TikTok Marketing for Cannabis, It Can Be Done!

[ okay we're excited too michael let's give it a few moments for everyone to log in here this all right well happy thursday everyone and welcome to the MediaJel podcast where we cover the latest marketing trends and strategies that are most effective in growing your cannabis dispensary delivery service or brand MediaJel connects brands and retailers with cannabis consumers through our ad network of mainstream publishers mobile apps games and tv we help cannabis companies advertise advertise through paid search seo and programmatic display advertising to drive awareness foot traffic and e-commerce sales i'm your host guillermo bravo and today we'll be discussing tick tock marketing for cannabis i'm super excited to introduce elizabeth udell with friends of friends agency to today's podcast elizabeth has been a social media manager for 10 years in a ton of different industries including cannabis entertainment food solar and e-commerce for the last two years she's taught content marketing and social media management at san diego state university to help people navigate the digital landscape welcome to the show elizabeth hey everyone so happy to be here thank you so much for having me yeah happy to have you excited to learn about tick tock and how businesses can leverage it for um you know for growing their exposure um before we embark on our tick tock and reels journey today i wanted to touch base on my philosophies for social media and cannabis businesses there's no doubt that it's difficult to promote cannabis brands and retail shops on social right accounts get shut down sometimes for no you know real missteps and we know paid social is not an option yet but that doesn't mean that there's no value for your cannabis business on these platforms so today we're going to walk through you know video strategies on tick tock with elizabeth with the focus on engagement and connection with your audiences you know it's all about building trust and relationships while having fun yeah so you'll see some excellent examples and results uh you know as we walk through some of the canvas industry's most successful tick tock accounts you know social media can be viewed as a marketing channel that shapes and influences the customer experience and deepens relationships with your audiences which in turn you know helps the power of performance for your business uh a strong ban brand identity can bring in customers it is impactful to your business and it drives intangible assets like brand equity on your balance sheet so we had a lot to cover today elizabeth well let's start from the top you tell me tell me a little bit about your background in marketing and what drew you to the cannabis industry oh yeah a lot to cover um hey everyone um so i have been out in l.a for eight years i came here to work in music live events so i worked with insomniac and i was always a consumer you know so i was doing like social media for all these brands under insomniac but i was also living in la i was a medical patient and i saw the potential of marketing to like some degree with these dispensaries and i would go to all these shops and i'd be like hey let me do your instagram for a hundred bucks a week you know because my mind i'm like well if i get ten you know a thousand you know um and it just like wasn't happening you know like marketing wasn't a thing this is 2015 2016. um it get rated tomorrow they don't know where the money's going they just didn't see the appeal so i linked up with a distro and um an agency that serviced a lot of different states like one of them was maine's like that was really cool back then to kind of learn what other states were doing um and i would do this like um social media campaigns like to like as much as i could to like you know like i said at the time it was just like really hard um but then in 2018 when we flipped i immediately joined med men um because they were doing everything i wanted to do we had billboards we had ad campaigns and i went to school for marketing i was ready to just take it to the next level so i went and i started their social media and it was just it was insane we were creating so much content we were spending so much money um but i felt like it was a boot camp i came in doing social i left doing all web digital influencers you know we launched a magazine so since then i've just been at so many different brands just helping out because all cannabis companies kind of know by now what kind of marketing to do so it's just all about helping out injecting that wisdom um and it's just been incredible and that's really what drew me to cannabis just being able to do all the marketing that i know how to do and taking it to this industry that i'm really passionate about and in the meantime really become a better marketer because you have to learn all these organic channels um and tick tock is one of them yeah yeah i mean we know the charitables with cannabis right it's yeah we talked about it uh your account gets shut down there's always limitations on what you can say and what you can show uh you know why do you think tick tock is you know such an untapped platform for the camp space and you know why should cannabis brands incorporate video content and tick tock and reels into their marketing mixes so um okay so tick tock is previously untapped because it's still new um we all got on board march 2020. that's when i got on board it was a kid's app not gonna lie it really was um it was moving the needle you know like little nasdaq's you know um his song that was big on tick tock in 2018 and i didn't even know what that meant i'm like okay i want to be fine but pandemic happened we all got on board and i can just say with certainty it is not a kid's app anymore um if you are old you are actually really cool so like it is literally for everyone so it's untapped in that regard because it's really new um and it quickly became a marketing tool um it is one of the only platforms where brands i say can be really unhinged um i see um accounts like the empire state building like literally um oh and what is old old as in like there's a group of 90 year old men in a house who just like have a great time and embark you know their wisdom so literally all ages um and um refunding to comment there um but uh sorry i lost my train of thought um um yeah no so it became