Dispensary

Why Your Online Dispensary Needs a Marketing Strategy

Do you have the right marketing strategy for your online dispensary?

It’s tempting to think that you don’t need marketing for some products. After all, marijuana is a desirable product that many people need for medical reasons. Why would you need marketing to get them to buy it, especially when they can easily buy it online?

However, the reality is that every business needs a marketing strategy, even an online dispensary. If you don’t nail down your marketing techniques, your competition will quickly take over.

In this guide, we’ll show you exactly why your marketing strategy is so important to the success of your online dispensary. Keep reading to learn more!

1. Save Time

One of the main reasons to have a strategy is to save time down the road. If you plan ahead now, you won’t waste time fumbling through your marketing later on.

Marketing strategies are complicated. If you don’t think ahead, you won’t be able to make the organized moves that will allow you to succeed.

With a strategy, you’ll ensure that your efforts can really work, so you won’t have to backtrack later on. It’s a “work smarter, not harder” approach. Don’t waste time on a marketing campaign that doesn’t have a strategy. Instead, plan ahead to save your precious time.

2. Stay Focused

There are so many different ways to do marketing for an online dispensary. If you don’t have a plan, you won’t be able to keep your focus throughout the process. You might even feel overwhelmed or lost if you don’t start by narrowing down your options.

When you make a marketing plan, you can choose the strategies that will work best for your business, and leave the rest behind. This helps you focus your efforts on the areas where you’ll see the most success.

You need to break down your strategy into the individual parts so you can see how they’ll all work together in the end. This focus allows you to fine-tune your work and concentrate on the right steps at the right time.

3. Beat the Competition

If you don’t have a strategy to use, you’ll quickly lose your customers to the competition that does. Marketing is how your online dispensary attracts the customers it needs to thrive.

Make sure you have a plan, so you don’t let the competitors get ahead.

4. Help Customers Find You

You already know that customers are looking for the product you’re selling. However, if you don’t have a marketing plan, they’ll find your competition instead of your company.

For example, if a customer types “Ventura mmj delivery” into Google, they’re looking for medical marijuana delivery in the Ventura area. The companies that come up first in the search results will be those companies that have a marketing plan.

Your business might have exactly what they need, but if you haven’t focused your marketing efforts, they might not even find your company’s name in the search results.

5. Target Search Engines

This leads to the next important point: a marketing plan is essential for SEO.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is what allows customers to find your company in situations like the one above. When a customer does a Google search, Google selects which websites to show based on how well that site does SEO.

With SEO, you’ll use things like keywords, blog posts, images, and links to make your site show up above your competitors’. However, if you don’t have a marketing strategy that involves SEO in place, your site won’t show up in your client’s searches.

SEO isn’t just something you can throw together at the last minute – you need a strategy to really make it work.

6. Produce Great Content

Content, such as videos and blog posts, is an important part of SEO and marketing overall. Without a strategy, you won’t be able to produce excellent content that gets the attention of your customers.

People are exposed to tons of online content every day. To make yours stand out, you need to plan ahead. This means keeping up with trends, making a content calendar, and covering the topics that your customers are most interested in.

A strategy gives you the time to research and develop this great content for your customers.

7. Use Social Media Effectively

It’s tempting to think that social media will be an easy part of marketing. After all, many people use social media recreationally. However, when it comes to using it for business purposes, you’ll need a strategy.

Social media posts need to be strategized to best reach your customers. You’ll need to know exactly what kinds of things they want to see. For example, does your clientele respond best to text posts, or videos?

A good social media strategy also involves lots of research. You’ll need to find out when your customers spend the most time online, so you can post at those times for the most engagement. You’ll need to review your approach from time to time and use analytics to see how well it’s working.

With a solid marketing strategy, you can seamlessly integrate social media into your overall business approach.

8. Predict Challenges

All businesses have challenges. If you have a marketing strategy in place, you can anticipate some of the marketing challenges you’re likely to face, which will make them much easier to overcome.

In fact, if you know your challenges ahead of time, you might even be able to turn them into strong points for your company.

9. Prioritize Tasks

Some marketing tasks are more important for your business than others. Use a strategy to help you prioritize the tasks that will get you the most results first.

This makes your efforts more effective, by breaking down the time you spend on marketing in the most strategic way. You don’t want to spend more time on tasks that will get minimal results while neglecting the tasks that would get major results.

Does Your Online Dispensary Have a Strategy?

