Influencer Marketing for Cannabis & Hemp Brands
If you’re not participating in influencer marketing then you’ll leave money on the table. Many brands have reported seeing 10 times the ROI of influencer marketing when compared to traditional paid advertising.
Influencer marketing expands your distribution and this is one of the best ways to increase your media build-out in a cost-effective way. When working with high-quality influencers there should be no reason to pay for expensive photoshoots and having the right marketing partner can make all the difference. At Trichome 5 we were doing influencer marketing before it was cool.
What is Cannabis Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is the art of attracting online personalities that are trusted amongst your target market. In some circumstances these personalities may just want free products, other influencers will require payment and contracts with more specific marketing objectives. The objective of influencer marketing is to get people to recommend your cannabis or hemp brand to thousands and even millions of their followers. Website traffic coming from influencer-affiliated links will tend to have a higher conversion due to the increase and trust that comes from the influencer. When brands work with influencers they are essentially enhancing the trust factor among their target market. In order to work with the top influencers in your target market, it is best to craft brand stories that are specifically created to connect emotionally with the top influencers in your niche. – Great brand stories attract the right people.
Influencer marketing is truly an art and it is a great way to get your brand stories in front of your target market. When approaching influencers you’ll want to make it as easy as possible for them to say yes and at Trichome 5 we’ve found that one of the best ways to work with the best is to develop marketing campaigns that they can’t say no to. This typically involves doing work upfront and ghost-writing for the influencer, but the end result is an influencer that will champion your brand with less money exchanging hands. You don’t want to be asking your influencers to do all the heavy lifting, you just need them to hit the post button. – If you haven’t perfected your brand stories and brand messaging then you may want to check out some of our resources about crafting emotional brand stories. If you want professionals involved with your influencer marketing program contact us today.
Brand Stories Mean Everything
The key to being successful with influencer marketing is about developing great brand guidelines, brand values, and brand stories. If you do your job right during the branding process and understand your target market it should be easy to win big in the world of influencer marketing.
Early on: During the brand building or brand enhancement process it is a great exercise to identify who would be your ideal influencers and build brand stories that are specifically designed to attract these individuals. You’ll find that the better job you can do at connecting emotionally with your influencers the less money they will demand and the more value they will create for your brand. If you’re launching a new brand from scratch you’ll want to proactively contact your preferred influencers and ask them to get involved with the product development process. One of the biggest opportunities that cannabis and hemp manufacturers have is to co-develop products with top influencers. If you pitch the right brand idea to the right influencer you’ll find that they’re eager to develop a lifestyle product that has their name associated with it.
Warning: The number one complaint that you’ll hear about influencer marketing is that it doesn’t work, time-consuming, and is too expensive. The marketers and entrepreneurs that make these claims are failing to recognize that developing a successful influencer marketing strategy starts during the early branding process. They’re also taking the easy road out and saying influencer marketing doesn’t work when in reality they have a people and/or execution problem. Just ask Nike, Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods if influencer marketing works.
When developing a brand or new product your early goal should be to develop brand/product stories so great that your ideal influencers are more eager to work with you than you are to work with them. This is often accomplished best during the early startup stage, but it can also be done while re-visiting your brand guidelines. When you craft emotional stories you can actually add more perceived value to the influencer and they’ll go above and beyond the contract agreements. Brands and marketers that say influencer marketing doesn’t work are typically failing because they haven’t fully vetted their influencers and/or do not understand who their target market is. If you don’t understand who your target market is then you’re not going to be able to identify the best influencers. Brands should also be cautious about working with influencers that come off spammy, unauthentic, or work with too many companies. Nike, Gatorade, and Patagonia are companies that have tremendous success using influencer marketing. Nike practically invented the modern-day influencer marketing strategy by signing ballplayers and co-producing shoes and clothing with athletes. Cannabis and hemp companies should always look to co-create with the top influencers in their target market.
2nd Warning: If you’re going to commit to influencer marketing, don’t rely on 3rd party match-maker websites to set you up with the ‘ideal influencer’. These matchmakers are only serving themselves as middlemen and brands will have a bigger impact on their ROI by finding influencers organically. Ideally, your influencer program should be run by your social media manager. The best jobs and business opportunities are never posted in the classifieds and this same rule applies to influencer marketing. Influencers that use these sites to generate money are not the type of influencers you want to be associated with your brand. Tell your social media manager to roll up their sleeves and start communicating with your target market’s top influencers. At Trichome 5 we encourage all of our clients to in-house all social media management as this is the best opportunity for brands to learn from real customers.
