By 2028 the cannabis industry will be worth more than $70.6 billion. If you’ve been keeping an eye on the industry, you know how lucrative it can be for those that get in now and begin selling cannabis product.
However, the downfall for many companies is not knowing how to market your business and increase your customer base properly. Are you wondering what the right way is when it comes to marketing cannabis online?
We’ve researched for you and created a comprehensive guide of strategies, tips, and useful advice that will help you when it comes to your digital marketing strategy and increasing your overall sales.
What are you waiting for? Start reading now; you’re not going to want to miss any of this need-to-know information.
Why Marketing Your Business Online Matters?
The online population totals upwards of 21 billion people that spend nearly 16 hours online every month. That means that the number of opportunities you have to market your business products to your target audience is endless.
If you aren’t taking advantage of the online marketing base, you’re losing out on a massive amount of sales that could ensure the growth of your business. There are several social media platforms that you’ve got at your fingertips to market your company on.
When you’re thinking of your digital marketing strategy, there are several ideas that we’re going to give you all in one place. We don’t want to waste any more time because in the world of business, ‘time is money.’
1. Use SEO
The SEO industry alone is more than $80 billion as far as its value is concerned. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and using it properly can help your business sore to the top of the search engine results.
To fully grasp what SEO is and how it can benefit your company, you’ve got to break it down and understand all of the components that make it what it is. When you use SEO properly, you will attract customers to your site.
When you increase the traffic to your site, you can increase the number of paying customers that you receive. SEO helps you attract traffic from customers interested in what your business has to offer because it’s something they’ve been searching for.
Another way that using SEO can help to improve your cannabis sales is by increasing your traffic with traffic that you don’t need to pay for. Remember we talked about using your social media channels the right way?
When you do this, you can get more business without having to spend a chunk of your marketing budget doing so.
How SEO Works
SEO is all about optimizing your website and the various pages you use to promote your business. We recommend before you post any content or create a page for your business, you take some time to perform keyword research.
This will show you the keywords that are popular in your industry and niche. It would help if you took the top keywords you find and sprinkle them organically throughout your content and website.
You should optimize things like your:
- Images
- Meta descriptions
- Titles
Optimizing areas like your meta description can help Google decide if it should show your content to the person searching for it based on the relevancy of your content. Typically, people don’t think of images as something to optimize when it comes to SEO, but this is not an area you want to miss out on.
For example, if you’re selling Delta-8-THC, you want to choose an image that matches the content you’re posting. Once you do this, you need to change the picture file’s name using keywords in the title.
Then you will need to use keywords in the ALT text using descriptive keywords. Therefore, when researching, potential customers are going to have better access to your content.
2. Define Your Business Goals
What do you want to accomplish with your marketing strategy? Do you want to spread information about cannabis to those that aren’t familiar with how it can benefit them?
Are you looking to increase your product sales? Without clear goals to achieve, it can make selling cannabis online challenging, and your efforts will be ineffective.
The goals that you set for your company should be goals that will ensure your business continues to thrive due to meeting these goals. Once you’ve spoken with your team about the goals that need to be achieved as a company, you need to define the results you hope to achieve.
This sets an expectation of where your team will start and where you expect to finish after implementing your marketing scheme. Set both short-term and long-term goals that need to be met throughout your digital marketing campaign.
As your company launches its campaign, you should measure the data you collect.
How Does Data Analytics Work for You?
Data analytics are important during any marketing campaign you launch for your company. The data you collect during each campaign will tell you things like:
- Which strategies are working
- Which strategies need to be reworked
- How customers are reacting to your campaign
These are just a few of the things that data analytics can tell you. As you continue to collect real-time data, you can change your marketing strategy to ensure that your next marketing campaign excels in ways that the previous one didn’t.
Not taking time to review data metrics can leave you and your customer base in limbo. The digital customer experience is essential to business success. When you don’t take data metrics seriously, it could make your customer base feel like your company isn’t meeting their concerns and needs.