If you don’t have a marketing strategy yet, it’s time to change that. Don’t wait – every day you work without a marketing strategy is a day your competitors can get ahead.

For more on marketing, check out our guide to content marketing here.

10 Website Promotion Tips For Your Online Dispensary

If you’re selling cannabis online, you need the right website promotion tips to be competitive.

Even if you sell out of a brick-and-mortar store, website promotion is the key to getting new customers to come through the door. And if you sell only online, you’ll need a way to get those customers to buy from you and not your competitors.

These 10 website promotion tips will get you sell on your way to running a thriving online dispensary. Read on to learn what you need to know.

1. Do Your Research

Before you can implement a winning website promotion strategy, you’ll need to spend some time on research.

You already know what your market is – cannabis. However, within that market, you need to know what your niche is. Who exactly are you selling to, and what exactly are you selling them?

The more you can set your business apart and target a specific audience, the more successful your online promotion will be. For example, you might be selling cannabis for medical purposes or recreational purposes. You might be selling to an educated, older audience, or a younger audience who is less interested in research.

The more research you do, the more you can target your promotion efforts for success.

2. Have a Great Logo

The more your logo will stand out, the more recognizable your company becomes online.

Even if you already have a logo, sometimes a redesign is best to stay competitive. Many dispensary logos can start to look the same – how many different versions of the weed leaf have you seen in logos?

Check out this website – their logo uses a weed leaf in a creative, abstract way that stands out.

Find ways to make your logo stand out from the crowd. You might try an unexpected color, or a clever double-entendre symbol. Think about your target audience, and decide on the best way to catch their eye.

3. Post Videos

Videos are a great way to promote your online dispensary. This is one of the best ways to reach modern audiences and tell the stories that they care about.

You can post videos directly on your website, and you should also share them on your social media pages to draw people to your site. From short videos that tell your story to longer, live updates, high-quality video is a great way to capture the attention you want.

4. Get Social

In addition to posting videos on social media, you should maintain an active, well-rounded social media campaign.

Many people find out about new businesses on social media. Being active on the social sites your customers use is a great way to get them onto your site. You can also use social media to interact with your customers, giving a sense of your brand’s “personality.”

5. Simplify Your Site

It’s important for websites to be attractive and easy to navigate. After all, if a customer has been enjoying your products and wants to come back for more, you don’t want using your site to become an obstacle for them.

Is your website cluttered and confusing, or is it clean and easy to navigate? How quickly will they be able to find what they’re looking for?

No matter who your target audience is, a clean website that’s pleasant to look at will go a long way. Use limited colors and plenty of blank space to draw the eye to the places you want.

6. Optimize for Mobile

It’s not enough to have a site that looks good on laptops and desktops. Your site also needs to be optimized for mobile phones, tablets, and anything else that customers might use to search.

Mobile-optimized sites will change to fit the screen no matter what device someone uses. They’ll be easy to navigate by changing to fit any form, so users on a phone or another device won’t run into obstacles when they visit your site.

7. Offer Promotions

A great way to get visitors to your site is to offer a promotion.

Use marketing materials to alert them to special deals, such as a discount for first-time customers. You might even offer free swag with a purchase – many marijuana customers love a well-design t-shirt or lighter.

After a few successful promotions, you may actually want to branch out and build an online store to sell merch. This can bring in a new stream of revenue and provides a new way to attract site visitors.

8. Ask for Customer Feedback

One of the best ways to find out if your website promotion is working is to hear from the customers yourself.

Add an easy-to-use contact form to your site. Ask them to review their experience after making a purchase. Interact with customers on social media to get a feel for what they think of the site.

Interacting with your customers and making changes based on what they say also shows them that you care about providing them with the best experience, which is likely to turn them into loyal customers.

9. Use SEO

Search engine optimization is crucial for all businesses, including online dispensaries. If you don’t optimize for search, potential customers won’t even be able to find your site in the first place.

SEO uses formatting, keywords, and other strategies to help customers find your site based on what they type into a search engine. With SEO, your site will be more likely to show up at the top of the search.

10. Use Animated Ads

Online ads are a great way to share the word about your online business. Animated, moving ads are an even better choice.

People spend so much time online that they get desensitized to online images. A moving image, however, is much more likely to get attention.

How Will You Use Website Promotion for Your Business?

With these 10 strategies, you’ll be well on your way to successful website promotion for your online dispensary.

How do you plan to use website promotion to grow your cannabis business? Leave a comment and let us know which strategies you’re going to try!

