Stephanie has been a programmer/developer for 14 years. She has done media buying, marketing and growth strategies for 8 years. A huge focus for her has been CBD Facebook & Instagram ads for almost 2 years. She has ad experience with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Ads, Pinterest & TikTok. She helps clients by consulting and managing their businesses and/or ad accounts. She is co-owner of the CBD Business Accelerator which is a membership platform for CBD Brands to start & scale their CBD Business. She has founded and co-founded multiple e-commerce businesses and scaled numerous endeavors while profitably spending up to 11 million a year for her businesses & clients.

Topics We Will Be Covering:

• The Facebook Business Verification/ad account shutdown that is happening to all niches of businesses right now.
• How to get your account back up if it has been disabled and how to proactively prevent it getting shut down.
• Brand Info – Knowing how you are different from your competitors and what your elevator pitch is.
• How to setup multiple business managers to have backup plans, how to keep track of them all and how to best utilize them.
• Tactics for compliant CBD ads & understanding ad rejection
• Top CBD brands example ads
• Picking audience targeting and how to set it up in your ads account
• Ad Testing Ideas & how to best maximize their potential

Business Verification Recent Surge (End of 2020 to 2021)

There has been a huge surge in Facebook ad accounts getting shut down in the past few months across the board on different businesses. This is not just CBD related (but is a huge time suck that you are not in control of). A big part of it is Facebook wants to verify that you are a real person and/or that you verify your business. They will shut your ad account down until you do this, even if you are doing everything 100% compliantly. Facebook will guide you through what steps you need to do as it depends on your account & Facebook what they ask you to confirm. It seems more and more important to get ahead of this if you can so your accounts have no downtime, but you could also wait and see if you are ever asked to do this and at least expect some downtime.

If Your Ad Account Gets Shut Down/Disabled

There are multiple things you may have to do to get your ad account live again. Things you may encounter:
– You may have to confirm your identity by uploading a front picture of your legal identification. 
– You may have to verify your business. 

To verify your business you will need your exact legal business name, address, phone number and website. You need documentation that verifies your business’s legal name (ie. business license, certification of formation, business tax or VAT registration certificate, EIN letter from the IRS, Official tax notices from the IRS, Business bank statements, business credit report.

You may also need a document that shows your business address AND phone number like a utility bill, electric, phone, bank statement or business license with address AND phone number.

You may also have to confirm your business by phone number, email and/or verifying your domain. 

Check the links below and follow the instructions Facebook gives you.

Check your Account Quality – https://business.facebook.com/accountquality

Check your Security Center – https://business.facebook.com/settings/security

Here’s the FB instructions:
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/245311299870862
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/159334372093366

Brand Info

– Who are you? Mapping it out & putting your url’s all in one place.
– Questionaire available here: 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZODNVLk3Su9EI2phwbVXI2FV9re_uYIN6IoskEPgDtE/edit#gid=984256685

Setting Up FB Business Managers/Ad Accounts Checklist

– https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZODNVLk3Su9EI2phwbVXI2FV9re_uYIN6IoskEPgDtE/edit#gid=0

This ideal setup has 3 different personal accounts that have clean business managers or create clean business managers. The ideal setup uses real people’s accounts that are aged. A common strategy is hitting up all those family and friends that will never run ads and explaining to them, that you just need them to create a business manager and it won’t ever effect their Facebook personal account. Also, you will want to ask them for a photo of their legal id for verification purposes in the future. Keep it on file. The google sheet attached is what I use to setup clients to easily know what is going on and be able to reference later.

To Create a Business Manager

To create a Business Manager:

1. Go to business.facebook.com/overview.
2. Click Create Account.
3. Enter a name for your business, your name and work email address and click Next.
   *Note, the email you use should be a separate email address that you have access to that has NO association to ANY other FB accounts. If needed, create a new email address. 
4. Enter your business details and click Submit.
5. Verify the email address that was used in the Business Manager creation

A couple things to also note, you will want to use different credit cards for each account, ones that have not been used on another Facebook account, especially if their have been issues with that account.