3. Revamp Your Website
Your website should be a direct reflection of your brand’s voice. If the website doesn’t align with your company’s personality, it can be confusing for those that visit the site.
Ensure that the design theme you use throughout the site isn’t overly busy because that can distract your customers from what they’re meant to focus on. The information on your site, such as the FAQ page, should provide accurate information for your customers.
The website should also be easy for potential customers to navigate and have buttons that make it easy for customers to access your social media pages. Don’t forget to revisit the SEO section of this guide and optimize your website properly.
All these things should be considered when it comes to designing cannabis websites.
Why Is Outdated Information on Your Website Detrimental?
While you might not think having outdated information on your site is a big deal, it can cause you to lose both past and future customers. Customers want to know what your policy is on shipping and delivery.
They also want to know how long it will take for them to get a refund if they decide to return a product. If the information on your site isn’t accurate, it can cause several issues and increase the frustration and anger that a customer experiences.
Outdated information on your site ruins your companies credibility. It takes years to build a strong reputation as a reputable company to do business within your niche and seconds to ruin it.
For this reason, you need to take care of your brand and not do things that can leave you starting from square one.
4. Work From the Bottom to the Top
Have you heard of the sales funnel? Too often, businesses will aim to start from the top of the sales funnel instead of working from the bottom to the top.
Before you can tackle the top of the pyramid, you need to focus on making decisions that will drive customers to want to purchase and do business with your company. At the bottom of the funnel, you should do things like hosting a live question and answer session online to allow potential customers to ask questions about the products you sell.
Once you meet the middle of the sales funnel, you need to think about the content you’re producing that will properly present all the options customers have to choose from. You need to think of content that will support your products, such as product pictures posted to your company’s Instagram.
Now, after the previous work you’ve done at the bottom and middle of the sales funnel, you’ve reached the top. You’ve done the work to create the appropriate content; now it’s time to push the content and start attracting customers to your site.
5. Redefine Your Target Market
Your target market is important to your business. There are some questions that you can ask to help define your target audience.
What are the problems facing customers in your niche, and how can you help solve them? Where does your target audience find information? Who do the people in your target audience trust?
These are just a few of the questions you should ask and seek to answer.
Targeting the wrong group of people will cause your products and services to fall flat. Ensure that once you get the answers you’ve been looking for, you tailor your marketing strategy accordingly.
For example, if your audience primarily uses Instagram and Snapchat, you need to create content that will work for these platforms. On Snapchat, you need to create live demo videos that you can post to your story. On Instagram, you need to take pictures that show the best side of your business for your audience to view.
How to Use Each Social Media Platform
There’s a different way to make each social media platform work to your business’s advantage when marketing cannabis products. As mentioned above, Instagram focuses on the images that you post to your account.
You can use Instagram to increase your brand awareness, which is an essential part of your sales.
If you’re going to use Twitter as your main platform, you can use it as a way to network with others that work in your cannabis niche. Or you could use it to follow people that lead and positively influence the industry. Following leaders in the industry will help you discover more ways to improve your companies marketing to increase business sales and growth.
Each social media platform should be another way for you to push necessary information to your potential customers.
6. Partner With Influencers
In 2018, businesses spent upwards of $6.3 billion when it came to the money that was spent collaborating with influencers. You need to look into partnering with influencers as a part of your marketing campaign because influencers have reach that your company may not have.
This is especially true if your company is a newer cannabis company. There are several ways that you can partner with influencers and have them market your products.
One thing you can do is provide them with samples of your products to test and advertise or create a review of the product. Or you can pay the influencer to use your products and push them to their fanbase.
Collaborating with an influencer will increase the number of people who purchase your products, and it redefines your target audience because influencers reach people worldwide.
Marketing Cannabis Online: Climbing Higher in the Industry
There are several ways that you can go about marketing cannabis online. We recommend redefining your target audience to ensure the content you post online is targeting the right customers.
And you should also think about partnering with influencers who believe in cannabis and its positive benefits for those who use it. Did you find the information you were looking for above?
Check out the other posts we’ve created in this section.