a marketing tool i see brands on hinge yes so the empire state building for instance all that account does is roast the architecture of other buildings in new york and and maybe that wouldn't like that doesn't fly with the instagram audience or the or the twitter audience or facebook but tick tock you can really just like have fun and not take yourself so seriously um so it's really popular in that regard but with cannabis it's also the most regulated account i'm sorry regulated platform um you can't even show any product yes i know there are loopholes yes i know celebrities do it yes i know i have one out there that's probably like everything i'm telling you right now is not like it's not blanket unfortunately you can't show cannabis flower you really can't show smoking yes people find ways around it like tik tok is really really really creative and clever like people find a way i'll tell you later on how i've done some growth hacking but blankets it's really strict it's not like instagram instagram is really strict haha but you can do so much more in reals that you can't do on tik tok so that's where cannabis companies i feel like are a little apprehensive and i would think that more than half of a cannabis company's first tick-tock post gets deleted because they go on and they think okay it's like instagram um because that happened to me i made like a let's make ice hash video two years ago and i had the flower so unfortunately you learn the hard way so like automatically your account has that flag on it um so it's tough for a cannabis company to get on board when you hear these horror stories so you know i recommend crafting a strategy before you just dive on in because your first tick tock video has a more likely chance of going viral than any of your other videos because tick tock wants to see what you got like if you're starting fresh you have no content attached to you um you can go big my first video got 60 000 views um and it was really silly and i probably wouldn't be able to recreate that again um so the other part of the question um why and how should canvas brands incorporate video content um now more than ever and this is when i'm gonna shift to reals so now more than ever we are able to utilize video content in the short form um years ago we were making all these videos for instagram and instagram was photo only really in their mind you know so we weren't able to really send the content the way we wanted to we would just have to rely on a photo and a really long caption so now with tick tock instagram reels is really getting a push because they want to compete with tick talk so much so we weren't even given analytics for the first few months of reels and you were like where are all these thousands of views coming from i've never had this kind of engagement in my life so they love it um all content right now if you can especially with cannabis should be in video form the last four years of cannabis content marketing has all been done okay bud porn does not hit anymore because there are billions of photos of bud porn and i'm sorry if your flower is the most beautiful you've ever seen someone's probably photographed it already 10 times over um so you have to push through the muck and this is the same with tick tock to just be unique you know there's such an emphasis on the cool [ __ ] that is in cannabis on reels okay and this is this is all reals talk because tick tock you can't do any of this so reels um for my clients i make really cool joint rolling videos 50 000 views it's nothing but we're like you know the whole world is on the internet this is what they want to see they want to see the cool stuff um so if it can be a video make it a video and i'm going to go into it later but you know budget doesn't matter the more relatable on the phone the better um and think about it like how many photos have we seen of the girl laying by the pool smoking a joint right now you can add a fifth you can make that into a 15 second video of you know maybe getting ready for the pool hanging out with friends um like now more than ever we have to be creative because everything under the sun has been done like we've had like you know we've had many years of the same old stuff the editorial style it's dead um like being in california being in the wreck market all the wreck states they have elevated their marketing because we are rec we we have um that business mentality and when i go and work with clients on the east coast they're starting to make this editorial content and it has very low engagement because they don't understand that we have been testing this for years and we know it doesn't work anymore so reels is the move tell your story the way you want because photo and caption is no longer your friend yeah yeah and you've said it a ton in this you know in the beginning here is be creative right like tick tock's that platform for you to be unhinged as a brand as a uh you know the face of a company and we'll get into a little bit uh you know different cannabis brands that are doing this well and showcase them uh yeah do businesses need a huge budget to start creating content on tick tock absolutely not um it's really like the i just said this the more low budge the better um when i joined canna craft um in uh january 2021 i did an audit of reels seeing who was doing it and there weren't that many and i would talk to the media team and i'm just like now is your chance to be more creative than ever like with your phone i would tell the brand managers go home roll a joint and like smoke it on your really pretty patio and they did we filmed it and that has gone like that that's the relatable factor right now um big budget productions hurt the brand sometimes because people don't want the stage they don't want the over done yeah authenticity um i just did a reel for a cannabis brand last week um they just rolled out this 14 pack of joints and i took it and i went to a party and i just filmed myself giving it to everyone and that's their most viewed reel so far um it's really chill it's really chill but it's also very hard i cannot stress the creativity i cannot stress the creativity like brainstorm with your team brainstorm with your friends like i am such a team person where i'm like i can't do this alone we have to like all chat about this like okay you go home and you dab and you have this really sick glass