VAPED

Business challenge

Vaped.com is growing as a business, as the market for legal marijuana grows across the United States and the world. They have three brands, based in the U.S., Canada and Australia, and were looking to grow all three simultaneously.

The CEO was looking to scale through link building and PR, and from our conversations with him we discovered that, as a part of this growth, he was in the process of hiring someone to be a full-time tester of his products, a role that he had previously taken on himself. We decided to use this opportunity to generate a PR campaign. In his own words:

“I need someone who is confident to take over reviews… someone who is passionate about vaporizers and has the ability to create well produced, helpful videos and write-ups on the vaporizers. I want to hear from you. I think it’s an amazing opportunity for somebody, and I look forward to us working together.”

How we solved it

First thing we did was work with Vaped to create a landing page with all of the salient facts about the company and a full description of the available job.

This included information about the company, the benefits ($250 a month for ‘herbal expenses’), as well as the salary: $42,000 (a deliberate number to further capitalise on the 4/20 theme). We also ensured that it was all written in the brand’s deliberately tongue-in-cheek style: “We are looking for someone to step in and do the dirty work: test out dry herb vaporizers. It’s not an easy job but someone’s gotta do it.”

When we first discussed this campaign we knew that it would have to be a real job, we didn’t want to create a fake job campaign that never follows through and is just there for coverage. This was reflected in the detail of the offer itself. He was genuinely after an enthusiast to fulfil the role that he had been doing as a sole founder. He had his own ‘Vaporizer Tester Application’ and a bespoke questionnaire that ensured the right person was fit for the role “Do you know the difference between an Xmas Starry and a Volcano?” “How good are you with software? I’m not talking about Microsoft Word…” & more.

We finished the campaign with a full quote from the founder, made some on-brand images that showed him asking for a replacement, and launched on April 17, three days ahead of the main holiday when we could target weed-based coverage the most.

Results

Within a few hours we’d had our first placements on major news networks: Newsweek, Fox News, and Lifehacker. This immediately led to further pickup across tens of radio stations in the U.S.. We also had pickup in the foreign press, including: Slate.fr, Tagblatt.de, and LeVoixDuNord. In total we had over 50 pieces of online links and coverage within the 24 hours we had targeted for outreach.

On social media we had tweets about the campaign from high profile accounts, including 20 verified news outlets. Cannabis-news specific accounts also tweeted it, including Cannaworld which has over 30,000 followers. Their tweet resulted in hundreds of pieces of engagement directly from the client’s target market. There was also further engagement on platforms such as Reddit, Facebook and Instagram.

Away from online media, we received extensive radio coverage that prominently mentioned the brand, as well as television coverage in multiple states. Finally, we achieved several pieces of print coverage, including a full write-up in the German Daily newspaper Märkische Allgemeine.

The client received over 85,000 visits to their site, over 5,000 applications, and thousands more email enquiries asking about the business.