Advertising digitally is one of the most effective ways to grow your cannabis business. The biggest challenge you face while promoting your business is negotiating and steering through the restrictions of advertising in the popular digital platforms. Though the legalisation is still pending in more than a dozen states, studies show growth of $23 billion by the year 2022. E-commerce plays a vital role in the growth of the cannabis business by reaching out to new customers. It can be overwhelming to decide which tactic to implement for the best results.
Out of the many marketing options, only a few stand out to create good volumes of customers. Here are the five tactics to help grow your cannabis business.
1. Educate, Do not sell
Before getting on with the marketing of cannabis, you need to understand the legal limitations. Since marijuana is not legal everywhere, you cannot promote it universally. Due to this, many people are still not aware of the benefits and use of cannabis. In recent years there are more cannabis customers than in any other product consumption space. These new customers if they don’t understand the use of marijuana, they are ignorant to make a purchase.
So, the first thing you should work on to get more conversions is to increase the awareness of cannabis. Create content that is informative, innovative, and will help your website visitors understand cannabis use. According to a study, consumers are more likely to buy a product after reading educational
content. Specific platforms allow only informative content and no selling. Therefore, this will not just help you in spreading awareness, but also is a good start for social media advertising.
2. Maximise And Amplify; Optimise Your Organic Reach
Plan and strategise your digital marketing steps to reach your desired goal. Plan your paid and unpaid promotions and keep track of them. Keep your SEO game healthy, which will give you long term results. Organic search is what will give your brand unpaid customers. Write blogs regularly on the keywords on which you want to rank your website on the search engine result page. Topics like the benefits of taking cannabis and types of marijuana are educational and will give your site more attention.
For example, you can optimise your website for the keyword buy edibles online. This way, when someone searches for this keyword, your website will turn up in the first position. The search results in the top three of the first page tend to get more traffic. It will also give your website a better domain authority. Maximising your SEO will provide you with complete control of your website. You can use google analytics to see how many visitors you are getting in a day. You can check what time the traffic is high, in which region, and what keywords are the visitors searching. Based on these details, you can promote and work more on the keywords.
3. Social Media Marketing
Once you write your blogs with the right keywords, it's time to promote them on social media sites, through emails and SMS too. You can use social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Youtube for the same. Promote in these channels using high-quality images and videos. Social media promotion is an effective way of improving your brand’s responsiveness and increasing customer interaction. Create a customised cannabis content for your posts and stories for Facebook and Instagram.
You must maintain consistency in the posts and stories. Include popular hashtags to promote your posts in all the sites. Hashtags like #weed, #cannabis, #marijuana, #cannabisculture etc trend on twitter. The more your brand catches attention on social media sites; the higher are the chances of its reach to new customers. This way, people will appreciate your work and leave reviews and feedback on your products.
4. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a legalised method of creating passive income. For this method, you need to create an affiliate marketing program and use cookies to track the process. Consumers will use unique affiliate links to promote cannabis products through their websites, blogs, and social media pages. Consumers make a commission whenever someone purchases by clicking their links. In this method, the only expense is the commission, and you don’t need to pay anything to the consumers to promote the links. Increase your cannabis audience by joining affiliate networks, by recruiting marketers or by collaborating with influencers.
5. Advertise
Advertising is the inorganic way of promoting any products. It is an adequate method of reaching more cannabis consumers. Native advertising is one way of advertising in which you display the brand message on social media feeds using paid ads. Display these paid ads depending on the looks, function, and feel of the social media platform. Native ads appear as if they are a part of the page’s content and do not look like typical display ads.
Due to the legalisation issues, though cannabis advertising on all social media channels is challenging, yet you can make use of the shop feature on Instagram and Facebook. Instagram has an in-app shopping, like a digital mall that has opened new opportunities for cannabis products. When you promote your blogs through Instagram stories and posts, you increase customer attention. It means that there are high chances of people shopping from the digital mall. Also, Instagram brings together posts on the explore page based on the users’ interests. So, you need to make the right decision about advertising cannabis products to reach the right audience.
Conclusion:
A cannabis business can be a success if you keep the above pointers in mind. In Spite of the limitations of digital advertising of cannabis, a cannabis business can grow exponentially. Customers are looking for education to understand the purpose of using marijuana. People look for customer reviews, third-party credibility, and an understanding of your brand. For the perfect cannabis brand pitch success, now is the best time for PR to invest in media outreach. Digital media platforms work as a social networking site, shopping network, and search engine for increasing sales, spreading brand awareness and reaching out to new customers.