like go film that you know like things that you have um i have a cannabis cart i filmed that because it's just chilling in my like in my um living room corner but the whole freaking world wants to see it like my cannabis card has gone viral on every single platform um and it's nothing to me so you know you have to think like outside the box here like it's not just you you're not just in the state that you live in you have the entire world that wants to see how we smoke weed what's the what's the recipe like what are the what are the key ingredients for you know like a viral post okay so all right so first i'm going to come straight from tick tock so my friends at tick tock have told me is what value do you bring to the app okay so you start there that is in the form of what is unique what is new what is insightful um you're being fed so many tick tocks a day that as i just as i said before you have to push through the muck like what makes this video special because i have friends who use tick-tock like instagram and they don't really get any views but i've always been in my head like every time you post on tick tock should the goal to be viral like the point is it connects us all over the world you know don't you want to have that reach um because like tick tock that's the fun part for me i love reaching people and just like showing them what's up um so that's the first part you know what value do you bring to the app um tick tock creation is pointless unless you don't use the app because you have to understand the app and it's not hard if you scroll for an hour every single day you'll understand what i mean with trends and sounds um nothing's worse than working with a content creator and being like okay so we're gonna do this trend this trend and we're going to do this transition and you know like this one and like they kind of don't really understand what you're talking about i'm like look if you just use the app it's not it's it's not hard it's not scary it's not complicated it's actually really i mean it's my favorite app on the internet right now um it's incredible it's where all video content on the internet aside from youtube is coming from so you might as well you might as well use it if you have to make content so um after you use it and after you know your value another key ingredient would be to get them talking um i'll speak on trolls later on and harnessing the power of the troll um but you have to have an active comment section and that can be a question um maybe you're cooking something and you use an ingredient that no one knows what it is and you don't even address it so they're going to take the comments and be like what is that what is that what are you doing what are you doing um i'm going to go to this later on too but my biggest video in cannabis on tick tock is at 9 million views and it's a stunning glass which is a gravity bomb and it's not being used in cannabis i will go very much in detail with that one but no one knows what it is so all the comments are just like what is that what is she doing where do you get that where are you located where was this so get them talking when you think about the value and you think about what's unique you have to take advantage of your environment um to really just tell the message i would say so for instance i live in la and i live in korea town and i live across from a korean market that i go to every day that i decided to film one day and it went viral because it's nothing to me but you have the entire world on tick tock and they think it's cool people in south korea thought it was cool people in new york are like oh yeah that's my favorite whenever i go down you know like stress i can't stress enough to get out of your comfort zone um something that is so simple to you is the world to everyone else so always think granular um if something funny happens with your dog post it it might be something he does every single day of his life but the world needs to see this so people just like really capitalize on the ordinary like people love to see into other people's lives people love to feel connected by shared experiences um so step out of your comfort zone um captions captions is another key ingredient because the art of tick tock captions is very much real um you want to go short form and again if you use tiktok you'll understand this because you're a user first and if you are scrolling and you like a video just expand the caption how did this caption get fed to you did they use hashtags like all of these you know like everything is repetition on tick tock with trends you know people always encourage copying building on the trend learn from them and then take it to your content um there is no like there is no actual guidebook it's people who have used it over and over and felt comfortable with the app and test like i'm the biggest tester i test everything um and you know hoping to kind of just like you know share the stories but if you use tick-tock it'll come very natural to you um but captions are a huge part of it um and always like yeah always go short and hashtags hashtags are the last ingredient um i i like using the for you page hashtag because it makes my videos go viral i don't know there's billions and billions and billions and billions of pieces of videos attached to the hashtag for you page but i still do it anyways um the science of hashtags is i always say do at least five um because yeah you know if you get viral and you know you're a viral account you don't need hashtag like whatever you're in growth mode okay so if you're in growth mode get hashtags um i always do five um sometimes you're fed like the trending hashtag so i usually do the trending hashtag um i usually do for you page just because like i said it could work um and then you know three hashtags that have to do with your video um i do a lot of clips so like clip talk of like old tv shows and stuff so i'll like do maybe like boy meets world so hashtag boys world hashtag corey matthews hashtag sean hunter like that kind of stuff and then you put that all together and then that should be a good video awesome awesome that's going to really help you know really push engagement for your video is there any other tips you'd recommend for extending that life and you know it's already gone viral like how do you keep that you know that's it to that real top of mind and you know