The holding/data account is used for creation purposes and if one of your persoanl accounts has chat support… make it the holding/data account. You will not use this account to manage your ads. It will be there to hold your account data so you can share it with other accounts if needed in the future. Chat support is not offered on every account, Facebook reps do not give a lot of info on how to get chat support added to an account, so you want to treat those chat support accounts as gold.

To find out if you have chat support, click this link https://www.facebook.com/business/help
And then you will see this below, if you do not see this when clicking on the link, you do not have chat support on that account.

The GALA accounts stands for ‘Getting Ads Live Account’ this is where you will start testing ads and strategies and the ‘Scaling’ account is where you will spend the most money and put ads that have proven to convert well and have no issues with.

TACTICS TO TRY FOR COMPLIANT CBD ADS

• Informational or Education articles that go to a blog post that has a button that goes to your website and sells. You can talk about CBD, but don’t sell it on that page.
• An ad that hints at the product, but doesn’t make it explicitly clear that it’s CBD. You can show images of the product, but don’t make it 100% clear what it is or state it in the ad.
• Building a topical landing page that substitutes the term ‘CBD’ with hemp even in all images and then if they click on anything, it takes them to the main site that has all products including ingestibles.
• Use words like soothe, calm, may help… get creative and NEVER make claims or say it will cure an ailment.

AD REJECTION

Know that your ad is going to be rejected. It’s part of the game. First, request review on the ad level of your ad or in account quality. Request review and wait see what happens. Try and limit how many ads you test out especially when you have dealt with rejections in the past or have a new account. You don’t want those rejections to build up and you always want to fix them. If your ad gets disapproved, it’s time to chat with support. Be as nice as possible and 1 question at a time. Know that many of the support people do not know what they are talking about, so take what they say with a grain of salt.

CBD Ad Examples That Are Working

There are always a few brands that my clients mention to me about how they are running ads and asking how they are able to use certain “tactics” – I’ll explain a few examples below…

FEALS – Ads Library

https://discover.feals.com/3-things-you-need-to-know-about-how-cbd-works-to-ease-anxiety

Common questions:

• How are the able to say ‘CBD’?
• How can they use a picture of an ingestible tincture?

They can use the term CBD because they are going to an informational or educational article. Facebook allows more leeway when sending to an informational or educational article instead of directly to a product landing page. That is why this is a top tactic that brands are using to get compliant CBD ads live.

They are going to a subdomain of their main site. The educational/informational article has a ‘Learn More’ button on it that goes to their main site.

They can use pictures of tinctures because they are not saying directly what they are on the ad and they are not directly selling.

Here’s a big part of this, Feals has a dedicated Facebook rep, no doubt about it and they will be able to get away with a lot more than a new brand and new ad account will, so do not try these tactics to the degree they are when starting out. Start more vanilla with your ads, get them live, build a solid relationship with Facebook showing you are being compliant and later you can start trying more tactics.

Honest Paws – Ads Library

https://honestpaws.co/products/relief-hemp-oil-for-dogs

Honest Paws has two different sites. HonestPaws.com as their main site and HonestPaws.co as their compliant site for ads. They use the term ‘Mobility Treats’ as their selling/marketing point and make no reference that it has CBD in it. They blur out their images so you cannot see that it says CBD on it. They do not mention CBD on the landing page. They replace the term ‘CBD’ with ‘Hemp’ or just remove mentions all together.

Takeaways/Conclusions from looking at top companies successfully doing CBD ads.

• You are not feals or honest paws, do not try to get away with everything they are doing. Start slow and get ads live and keep building up.
• Remove the term ‘CBD’ from your landing page including all images.
• Use a subdomain or new url to send to, this helps not put your main url at risk.
• Try many tactics, build a seperate landing page, build a blog/educational/informatioal landing page.
• Follow the rules, even thought Facebook purposly makes them unclear. Don’t try to get away with things.

