Cannabis legalization has brought on a new wave of business opportunities. Whether your target customers are recreational or medicinal users, they currently enjoy much easier access to marijuana than they would have 10 or 20 years ago.
This is excellent news for those in the cannabis business. However, many challenges remain for entrepreneurs in this rapidly growing space.
Due to restrictions set out by companies like Facebook, not all digital marketing is available if you sell cannabis products. With the ever-growing importance of digital marketing, this situation is less than ideal.
Here are the five best ways to market your cannabis products online.
1. Guest Posting
Guest posting is a fantastic way to broadcast to a broad audience if your online presence isn’t significant yet. By contributing a blog post for an established publication, you’re accessing a ready-made customer base.
The best way to find excellent guest-posting opportunities is to reach out to many different bloggers and publications in the cannabis space. Not all of them will be interested in working with you, and that’s fine. If you persist, opportunities will arise.
As you start guest posting, more guest posting gigs will begin to present themselves. If you develop a reputation as a creator of quality content, more established names in the cannabis industry will want to work with you.
Many guest posters leave links to their online store in their posts. A certain percentage of your readers will, therefore, end up buying a product from your site.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing has become a huge deal in the online marketing community in recent years.
Mostly, content marketing does what you’d expect; markets your business with content. Whether it’s a blog post, online video, or social media update, the idea is to post something that will draw people to your site and encourage them to buy from you.
This approach works best when you couple it with SEO practices. These help your posts to rank more favorably on search engines like Google so that people will be more likely to end up seeing the content you produce.
As this study outlines, content marketing is one of the best ways to get the market to trust your brand.
There are plenty of examples of effective content marketing strategies in the cannabis industry. High-Supplies is a leader in the cannabis industry in 2024, and one of the reasons is its sharp, relatable, and engaging marketing content.
3. Cannabis Directories
As cannabis has become easier to access legally in more U.S. States, cannabis directories have become more popular. These sites essentially act as a sort of online Yellow Pages for cannabis dispensaries and related businesses.
Making your presence felt in cannabis directories is a great way to expand your reach. When people from, say, Sacramento want to buy weed, they’ll search “where to get weed in Sacramento” on Google, and almost all of the results on the first page will be for directory websites.
Directories don’t even have to be cannabis-specific. General-purpose review sites like Yelp also have information on weed dispensaries and other cannabis-related retail stores.
If you look up directories and see that your business is not listed, don’t panic. Consider reaching out to the directory operators and telling them about your business and what you offer.
4. Influencer Marketing
Social media influencing is one of the newest careers around. Before they were real marketing platforms (especially Instagram), it wasn’t possible to build a career in endorsement by yourself. Unless you were already famous through sport, music, or other publicly visible careers, this profession would not have been open.
However, anyone can build their audience online and start leveraging it to charge for marketing services. Fitness athletes, makeup artists, musicians, chefs, and creators from many other disciplines have developed this kind of success with nothing more than hard work and an internet connection.
The cannabis industry has its share of influencers, too. Well-known creators review strains, smoking apparatuses, and other cannabis-related products.
If you can persuade a well-regarded influencer to plug or review your product, your sales could get a considerable boost overnight. What’s great about this strategy is its cost; many influencers will agree to review products in return for free samples, meaning that this kind of exposure might not cost you any money.
5. Email Marketing
The email campaign is perhaps the most effective outbound marketing tool. Outbound marketing is any marketing approach that requires you to pursue leads actively. In contrast, inbound marketing involves the leads coming to you (an SEO blog is an example of an inbound marketing tactic).
Outbound marketing is generally less popular than inbound marketing. This is because it allows marketers to target more leads with every piece of content.
However, email is one of the most scalable outbound marketing tools around. You can send the same email to as many recipients as you like once you write it, making it far more efficient than something like a cold call.
Grow Your Cannabis Enterprise With Digital Marketing in 2024
The cannabis industry is not without its pitfalls these days. While legalization has created huge new markets for cannabis products, the level of competition in the area has made it difficult for newcomers to do well.
The best way to stand out as a cannabis business in 2024 is to invest in a solid digital marketing campaign. If you can create a trustworthy brand across multiple channels in the online space, you’ll build up a loyal customer base in no time.
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