Pro-tip 1: When doing research on potential influencers ask two questions. Does the influencer product content that my ideal target consumer would find interesting? Does that potential influencer have high engagement with their posts? When searching for influencers we encourage brand managers to direct message influencers that they have found organically on social media as opposed to going through an ‘influencer match maker’.
Pro-tip 1.5: Use a free Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator to analyze how your influencers stack up against each other.
Pro-tip 2: Don’t ask influencers to promote your entire product line. When approaching an influencer you need to have a specific product or niche product line in mind
Pro-tip 3: Ask your influencer to help co-develop authentic content that shows proper use of the product. We see a lot of CBD tincture brands working with hiking influencers that are posting pictures of their tincture on top of mountains or on scenic parts of their hike. Who in the heck is actually taking supplements and tinctures with them on hikes?? This is unnatural. A better product to promote would be gummies, CBD-infused nutritional bars, or our favorite energy ball. If you are only selling tinctures you can have a more authentic story by posting a recipe of how you infused your homemade energy balls with full-spectrum hemp tinctures.
Who is Going to Develop and Operate Your Influencer Program?
At Trichome 5 we co-improve our client’s brand stories by focusing on the ideal target market and identifying the key influencers within this target market or tribe. Identifying your tribe’s key influencers early on it makes it easier for copywriters and marketers to craft stories that can connect emotionally with your ideal influencers. We have to remember that brands are simply groups of people and influencers are people. At the end of the day, it’s just people connecting with people to tell great stories and many brands are overcomplicating or forgetting what it’s like to be human.
Managing your influencers is also a major part of having a successful influencer strategy and is necessary to measure your marketing ROI. ROI isn’t about measuring the number of likes your influencer’s posts got, but actually paying attention to the money spent, the products give, and the amount of revenue that is generated. Some marketers have reported seeing 10-15x ROI for influencer marketing when compared to traditional digital marketing strategies.
The best way to track influencer marketing is to make sure you use specific influencer landing pages and affiliate links. Product landing pages should ideally contain user reviews from your influencer and similar influencers to increase the trust factor. Let us take care of the management and reporting so you can focus on what matters most to you. This could be other business opportunities or lifestyle goals.
If you’re struggling to find traction online, contact us and we’ll teach you how to become human again. If you already have specific influencers in mind then please include their social media links so we can have more a more productive introductory call. We’re here to make a difference for your cannabinoids or wellness company.
Influencer Rewards and Incentives: The world’s top social media influencers are in high demand, but the way you position your brand will dictate how much wiggle room you have to negotiate on compensation. Some influencers you don’t even have to pay. At Trichome 5 we have had success finding influencers with a couple of thousand followers and all they required was some free products. These are the best type of influencers as they will be more passionate about your brand and all you had to pay was COGs of products and shipping. For bigger influencers, we haven’t been as lucky. The largest influencer of them all, Kylie Jenner gets paid an astonishing $1.2 million per Instagram post! At Trichome 5 we haven’t had the pleasure of working with Kylie, but most influencers will cost between $10 - $25 per post / per 1,000 followers. Bloggers may require $60 per / 1,000 followers. If you go the commission route you should expect to pay 10-40% depending on the quality of the influencer. Using coupon codes is the cheapest way to track commission-based influencers. Commission agreement and free product are typically all you need to offer when working with micro-influencers.
Cannabis Influencer Checklist:
Define what success is –What are the KPIs and why?
Identify why your ideal influencer would want to work with your brand. Think empathetically about the influencer and put yourself in their shoes. How can your brand add the most amount of value to the influencer and their network? – Be specific and write down all the details. Each influencer pitch should be catered to their specific strengths, there is no one-size-fits-all.
Find a management partner that shares your vision for your influencer program.
Develop a structure that revolves around who is responsible for managing the influencer program. – Someone must be accountable for the ROI of your influencer program.
Develop a selection process and criteria for finding the perfect influencer for your ideal target market. Campaign goals should be tailored to how your brand can help your influencer develop deeper connections with their followers. If you haven’t identified a shared problem then you probably haven’t found the right influencer.
Develop a compensation structure, lifetime product membership, cash payment, or commission.
Identify what are the SOPs for managers and influencers. For influencers, you’ll want to discuss the deliverables, exclusivity, and time frame.
Don’t work with influencers that are seeking a one-night stand. Your goal should focus on developing a team of influencers that are committed to the company for the long haul.