CUSTOMERS DON’T JUST MAGICALLY APPEAR. CULTIVATING THEM IS A PROCESS THAT REQUIRES CAREFUL PLANNING AND STRATEGY.
ales is not a single, isolated action. It’s a flow that starts with the prospective customer becoming aware of your CBD and THC products and ends with a final sale.
Businesses that leave that process to chance will flounder. That’s because they’re exercising no control over whether the customer will even discover that they exist, much less whether the customer will agree to do business with them. They’re leaving their fate up to random chance.
Smart businesses, by contrast, create a very careful, controlled customer flow that starts before the customer even knows your business exists and ends with the purchase. It’s called a sales funnel.
Sales funnels consist of four basic stages:
- Awareness: becoming aware of your business
- Evaluation: trying to figure out if you can solve their problem
- Research: determining if they should choose you over another provider
- Conversion: making an actual purchase
This sales flow is called a funnel because it represents a process of winnowing. For every 100 consumers who become aware of your products, only a fraction – say, 30 – will move to the evaluation stage. Of those, maybe 10 will start researching with buying intent. And then perhaps 3 will actually purchase your CBD gummies, oils, capsules, or other similar products.
That represents a conversion rate of 3%.Our goal is to make your sales funnel as effective as possible. A 3% conversion rate is not bad! It’s actually higher than the median rate of 2.35% for all businesses. But top performers can do much better than just the median. According to Wordstream, top-performing businesses average an 11.45% conversion rate – a nearly five-fold increase!
But it all depends on constructing an effective customer acquisition sales funnel. That’s what this paper is going to help you to do.
The Awareness Stage: Get in front of potential leads, stoking enough interest that they want more info.
CBD and THC products are genuinely helpful for a wide variety of health conditions, including chronic pain, anxiety, depression, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, acne, and so many others. When someone looks for a cannabis-derived product, they’re not looking to burn money; they want to solve specific wellness issues.
Your job during the awareness stage is to get in front of these people during their initial search, and to do so with messaging tailored to their concerns and needs. Who is your target demographic? What are their hopes for using a cannabis product? What are their fears and objections? Where do they go for information and referrals: Google? Magazines? Social media? Medical professionals? Only with this kind of information can you know which channels to use to put yourself in front of them and what you need to say to catch their eye.
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Tactics To Boost Awareness |
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Understand Your Customers |
Emphasize SEO |
Get Listed on Review Sites |
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Start by developing “customer personas,” which are detailed descriptions of your ideal customers. This persona can then serve as a compass for making marketing decisions. You need to know your typical customers’demographic info, like age, gender, health status, economic status, etc. You also need insight into their behavior. What websites do they use? Do they prefer offline research? Only hen you understand your customers, can you know where you need to go and how you need to position your solutions in order to get in front of them. |
93% of online experiences start at a search engine like Google. That means your website needs to show up when your potential customer searches for cannabis- related products. However, 75% of Google users will look only at the first page of search results. That means your site has to show up in just the first few listings. That’s why search engine optimization (SEO) is so critical. In fact, it’s doubly important for cannabis-centric companies, because federal law and platform restrictions make advertising very difficult for businesses operating in this space. Organic search results are simply the best way to get new eyes on your site and your business. |
71.7% of organizations find third-party review websites to be effective in generating leads. Indeed, for wellness solutions like CBD or THC products, potential customers use directory and third- party review sites as information resources. They might navigate to them directly or find them through Google searches. Regardless, it’s often on these sites that they’ll begin the process of discovering individual cannabis product vendors and start making sense of them. Your job here is to show up on the sites and to make sure that your listing is visible (at or near the top of list). |
The Evaluation Stage: Assure prospects that your CBD/THC products can meet their needs.
Once prospective customers become aware of your business and its products, they instantly shift into investigative mode, looking to answer a single key question: do you offer the kind of CBD/THC products that will address their health and wellness issues? By this stage, they’re already interested in CBD and THC pills, oils, or other products as a potential solution, and they’re trying to figure out who can provide the solutions they want. The single most important tactic at this stage is to deploy the right content. Consumers have entered an information-seeking process, but one with a lot of uncertainty. They have basic questions that need to be addressed, and the way to do so is through well-crafted content.