How to Market Your Cannabis Dispensary

It’s an exciting time in the United States for those involved in the marijuana industry. It’s an equally exciting time for those interested in getting involved in the marijuana industry.

With the legalization of marijuana for both medicinal and recreational use taking place in states like California, Colorado, Vermont, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, opportunities for new businesses such as dispensaries abound.

If you currently own or are looking to start a cannabis dispensary, you might be surprised to know that marketing your business isn’t exactly going to be all that simple. In fact, because marijuana is not legal in all 50 states, businesses in the industry have strict regulations they must follow when marketing them – if they want to continue to operate.

In this post, we’ll offer several helpful tips for marketing your dispensary. Want to know more? Just keep reading.

Familiarize Yourself With the Laws in Your State

With the majority of the products in the U.S., there’s a certain amount of freedom afforded to marketers – and not very many rules or regulations regarding how things can be marketed. For the marijuana industry, however, there are rules.

As you probably already know, marijuana is not yet legal nationwide. Since it’s only legal in a few states (and each state has different laws surrounding it), the laws for marketing your dispensary are going to vary depending on where it’s located. Before you can market your pot-based business, though, you’ll need to know what your state allows.

For more information on what how your state specifically allows marijuana and cannabis products to be marketed, check out this post from Leafly. It provides an idea of some of the rules and regulations throughout each state. From Alaska to Illinois to New Mexico, there’s a ton of information that’s sure to help cannabis dispensary owners no matter where they’re located.

For each state, Leafly even goes as far as to detail what the rules and regulations are regarding things like billboards, signage, print media, internet marketing, and more. However, one thing is banned no matter where the cannabis dispensary (or other marijuana or cannabis-based business) is located: marketing products to minors.

Once you’re familiar with your local marijuana marketing laws, you can begin to create a marketing plan that is in line with both federal and state regulations and laws. How you go about doing that is at your discretion, but do be mindful that failure to comply can mean the end of your cannabis dispensary.

Step It up with SEO

Or Search Engine Optimization. To make it simple, following good SEO practices means that your business will rank more highly on Google when specific keywords or phrases are searched. And the higher you rank, the more people will visit your website, and hopefully, do things like purchase your products…or (at the very least) sign up for your mailing list.

Want to find out where you rank? All you need to do is type in your dispensary’s name into the search bar on Google…and see where it crops up in the results. For example, if you had a prescription for medical marijuana and lived in Lansing, Michigan, you might type Greenwave Cannabis Dispensary in.

Most people on the internet are typically looking for something that’s convenient.

If your result is beyond the first page, it’s time to take your SEO game to the next level. But how? Mastering SEO is becoming increasingly complex as Google’s algorithms continue to change.

There are a few simple changes you can make to your website (and the content that lives on it), though:

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

Keywords are the key to SEO success. Without including them, people who search “cannabis dispensary” on Google won’t find your website.

If you run a cannabis dispensary, focus on what people who are looking for your products would search, and include those keywords and terms on your website. Study up and place them strategically, though, because stuffing your website’s pages with keywords will get you found out by Google in no time.

Meta Tags and Descriptions

“What’s a meta tag?” It might feel like it, but you’re actually not the first person on planet Earth to ever ask that question.

We’ll make it simple for you. Meta tags tell search engines like Google what’s on the page. This description, though, lives in the coding of the page rather than on the page itself.

And just like other online practices (like using hashtags for greater visibility on social media), some meta tags are more effective for SEO success than others.

Imagery

When it comes to your content on the web, including imagery is a must. Why? It draws people to your website and, when you combine it with great content, provides them with an experience that’s engaging in more ways than one. What does this mean for you?

It means that people will spend a longer amount of time on your website, which makes them more likely to convert.

Social Media

If you want your cannabis dispensary to be relevant in 2018 and beyond, it’s essential to maintain a presence on social media. If you’re not ready to go all out at once, you can start by creating a Facebook page and Twitter. Since Instagram’s user base only continues to increase, it’s a good idea to set up an account there eventually, too.

For many businesses, social media is very trial and error. (And sometimes, it’s more error than anything.) You’ll find what works for you in time.

Market Your Cannabis Dispensary Effectively with These Tips

Now that we’ve covered the basics of what you want to focus on when marketing your cannabis dispensary, it’s time for you to take what you’ve learned and put it into practice. With adequate research and a bit of trial and error, you’ll eventually find what practices are most effective for your canna-business.

For more business articles, check out the rest of our blog.