keep it going let's see so if you have a viral video going you know let's say you struck gold and it's going definitely capitalize on it yeah um take the comments from that viral video and respond with another video um a great example so i went to coachella and i had a client at revolve fest and um i went to a ball fest and i was in like this nice little ga all right this is general admission section um down by the lake with some friends on a couch smoking weed and then after a little while security came up and said we had to move because kim kardashian was gonna do a photo shoot so i just took like a nice little eight-second video of the beautiful lake and then we left and she kicked out about like 300 people in the entire section too so i wasn't going to take a stand even though everyone checked talks like why did you take a stand i'm like because you're not going to do it you're not you're doing a party like you're getting you're getting removed for a little while you can get out of the section so i add the text um minutes before getting kicked out of the shady nice area by kim kardashian at revolve fest so seo okay lots of seo in there um and the video went incredibly viral um it's at like 5.5 million views right now um it got rid of and it was just it was nothing it was the smallest little thing so i capitalized on it by doing a response video so i took that comment i took one of the comments and i made a new video addressing the whole thing um and then i kept doing it i kept capita i kept you know like you're getting thousands of views on your page right now because you're going viral keep going like that like you have to keep momentum going that's how people stay viral that's like you know instagram i'm sorry tick tock now has you in this like hold where um this kind of content performs well um so like with the stunned and glass one um i now have tick tocks of just canvas accessories that automatically do good because that's what tic toc sees me post and people respond to so i have like you know so my joint filter videos that have gone viral um i took advantage of a trend to showcase like these um really nice patterned uh to do joint cones that's gone viral so thankfully if you do ever go viral um you can keep making that kind of video too um because tick tock like series you know part one part five part six so um i do this strategy with print street pizza one of my clients um oily pizza and no ranch signs always do good and i've done it at least 12 times so if you find yourself excuse me if you find yourself yeah there she is there's my baby um troll galore um but if you um if you find yourself going viral just keep going um something worked um keep doing it yeah and so that's the thing so that die hard ranch one that i just did um that's the sixth in a series and that's the mo we've never hit a million on that one before and the other ones did pretty good so like never give up you know i i'm like i'm gonna talk about that too but like just never get disturbed get discouraged every video is not going to be a hit as you can see here you know not every video is a hit but it's okay you're still you know you're still on the road um to getting there um my stunned in glass video i was on the app for a year and a half before i ever and that's my biggest that was my first viral video so like you know never get discouraged always test and um if you go viral just keep that formula going yep yeah it seems like you know uh you know you know you know what to do to go viral and then extend it you know as far as algol speak like how do cannabis brands stay on top of all these new terms and trends i think because it changes so fast right yes okay so there is a new term out there called i'll go speak which i find just so fascinating um like the best the best thing about social media is it changes every day so right now i'll go speak mean it's short for algorithm and it's mainly trigger words that will get your tick tock flagged and it has now made our way into slang you know accountant on tick tock is a sex worker um and that lets people talk about stripping talk about sex work in an op in a safe and open environment compliantly so with weed for instance um on tick tock and you know it kind of sucks because tick-tock is on to us because this has been a thing for a little while but weed was spelled o-u-i-d like the french word for yes we d so um algo speak can be anything like it's a word that sounds like another word when it's written out um it could be um terms like he unlives himself he died um sw again sex worker um i saw someone today talk about um i got fed this guy who gets um letters from his dad in prison and he made he said like his dad killed his mother but he did k underscore nothing l-l-e-d so there are just ways to get around what you want to say and um if you use the app you'll see these words that'll get fit to you and then that's how you know what everyone's talking about so this is just like another slang um but yeah they're definitely trigger words you can't say smoke um i've seen people take words like cannabis or smoke but you know start with a c like just completely mix up the words because you know who cares right like as long as it gets fed like it's okay if people are reading fast you know you're trying to take advantage of that um typos are fine like it's just like that's like where we're dealing with like split seconds here with videos so um people will scramble words to get through the algorithm um so like that's um that's all i'll go speak um and you'll understand it and you'll see like what your competitors are doing um through there um through the app and then you'll understand on the on those terms that you shouldn't use are those gonna get will those get like your account shut down or is that just that'll just get that actual post taken down or like how does that work so unfortunately um you will so you'll have the video removed and then you'll have the appeal process and um that is what happened with my sending last video um and i guess i'll go into that story right now so this was like the best test i've ever done in my entire life my entire marketing career this is what i'm most proud of so i made this stunned in glass video of um someone just using a stunning glass which is a gravity bomb someone was using it at a party to smoke a drink with wood chips okay no cannabis was involved