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Tactics To Facilitate Evaluation |
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Business-Generated Content |
User-Generated Content |
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At this stage, you want the content you produce to address three key factors: Confirm your products will meet their needs. This goes back to understanding your customer, where they’re coming from, and what they’re looking for. Develop authoritative, expert content that communicates that your products are a viable solution to their problem. Dispel myths and misinformation. The cannabis industry still labors under a cloud of confusion and misinformation that may need to be clarified. Use content at this stage to start setting realistic expectations and educating customers about not just your product but CBD/THC products in general. Showcase knowledgeability. You are asking people to place their health and well-being in your hands. To establish credibility and build trust, you need to communicate both explicitly and subliminally that you know what you’re doing. That means content, starting at this early stage, needs to reassure them that you are genuinely expert in this domain. |
Reviews, social media posts, and other content made by customers also play a role in this stage. Reviews – which can help throughout the sales funnel – are a particularly potent form of UGC when it comes to evaluation. User reviews can help prospective customers read about people like themselves. If those people happen to be your customers, and your products helped them to deal with their wellness issues, reading such reviews can immediately propel the prospective customer from evaluation into research. This means you don’t want to leave user reviews to chance but instead actively manage the whole process. Solicit reviews from satisfied customers, respond to negative reviews, and monitor reviews at multiple sites – especially niche-specific review sites where consumers know they’ll be getting information tailored to their interest in cannabis-derived products. Just make sure your listing shows up under the appropriate categories – e.g., “best CBD gummies” rather than “best THC gummies” if you only offer CBD products. |
The Research Stage: Convince customers to choose you over your competitors.
This stage flows naturally out of the previous stage; in fact, it’s possible for a customer to shift from evaluation immediately into research in a single piece of content, like a user-generated review (as discussed above).
This phase represents a more intensive form of investigation. The customer knows you offer the kind of product of interest to them, but now they’re doing due diligence to determine if yours is the specific product they want. Your goal here is to answer every question, satisfy every concern, stand out from your competitors in every way, and gently but persuasively compel customers to stay in your sales funnel.
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Tactics To Rock Research |
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Content (Again) |
Trust Factors |
Reviews (Again) |
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Content also plays a major role in virtually every stage of the sales funnel, but its specific goals shift from one stage to the next. Here it’s about demonstrating results and outcomes. A major issue is trust; you want the customer to trust that you can deliver on your promises, and that means being honest, authentic, and straightforward in your descriptions of your products and how they work. For example, reference reputable studies, develop case studies, and profile happy customers, all with the intent of bringing the effectiveness of your products to life. |
Remember, in this market, you’re not just asking customers to give you money; you’re asking them to put their health in your care. To that end, deploy as many “trust factors,” meaning any indicators that burnish your credibility. These include:
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Let your customers do your selling for you at this stage. After all, consumers trust user generated reviews 12 times more than corporate descriptions.Nearly two- thirds (63%) are more likely to make a purchase from a business that has user reviews than those that don’t.One key, as mentioned previously: make sure your listing is visible. If it’s buried in the list of companies being reviewed, it does you no good. If you haven’t yet garnered enough reviews to move to the top of the list, consider promoting your listing. Watch which categories you appear in as well, e.g., showing up for “best CBD pet oils and treats” is useless if you actually offer human-oriented consummables. |
The Conversion Stage: At long last, turn those potential leads into actual customers.
By this point in the sales funnel, the number of people will have narrowed considerably. You’re no longer dealing with tire kickers or casual web browsers. These are highly qualified leads; they are definitely interested in doing business with you; you just need to convince them to take the final plunge. In other words, it’s all about persuasion.
The good news is, most of the tactics we’ve already been discussing play a role here, so if you’ve integrated them into your sales funnel, you’ll be in good shape. Reviews, for example, produce an average 18% uplift in sales.
Sometimes the effect will be even more dramatic: one study found that an increase from a 3.5-star rating to a 3.7- star rating can increase conversions by 120%.You can strengthen the effect by responding to reviews: one business achieved 80% higher conversion rates after increasing their review reply rate from 12% to 32%.
References
1 https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/03/17/what-is-a-good-conversion-rate
2 https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/medical-marijuana-faq
3 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-stats-to-justify-seo/36762/
4 https://lab.getapp.com/third-party-review-sites-lead-generation/
5 https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Role-of-Customer-Product-Reviews/1008019
6 https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2011/12/15/1078395/0/en/iPerceptions-Releases-Retail-ECommerce-Industry-Report-Q3-2011.html
7 https://uberall.com/en-us/company/press-releases/study-brick-and-mortar-businesses-small-increase-inonline-ratings-boosts-conversion-by-25-percent
8 https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/10/23/roi-of-improving-online-reviews-0-1-stars-can-boostconversion-25/
9 https://uberall.com/en-us/company/press-releases/study-brick-and-mortar-businesses-small-increase-inonline-ratings-boosts-conversion-by-25-percent
10 https://www.quicksprout.com/beginners-guide-conversion-optimization/
