As the strict regulations surrounding the world of CBD start to slowly fade away, a lot of companies started dipping their toes in the industry. The client in question is one of the thousands of entrepreneurs that entered the CBD eco-system following the 2018 Farm Bill.
Despite new policies making the lives of CBD brand business owners easier, the client still had a lot on their hands as far as the legal side of the business was concerned. Once that was settled, they needed a large amount of content for their media campaign, and reached out through a referral.
This short case study goes over their marketing strategy, and how we were able to help turn their CBD startup into a high 7-figure brand.
Their goal was simple – to become one of the biggest CBD brands in the US.
Timeline and Execution
The first step was to start establishing the brand as an authority in the niche. We did extensive keyword research, and handpicked keywords for 100,000 words worth of informational content for their blog to kick things off with, starting with the “low hanging fruit”. The objective here was to become a “beginner’s guide to CBD” sort of blog, and promote their products to visitors who landed on one of these articles.
Next, the client’s in-house team started working on link building and a sponsored article campaign, which we were to produce the content for. They weren’t new to this, and already had promotional arrangements setup with a lot of large websites. The outreach campaign for new sites was somewhat broad and mostly included lifestyle and health websites.
The sponsored article campaign was mostly done with the intention of ranking these web properties on Google for carefully chosen keywords using the websites’ own authority. These served to bring massive amounts of traffic to their website, as well as cementing the brand’s authority in Google’s, as well as consumers’ eyes.
We did a total of about 700,000 words of content for their outreach/sponsored article campaign over the next three months.
We also continued to grow their blog with content, publishing an additional 250,000 words worth of it.
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At this point, the blog content strategy, combined with the outreach and sponsored article campaign started to pay off. Google started picking the website up for some of the lower-difficulty keywords, which is what the plan was to begin with.
We then did another 200,000 words more of informational content for their CBD blog.
Results
While traffic from the sponsored article campaign started coming almost from day one, both organic and referral traffic grew in the coming weeks, and the brand even started showing up in SERPs for some higher difficulty keywords.
It’s important to note that while organic traffic was decent, most of their traffic came from their own marketing efforts – we just produced the content for them, they are the ones who had it picked up by major websites.
From this massive media/outreach campaign, the brand managed to secure close to 1100 referring domains within a rather short timeframe. Other websites joined in and began linking to them as well. The additional, non-incentivized domains accounted for about 35% of the total number of referring domains.
They also spent a great deal of effort in getting affiliates onboard, which further fueled the backlink fire and secured the brand’s authority in SERPs, as well as general online presence.
The brand’s success was in great part due to the fact that they weren’t new in the niche nor new to massive promotional campaigns, and did everything intentionally and in an organized manner. We can’t take credit for much, other than doing a good part of the keyword research and producing as much content as they needed, when they needed it.
The client did not share the specifics of their revenue because they want to keep their numbers private. However, just for the sake of this case study, they reported that their monthly revenue from the CBD brand was in the mid 6-figures. This is arguably one of the fastest growing CBD brands in the world, largely in part thanks to SEO.
Overall, this was a super positive service for us, as it helped us launch our own guest post publishing service as well.
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