at all but the gravity bong was so someone i'm sorry so i made the video and it was doing well and then it got deleted um and i appealed it because i'm like this isn't cannabis this is obviously a drink and this is obviously a hookah so i won the appeal and they brought the video back but once it's back it's a dead video like it's not gonna get pushed it's dead so i took one of the comments from the now dead video responded to it with the video again and it went viral and it never was taken down it was fine i promoted all the time with money because i think it was pre it was from a video that was deleted and okay so that was like an incredible test for me because no one's gonna tell you hey if you re-upload from the comments of a deleted video that video is safe so there's that for you if you ever get an appeal back try that um but if you get a video taken down and it's obvious that it goes against the guidelines um they'll remove it you'll get a little warning um every single account is different on how many warnings um a friend of mine just recently told me that when someone follows her account now they get like a little like pop-up saying discount always gets like reported or something so there's things going on there's shadow banning um it's not fun but that's why you know you're going to start smart you know if no one in here is on tick tock yet your first one is going to be so compliant because you're going to look at what everyone else is doing you know we're going to go over some good ones but um you just have to really treat this account the most compliantly you've ever treated any accounts because their potential the potential is there for tick tock and i would hate to see your account just get banned because they do ban accounts it just doesn't matter i don't know the exact number every account is different but if you do get videos removed then you are um you are increased uh awareness okay and we do have a question from the audience here from cy jones so uh you know they've grown their account to 200k um and their growth has been stagnant uh since they reacted to the account you know it was banned i guess is there a smarter way to dig out of the shadow band hole she asked um yeah i would kind of so i would focus on um if you have the so okay so you're able to promote on tick tock um like you know you can boost things you could boost for likes you can boost for followers um i would suggest making some cannabis not sorry non-cannabis friendly stuff that is on trend that you think could be cool and promote it you know throw 100 bucks um get some real engagement back get some real followers back um and tried that um and it's not like it's not always going to work but trying to do other kinds of content for a little while but really making it really like really really really trying to go viral um so for instance cush queen um dear friend of mine got her account verified um she is in shadow band hell because um she always has cannabis content but then she did a political post that's almost like a million so now she like infiltrated that so she worked really really really hard to go viral in a different way so um i would suggest promoting to get some real engagement and just thinking of outside cannabis that can still you know be true to your brand like your personal brand yeah awesome thank you for that i mean that's a that's a great tip yeah it's tough yeah not easy what about your first viral video in the canvas space like what was the video and how did it how did it you know make you feel and is do you have that profile so we can pull it up too it can share the screen yeah yeah yeah um do you want do you want you can share it um if you uh if you pull up my account um l-i-z-o-o-d-e-l-l all right right so um scroll down i forgot you can't pin on here scroll scroll down keep going [Music] sorry one more one more one more keep going keep going keep going sorry there we go okay so first um [Music] okay so um so that was my first video of the story i just told you and [Music] it the other so the other thing was that was part of it is i used a trending sound um that was uh the backyardigans they were really popular last summer so i used a trending sound because that was that's what the comment was they said do the dab remix to this so that was that um so it was an unreal feeling um it like i was telling my friends i'm like kids really don't need drugs like validation is all these kids need like you really feel high you know like you really do um i called the notification button my dopamine button because i just kept pressing it and it just kept refreshing with the most insane engagement you know like 100 just like this like it just it it's really really insane um but i i don't have it like i don't have it in me to make this my life um i like working for companies it is really hard to be a personality on tick tock i like to test like i keep saying um just so i know what i'm doing so i can work with brands um because like i i say i'm not a content creator but i am a country content creator but i'm not someone who every single second i'm making content for my personal tick tock um because i feel like that can just be like really unhealthy and it's just the um the constant pressure to you know keep topping and stuff i think can really get to you um so what i do is i test but i also have fun um a few my videos that have gone viral we're kind of just like split in the second moment where i'm just scrolling and i'm like wait i have an idea and you know a lot of the times that doesn't work but i just i want to have like a healthy relationship with this app and i want to have fun with it so um after i did the sunden glass one i saw that you know i can do accessories so um i did a few one of them so i'll go speak word a good one is forbidden um you know the forbidden uh like tide pods the forbidden jellies you know you can't eat them so for vin jellies it's like why is it forbidden well it's scheduling so i had like um i forgot the exact word there's like fruit uh let me find it it's important i find the exact word that i put on the technical ones yeah so i got these custom filters for um a friend for christmas and i put um i took like a picture of it and it was fine because um you couldn't really tell what it was like the filters look like pasta so i said forbid it i got my i got my friend custom forbidden tips ]