or her questions about what CBD is, how it helps with a healthy lifestyle and how they can purchase it online.
If he or she is not quite ready to make the commitment and clicks away, our software will recognize the user to be in the consideration stage of the sales funnel. We can then retarget the user again by serving them an ad that provides incentive – this time the ad shown will offer 20 percent off any product on the site for 24 hours. Now, the user is incentivized to buy. She clicks through the ad and purchases CBD oil and rub.
What Are the Benefits of Using Programmatic to Advertise CBD?
In 2019, $60 billion was spent on programmatic advertising – and the reason is simple. The benefits marketers and advertisers see from advertising programmatically are undeniable. Cannabinoid suppliers now have the opportunity to enjoy these benefits themselves by leveraging this technology.
Stronger brand awareness
with media availability on millions of different sites
Higher conversion rates
thanks to programmatic’s insights through data
Increased ROI
due to reduced human error, less time investment and better targeting
Real-time analytics and tracking
allows you to watch how your campaigns are performing and make adjustments as you go along
All of this leads to increased sales and profit for your business. If you’re interested in getting ahead in the CBD advertising space, reach out to us at sayhello@adfirehealth.com. We can help you build a successful programmatic advertising plan to fit your needs and budget.