HOW TO PICK AUDIENCES/INTERESTS/TARGETING

It’s best to seperate your ad campaigns based on how hot, warm or cold they are.

BOF – Bottom of the Funnel – The hottest of your traffic
This is usually the traffic that has Added To Cart Or Initiated Checkout on your offer/offers in the past.

MOF – Middle of the Funnel – Warm Traffic
This is usually website visitors and re-targeting based on video views.
(exclude all targeting you are using in the bottom of the funnel)

TOF – Top of the Funnel – Cold Traffic
This is Lookalike Lists and Interest based targeting. It is any targeting where the potential customer has never heard of you before.
(exclude all targeting that your are using in middle of the funnel AND bottom of the funnel)

A lookalike list is made from an uploaded list or created based on data gathered from the Facebook pixels about people’s actions on your site or FB page.

To find interests to target, a good tool that is built inside Facebook is the ‘Audience Insights’ tool where you can see what other interests people have that like your page or based on certain demographics.

Audience Insights Tools

Testing

There are a few different factors to test if your ads are not converting.

Offer/ad copy/creative – grabbing attention and interest

Targeting & traffic – Make sure you are targeting the right people

Website experience – when they land, you can convert them

Test multiple different options – don’t limit yourself

Marketing Ideas/Solutions

UGC ads – User generated content – testimonials, unboxing. There is an affordable software to find people to help you create these -> https://billo.app 

Reach out to top customers too!

(With testimonials or opinions from others, you get away with saying more because they are talking about their experience instead of you saying what your product can do in a general sense for everyone.)

• What is their problem and how are you going to solve it? Make it clear.
• Use emojis to stand out
• 1-2 sentences per paragraph, make it easy to read
• Call out their pain point problem & then call out the solution
• Call out the discount/incentive
• Use scarcity (ie. limited time or first 100 customers)
• Reply to all comments and sell in the comments too.

Ad Creatives

I believe in using videos at the top of the funnel whenever possible because you can retarget based on video views. Use 4:5 or 1×1 for sizing ideally. Make multiple versions of the same video with different lengths, try. for 15, 30 and 60 seconds long.

The first goal you have is to stop someone in their newsfeed so try to capture their attention in the first 3 seconds. It can be eye-catching, weird, pretty, ugly… anything that disrupts someone from just scrolling.

For Retargeting, use images and longer videos. You can use screenshots of the videos for easy ideas to get images to test.

General 

No claims – Never say your product will cure anything

Optimize website for mobile

Keep track of all your ad url’s on a google sheet for easy way to handle comments and another way to keep track of ad performance. I use this Kill Ads Calculator sheet to do both

Setup your ad account columns to see what actions people are taking and the cost per action. Set it up in the order of your funnel from when they hit your landing page to when they purchase.

APPS I LIKE FOR CREATIVES:

I don’t have any artistic skills on my own so I fake it with knowing the right apps to use. Plus, for brands/businesses on a budget… it’s good to know apps to help cut costs where you can. And it’s great to have multiple options with creatives to test.

• Remove.bg – Awesome for removing background of pictures for creatives (desktop or visit website on phone)
• Mojo Video –  Great for animating images into videos, tons of templates (phone app)
• Adobe Spark Post –  My go to for creating image creatives & thumbnails. Includes a ton of design features to hack that you have design skills. Fun hack: You do not have to pay for this, on the image there will be a watermark, click it, say remove for this image and then just do that everytime. Duplicate creatives to keep colors and make staying on brand super easy. Can be used on desktop or app on phone, both are awesome.
• Inshot – Incredible easy video editing tool. Allows easy splicing, zooming, drag and drop. Lots of Tik Tok users edit in Inshot before they bring into TikTok. Phone App.
• Phonto & Vont –  Phone apps. Phonto is just like a phone Photoshop. Allows for super simple sizing, adding of extra images on top of each other with drag and drop and saved colors & fonts for easy on branding. Vont is the video version of Phonto. Both super basic, but often comes in handy when other apps can fight you with having so many extra features.