While the cannabis industry continues with its vertiginous climb, many cannabis business owners are looking for more efficient and scale enterprises.
If you want to be a part of the cannabis market, especially B2B companies, you must put a solid cannabis marketing plan. Although cannabis is undoubtedly a great investment market, it has many restrictions, licensing, and guidelines you have to follow to do it right.
Here we give you a list of what to do to market cannabis correctly from the get-go.
Know What you Have and What You Don’t
The first important question you should ask yourself when building a cannabis business is, how prepared am I?
To build a marketing strategy, you need to have a foundation to lay it upon. These are some must before even starting to think about marketing.
Set up a website
Today, in the post-pandemic world, digital presence is a must. If you don’t have a website, now is the time to build one. Do not budget on hosting because this will determine your website’s space. If you have a website, assess if it reflects what your brand is today, if it is usable on all devices, and has Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in place. This will ensure that people find your website when searching for the solutions/products or services you offer.
Create Capture Leads
The first step of selling or showing anything is bringing visitors to your place; the second is keeping them in it once they arrive. You have to capture their attention immediately, and you also need to capture their information. If you don’t, they could leave without you knowing they were there in the first place.
To avoid this from happening, have a relevant and impactful call-to-action statement throughout your site. These Calls to Action should encourage visitors to take the next step they want in your buyer or user funnel. That could be spending more time on the page or buying something. No matter what it is, you have to provide valuable content or services, so much that they will want to leave their information for you to use afterward.
Organize Everything
After you engage your audience and get them to leave you your info, buy your product, etc., you should have a tool or system that organizes their information so that, in the future, you can reconnect with them and restart their buyer journey.
These three steps will be the foundations for your marketing strategy. With them in place, your team is prepared to bring and understand new leads and guide them in their buyer journey towards making the decision you want.
Create a Funnel Strategy
A marketing funnel describes your customer’s journey with you from the initial stages when someone learns about your business to the purchasing stage. Having a sound funnel marketing strategy is key to getting leads and sales.
One of the best ways to ensure your funnel strategy is adequate is using content marketing. Content marketing can boost your SEO, create new leads and establish your authority within your industry.
What Content marketing does is that it uses engaging content (emails, copies, news, blogs, or anything written on your website or coming from your business) to create value for your buyers. The best way to approach content marketing is to be strategic. That means analyzing your funnel starting at its bottom and working your way up to the top to make sure you are creating relevant, timely, accurate content aimed at prospects at each stage of the funnel.
Methods for Cannabis Content Marketing
Blogging
Blogging is always a good option because, although it is a competitive field, both vendors and consumers want to find out more about the industry. Set up a periodic and sophisticated blog where your audiences can find the information you want to share with them. This is also a good strategy because having tailor-made content will put you in a good spot with internet crawlers that determine your organic positioning in an online search.
Remember, the key to creating quality content is to know your market and produce engaging, relevant blogs. This is why defining your target audience is key.
Besides having a cannabis-oriented blog, make sure you know how you will distribute it: SMS, email, social media. Pick one channel or many. For a cannabis blog SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is very important because it will allow you to use certain terms, be thoughtful about your length and optimize your headers so that you are getting the message to cannabis enthusiasts and entrepreneurs.
Make Videos
Marketing Charts published a study that shows that the average person watches 100 minutes of video content per day. That is a lot of time, which makes video content a great opportunity for your cannabis brand to convey its message to its audiences.
Since cannabis is a developing business, using different content strategies, like video, is a must. Although producing video content can sometimes be expensive or more time-consuming, it can lead to a very high ROI (Return on Investment). The most viewed content, for any business, are how-to´s and product-related so, think about what you want to highlight from your cannabis operation and make it a video.
Podcasts
Having a podcast is overlooked in cannabis marketing. However, it is one of the best content channels to share the stories and people behind products and brands. If you are constant with your podcasting production, you can get a faithful audience that will come to you for info.
A tip that can help your cannabis podcast is for it not to be overprepared. Podcasts are all about intimacy, so don’t overdo it and keep it candid.
Social Media
Social media posting is an all-business must. With that said, cannabis businesses can benefit even more from good social media posting because, depending on the social media platform, you can show different parts of your brand, products, and services. For example, on Instagram, focus on visual content. Be aware that each social media platform has different cannabis-related policies.
