A brand is a story that is always being told. If you think a great product or service is all you need, you’re missing a vital duo: brand presence + positioning.
2016 was an incredible year for 7 Rays. We got to work with some special entrepreneurs and cannabis brands. One of our favorite clients was Sweet ReLeaf. The company has an amazing product that has helped countless people with pain. And the people behind the brand are super passionate about healing and giving back to others.
We joined forces with Sweet ReLeaf to drive their brand forward with content creation, social media and design services. The case study below discusses our 3 takeaways from working with the brand last year.
1. The Brand’s Voice Will Carry it Further
Many brands in the cannabis sphere don’t offer up a story along their product or service. Actually, let me capitalize and bolden that: story. The 7 Rays process begins with client interviews that allow us to deduct the brand’s personality. Our approach is to unearth the Client’s story, mainly their purpose and higher vision.
How do you want to change the world with your brand? I know, it sounds a bit grandiose, but the process of putting these concepts into words will propel the whole brand further, in a powerful way.
When copywriting for Sweet ReLeaf’s website, we naturally magnetized to the founder’s story. When your business is built from a personal struggle or self-discovery and you communicate this story, emotional connection is created with your customer.
[bctt tweet=”When your business is founded on a personal struggle or discovery, your brand builds emotional connection.” username=”7raysmarketing”]The story and the soft, nurturing voice remained consistent on all other content development. For instance, during the time we managed their social media account, our content mix revolved around health and wellness. The content a brand puts out there should always echo the brand’s purpose.
2. Social Doesn’t Have to Take Up All Your Time
Ah…the beauty of automation. A fine balance exists between authentic interaction and automation. Both enable a brand to gain exposure. And we believe that both sides of the coin are important.
We saw Sweet ReLeaf as a lifestyle brand, worthy of attention from outside the cannabis bubble. By forming a strategy early, on where we would find the right customers, we were able to fine tune our targeting strategy for the automation platform. The paid service we use allows us to follow, comment and like accounts per the settings we choose. We can aim for followers of a certain account, hashtags that users use, and even location based targeting.
What this does is save a ton of time while rapidly growing a following that is relevant and organic, based on our targeting strategy. That being said, we manually maintained direct contact with our followers and our strategic partners on the channels. With each custom daily post, we would engage and communicate with people who commented and liked our posts. The human element is not to be ignored, but automation just gets things done that would take hours and hours of labor to achieve.
3. Influencer Marketing is the Bridge to Mainstream
Think bigger. If you are only marketing to the cannabis user, you are missing out big time. Why? Because many cannabis users aren’t reading about or participating in the cannabis culture. Infrequent users or newcomers aren’t spending time on the same channels as cannabis enthusiasts. Thus, the goal of expanding your reach is worthy of examination.
Our strategy to find the right Sweet ReLeaf influencers was to search for people, blogs and websites in the wellness space. They had to be open to cannabis, live or operate in California or at least have a large California following as the product is only sold in this state for now.
We started with deep research and databasing. Names, websites, contacts, subject matter, social accounts, etc. We then composed a pitch that was a personal letter talking about the product, the story behind it and all the conditions it relieves. We asked for a product review and sent out free product to those who replied with interest.
In the end, we had a handful of influencers on Instagram (some with 100k followers) and several great blog features. The beauty is that these posts and back links keep on giving and boosting the brand’s SEO value over time.
Take, for example, Heather Hoffman- cofounder of Pura Vida Health, a super food company. She is a public figure talking about natural wellness and self-proclaimed Holistic Healer and Yogi. She loved the cannabis topical so much that she included it in her YouTube video. Heather has 54k followers on Instagram and the video got over 2,000 views. Pretty great exposure to a relevant consumer base that normally would not stumble upon this cannabis product.
Influencers coupled with content marketing goes even further. We formed a relationship with HelloMD, a telemedicine website offering online cannabis evaluations and articles about a wide variety of topics associated with cannabis.
We produced articles for their blog that were also featured in their newsletter, reaching many thousands of people. The site gets a lot of traffic and we saw an increase in sales due to our efforts. Google Analytics showed that a lot of visitors to the Sweet ReLeaf page came from HelloMD. The beauty is that the SEO value will keep on growing over time.
If you’ve made it this far, you must be pretty interested in this stuff. You’re taking the time to understand what tactics you should be applying to your own growth. Good for you!
To find out about ways in which 7 Rays can support that growth, get in touch with us by filling out a New Project Form. Ready to create your own Case Study?
