This is part of our Inno on the Road Series, where we explore and showcase a neighboring ecosystem. Inno on the Road: Hampton Roads, which will feature a couple new stories a month and an event in May, is presented by BDO.
Herbfluence is clearing the haze around influencer marketing.
The Virginia Beach-based company solves a problem that is a result of strict advertising laws. Because marijuana is still illegal at the federal level, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and digital media companies like Google have taken steps to protect themselves by adopting bylaws prohibiting the use of their sites for the promotion of any related products. In comes Herbfluence.
“These digital platforms have extremely limited advertising opportunities,” Founder and CEO Tyler Knight told Inno. “Social media influencers have become a main way for brands to promote their products and services to their immediate followers.”
Herbfluence is an online marketplace that connects cannabis and CBD brands with influencers who post content to promote their products. They launched in April 2019 and opened the platform to the public on January 1, 2020. Since then, they have built up a client base of 35 cannabis and CBD companies and boast a network of over 200 influencers, who have a combined follower count of over 20 million.
Knight had previously built up a network of influencers in the cannabis and CBD realm while working on MassRoots, a different company he helped found back in 2013 that served as a social network of sorts for the industry. During his time at MassRoots, Knight experienced the problems that these digital advertising laws created, on top of the tedious and time-consuming nature of finding and working with influencers.
“It takes a lot of time to get in contact with the right influencer, wait for a response and then figure out how to pay them,” Knight said of the process of implementing influencer campaigns without the help of third-party services. “Typically, at the end of the day you wouldn't get analytics on your campaign, you don't know what return on investment you're getting or exactly how many people clicked through to your website and made a purchase. We've built out the technology within our platform to send the brand full analytics on their advertising campaign, such as links clicks, views, shares, comments and interactions with the post.”
Brands are able to subscribe to the platform for a fee based on how many campaigns they intend to run and use the site to post detailed descriptions of what they want to promote and specific copy for photo captions, call to actions or hashtags. Influencers then have access to a listing board of all the available campaigns, from which they can place offers for what they would charge to complete any given one. Once the brand accepts the offer, they have access to the influencer’s profile, social media accounts and analytics and can decide if they match their target market.
Herbfluence currently has eight full-time employees and is in the middle of a $1 million Series A round. Knight helped jumpstart the company at the beginning with a personal initial seed investment of $250,000.
The Hemp Farming Act of 2018 was signed into law and made hemp (cannabis with less than 0.3% THC) legal to be farmed. And as more states ease up on marijuana restrictions, the golden age of cannabis marketing has likely just begun. While Herbfluence doesn’t work directly with companies that sell THC products, most of the brands include those that sell ancillary products like rolling papers, glass pipes, grow kits and hydroponic systems.
“Since I've been in the industry, the passage of the hemp farm bill has driven a huge amount of new businesses that are selling CBD products and have gotten into the hemp and CBD industry,” Knight said.