Email, Email, Email
Use an email content strategy to retain current customers and to follow up leads of your cannabis business. Build a strong clientele list and consider your audience carefully, curate it. For example, are the recipients experienced cannabis users or first timers? Do you sell medical or recreational cannabis? Ask yourself these questions because the answers will determine who you are writing to.
Also, know what you want to convey with each email. Is it a sales pitch? Is it an advertisement for new cannabis products are you offering a promotion for email subscribers? This will let you define and accomplish your cannabis business goals in advance.
Funnel Stages
Bottom of the funnel
Sometimes marketers start at the top of the funnel because they want to focus on the information that can bring people to the site. However, if you don’t create content for the bottom of the funnel, it is unlikely that you will get the conversions (actions that you want your users to do on your page) you want. The best way to create this content is to visit your website as your buyer persona. Ask the questions they would ask: Does the website have the content your target needs to make the decisions you want? Information (e.g., pricing info, place info, product info) must be on your website because today’s buyers prefer to find information online before engaging with a selling person. So make it easy and available.
For a cannabis business defining its buyer persona is key, because it will define each strategy from that point forward. When defining your buyer persona remember there are many different types of cannabis consumers. The best way to navigate such a diverse world of consumers is to create different buyer personas which will represent your ideal customers.
Here are 9 possible cannabis buyer personas, they will have to be edited by your marketing team, created by New Frontier Data that can help you start understanding who your audience is.
Middle of the funnel
When users are already on your site, what do you offer them? For this funnel stage, you want to have much content to help your users get the info they need and compare you with other vendors. Make sure your information is as specific and accurate as possible so that they choose you. This means testimonials, clear buying links, product descriptions, among others.
Top of the funnel
When you have the content to bring leads into the funnel and convert them into customers (which should always be your aim), you should focus on getting them to visit and stay on your site continuously. Take into account the questions buyers are making within your industry. Use tools like google trends or ask to find such questions and have a crucial marketing strategist to channel these questions into content that will speak to your users and draw them to you: this can include blogs, emails, social media copies, or whatever channel you want to use. Just think, always, about what information is valuable for them.
Have a Social Media Presence
The best way to amplify your cannabis business message is to get the news out there. That means having your content in places your prospects care about and see regularly. That’s why it is essential you do a benchmark and a business analysis that tells you where your buyers are so that you can build a cannabis social media marketing strategy,
Social media is critical to any business because it is an easy and broad platform to show what you sell. However, business vendors must be aware that sometimes they can get banned, so you have to be careful with the content you share. Many cannabis brands choose not to have so many paid posts on social media sites, so, in this case, you have to get the best of your organic strategy; we recommend you have a social media presence in
Cannabis businesses can use Facebook to build a fan page, promote customer service and keep their buyers updated on the latest news and trends from the industry.
Being a 100 percent visual network is beneficial for brand selling and building high-value audiences.
Twitter is good for networking, exchanging ideas, and contacting industry leaders that are big influencers. This includes journalists, CEOs, and influencers.
This business network is ideal for making polls and targeting a business-oriented audience.
Tik-Tok
This relatively new social media channel targets younger audiences with less formal content.
When posting online, in any social media channel, the critical thing is that being in the cannabusiness, you should educate your users and tell them as much about the industry as possible. Think about what they care about and create posts that speak to them—impactful, relevant, creative, including links, graphics, and always, what you are selling.
For example, if you have a cannabis brand you can make educational videos about topics like medical cards, strains, new products, and edibles. Never forget tik tok is about fun, so your content will do better if it has a funny side to it. Also consider that your videos will be removed if they include words and hashtags associated with cannabis, To avoid this, add emojis to the hashtags or use different spelling for traditional cannabis terms like weed.
When you start to post, make sure to have metrics. To test your posts so that you know how to spend your time and resources.
Create an Email Strategy
Email marketing is everything. Although many deem it as an old marketing strategy, it still works. It is a potent tool to target audiences and a great way of delivering messages to segmented audiences.
The first step you should take is to build an email list. Such a list must be segmented to attract potential customers and have a newsletter that can be sent monthly.
Once you have an email list, create your email strategy. The strategy should consider what the emails will be about, how you will segment, and how your message will change depending on each prospect.
Be in the Media
The cannabis industry is booming and relatively new, but still, a media presence is important because it will put you in front of new customers. It is an aggressive growth strategy in which being published in a traditional or niche media outlet can bring you a lot of new audiences.
How to get on the media? By attending trade shows, like Bizcann Expo, and events where you can network with journalists and create top-notch content with a unique point of view that interests them.