The Challenges and Goals
With the legalization of cannabis scheduled for October 17, 2018, Emerald Health Therapeutics was one of many licenced producers across Canada scrambling to launch their brand and start engaging with prospective consumers.
The lead up to legalization was competitive and chaotic: an ambiguous regulatory environment meant that any consumer-focused communication had risk. All major digital platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter had banned cannabis advertising. But regardless of restrictions, we needed to act! Legalization would bring even stricter advertising and promotions regulation and a solidified brand landscape.
Our primary goal was to grow Emerald’s addressable audience leading up to legalization – building a base of engaged contacts that we could connect with once product was available. We also endeavoured to dominate the conversation on legalization day because of its crucial place in Canadian cultural history.
The Insights and Strategy
Even with cannabis legal in many US states, and the product being available by prescription for a number of years, there was still a stigma around its use. Many still associated it with recreational use, being a pot-head and just generally “getting high”.
To succeed, we set out to elevate the medicinal benefits of cannabis to an audience that was already focused on wellness – but had yet to consider cannabis. But we had to do this without making any health claims, or risk losing our medical cannabis license. Our strategy took a two-pronged approach:
First, reduce stigma and build our following by linking Emerald’s cannabis products to a key “need” state – difficulty sleeping. To circumvent Health Canada regulations, we used the Emerald Health Naturals division of the organization to brand our messaging as it does not sell any cannabis products.
Second, we tapped into Canadians’ desire to better understand cannabis by becoming an authentic voice in the rapidly growing organic social conversation leading up to and on legalization day, putting the Emerald Health Therapeutics brand front and centre.
The Execution
Our “need state” tactics, connecting the Emerald brand with the topic of sleep, truly activated all of our digital’s strengths. Our analysis of public social media data helped us better understand some of the common issues people have when suffering from sleep issues. Based on this, we launched a time-gated website, www.slumbr.ca, only accessible between midnight and 6:00 am. The site offered shareable content to those having trouble sleeping including helpful tips for a more restful sleep (like turning off electronic devices) and boring content to put you to sleep (like watching “The Most Boring Man in the World” fold laundry).
Silmultaneously, to educate Canadians, we catalyzed and capitalized on conversation around legalization by launching #DiscussCannabis content in social channels. We built a team of community managers with first-hand medical cannabis experience and engaged industry influencers for an educational retreat. On legalization day, our DiscussCannabis.ca microsite showed real-time conversations taking place coast-to-coast.
Technology and Tools:
Time-gating our website by region made slumbr.ca as relevant as possible. During off-hours, we directed visitors to Emerald’s product information website Endohelp.ca.
The Twitter API allowed us to build a real-time data visualization of cannabis-focused conversation, mapping individual tweets, based on keyword usage and geographic data, to a styled Google Map housed at DiscussCannabis.ca
Analytics and heat mapping were used to track everything from site visits to engagement with individual content, for ongoing content optimization.
Emerald Health was able to review ad performance in real time through a Google Data Studio report which aggregated all online campaigns.
User Experience:
Our UX strategy was simply built around providing a 24/7 online experience, even though our creative idea was centered around a time-gated website. With the addition of endohelp.ca, our audience could engage with Emerald all day, every day.
With our domination of legalization day through social, we organically met consumers where they were, never demanding that they click for more. All our digital efforts focused on ensuring Emerald was the brand that was providing the information they were seeking.
Supporting Channels:
Our campaign was 100% digital. Our strategic use of Emerald Health Naturals as the brand behind Slumbr.ca allowed us to use display networks, video and social ads to drive traffic to both Slumbr and EndoHelp. We leveraged the Google Search Network to reach users across the country performing relevant searches.
#DiscussCannabis relied on a purely organic strategy, focused on Instagram and Twitter. Strategic use of hashtags like #ACMPR drew engagement from the cannabis community. Influencers, again focused on Instagram and Twitter, drove additional traffic and impressions.
The results and impact:
The campaign exceeded all of our targets:
Social audiences grew by 40% (vs 25% goal)
Our online presence increased by 611%
Average engagement rates increased on all channels; on Facebook we achieved a 313% increase from our benchmark (1.25% to 3.9%)
On legalization day, we dominated the conversation by posting 17 unique pieces of content, increasing our cross-channel average engagement rate by 367% – a huge lead over Tweed and Aurora, who achieved 91% and 200% respectively.
Slumbr.ca received 125,000 unique visitors with over 61,000 returning between the hours of midnight and 6:00am. The average time spent during our ‘open hours’ was over 2.5 minutes.
Post campaign research confirmed the campaign strongly communicated its message, and 74% of the sample agreed the campaign made them feel that Emerald was trying to help people with sleep issues.