Increasing social acceptability and the widespread legalization of medical marijuana influenced the growing number of seniors who made CBD a part of their lifestyle.
The Growing Cannabis Market of Seniors
The cannabis market has grown from stoner rap to geriatric care. And with state laws more open to CBD, we can say CBD is going to be as mainstream as other nutraceuticals sold today.
According to a study done by Gallup, a global analytics firm, 14% of Americans say they use CBD. Surprisingly, this market has a very diverse audience niche.
Below is the breakdown of users:
From the chart, you will see that 20% of people ages 18-29 are using CBD. They have the biggest market in all of the age groups. However, this doesn’t mean that only they have the best potential as a market.
Although only 8% of the seniors are using CBD throughout this survey, it has seen the most growth over the years. According to the JAMA network, only 2.9% of seniors said they were personally using CBD in 2015, which means that it doubled in 4 years! The increase was most noticeable in women with more education and higher incomes $75,000 a year or more.
According to experts who conducted a study on CBD use in seniors, this number is on an upward trajectory. Moreover, seniors are keener on using it for medical reasons than for recreational purposes.
So, if you haven’t considered adding seniors to your target audience mix, you’re going to miss out big time.
How to Promote CBD Oil to Seniors
Before you run your own CBD ads targeted to seniors, you should know who your best target market is.
And based on the data given by Gallup, here are the top 5 reasons Americans use CBD:
- Pain (non-specific) – 40%
- Anxiety- 20%
- Sleep Insomnia- 11%
- Arthritis- 8%
- Migraines/Headaches – 5%
- Stress- 5%
The above data shows us how we can segment target audiences and create different customer avatars based on these interests.
Target Market Segmentation
To help you create an ideal target market segmentation, we compared the data from Gallup’s research with Facebook Audience Insights. Facebook has the most extensive user base, and it has the most targeted type of audience.
Arthritis
8% of CBD users are using it for arthritis. On Facebook Audience Insights, you’ll find that 39% of women and men have “Rheumatoid Arthritis” as interest are seniors. It has 8-9 million audience size.
Pain Management
40% of CBD users (majority) are using it for Pain.
With “Interventional Pain Management” as interest, 34% of women are seniors, and 25% of men are seniors.
Anxiety
In a clinical study done by the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, cannabis use in adults ages 65+ is also because of anxiety, about 24.4% say they use cannabis to treat anxiety.
Diabetes
There was a 180% increase in CBD use in seniors with Diabetes last year, that’s according to the JAMA research. With Diabetes as interest, the seniors are the biggest audience on Facebook.
These are just a few of the major interests you can use in your ads targeting.
Perhaps the most important part of creating your market segments is to create individual avatars for each area of interest. When you create an avatar, you can narrow down on your audience research and dig deeper into their obstacles. That way, you see a good picture of what their normal day looks like, and you can position your product better.
CBD Advertising For Seniors: Building Awareness Is Key
In the above illustration by Gallup, 49% of seniors are still unfamiliar with cannabis products. If you look at it, they have the biggest potential for growth because they’re the least aware of cannabis and CBD products.
So, to reach out to this particular audience, you have to actively create awareness about CBD and your brand in this market, and below are just a few of the many ways to do this:
Blog Posts: Creating Readership
Publishing blog posts regularly is one of the ways you can create awareness about the usefulness of CBD for seniors. To start, you can answer the frequently asked questions by seniors who are still starting with CBD.
Questions such as how to use, safety, legality, interaction with other medication, side effects, proper dosage, and product recommendations for certain illnesses are just a few of the basic things seniors would like to know when buying a cannabis product.
If you don’t know where to start with your blog posts, choose an avatar, and curate topics that this avatar is likely to be concerned about, or resolve common hindrances that hold them back from buying your product.
You can also build an idea tree from a single topic you want to discuss.
More importantly, regularly publishing meaningful and helpful blog content helps you establish your website’s authority in your niche.
When you have gained enough readership, Google will pick up your efforts, increasing your ranking in organic searches over time.
Google SEO and Adwords
Relying on organic traffic is not always the best route, especially if you’re still starting. With so many brands competing in this niche, you have to promote your product where your audience usually looks for it- Google Search.
Google is where everyone searches for everything they want to go, know, or buy. Since users are actively searching, they’re more likely to convert on Google. Google Ads also allows you to include age targeting so you can specify its reach to just the seniors.
Below is a Google Analytics report of the performance of one of our client’s websites. We filtered the results based on the age of the audiences, and surprisingly, the seniors didn’t rank the lowest when it comes to Reach and Conversion. In fact, it had better conversion rates compared to the rest of the age groups for this specific website.
The conversion rate for the 65+ age group is also 3.67%, which is a really good figure especially in this industry.
To make more use of your cannabis ads, you can use targeted content for your tripwire strategy. You can offer them a content upgrade such as an e-book, product recommendations, or anything that piques your specific audience’s interest that’s worth giving out their emails. For this, you can use a pop-up to get their details.
You can also use this data for your remarketing.
CBD Advertising on Facebook
Facebook is one of the best places to do CBD or dispensary marketing not only because of its huge user base but also because of its flexibility for remarketing. You can create a custom audience made up of people who came to your website, and you can do this by installing Facebook Pixel on your website.
Moreover, Facebook also has a feature called ‘lookalike audience.’
Through Facebook’s lookalike audience, you can create a custom audience from the people that showed similar interests to the people who clicked your ads, visited your website, or liked your page.
You can scale more easily and have a higher chance of conversion since the demographics and interests are similar to your existing active audience.
Although seniors are the least age group in the USA for Facebook, 46% of seniors ages 65 and above are on this platform.
Moreover, Facebook has the most number of senior users among all social media platforms.
Email Marketing
When you have gathered their emails, you can then create an autoresponder sequence ready to build trust, create more brand awareness, and eventually close a sale. If you have webinars or Facebook Live sessions where you answer all product-related or industry-related questions, you can also use this to invite them to those events.
With effective email marketing, you can nurture your existing audience down the sales funnel.
Takeaway
The first step in dominating the senior’s cannabis market is to create awareness. When you want to create awareness about your brand and CBD in general, we highly recommend that you use a mix of digital channels like Facebook, Google, Email, and other forms of social media to reach out to your audience.
Be One of the Top CBD Brands. Work With Us!
You might be asking, with all these opportunities, can you even advertise CBD on Facebook or Google?
Despite its non psychoactive effects, since CBD is still cannabis, CBD Advertising online is almost impossible. In fact, advertising or selling CBD on Facebook is prohibited just like it is on Google.
You might have tried and failed (yikes!) but don’t worry, if we were able to do it with other brands, we can make advertising your CBD business happen. You don’t have to worry about stringent Google and Facebook CBD policy. Let the marketers do the marketing and you keep doing what you love!
As a cannabis marketing agency, we can help you come up with the right target audience and skip through the best part of advertising- conversions!
We also offer SEO for CBD companies so you get the top real estate in Google Search organically. There’s so much more we can do to help you create an effective cannabis marketing strategy (and of course, make more conversions!) in the lucrative senior’s market.
Our team is ready to help you! Contact us by calling or fill out the form to have a FREE strategy consultation with us!
Let’s get your business growing!