If you run a cannabis dispensary, you need to market it like any other business. With cannabis slowly becoming legal or decriminalized throughout the United States, a dispensary is a legitimate, legal business. So it follows that it needs to know how to market like one.
Marketing is an important part of running any business. It’s the way that companies let their customers know where their product is and convince them that they need it.
In the 2020s, digital marketing is a must. Your customers are online — so you need to go there, too. This means learning the basics of dispensary SEO, or search engine optimization.
This is true for any business, but it’s especially true for dispensaries. Cannabis sales are quickly moving online.
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Why is the Future of Cannabis Sales Online?
Until the 2010s, laws in the United States made it tricky — if not impossible — to ship cannabis through the mail. This meant that online sales weren’t possible. However, this has changed, and online cannabis retail has begun to flourish.
In 2019, online cannabis sales had hit $15 billion. And that is only expected to continue growing, with projections of $43 billion by 2024.
With more people preferring to shop online and cannabis becoming legal in more states, online sales are a must for any dispensary.
How Do You Market Your Dispensary Online?
When you start online sales for your dispensary, you will need to prove that everything about your company is above-board, legally speaking. Once you’ve done that, effective online sales are all about a few things.
So what are the most important factors of effective online sales?
- Good dispensary SEO
- Social media marketing
- User-friendliness/organization
Dispensary SEO
SEO or search engine optimization is a basic strategy for digital marketing. Essentially, it’s all about getting your website to come up organically in the top few results in a given search engine.
This is done through the effective use of keywords appearing in your content and studying Google analytics. Anyone can learn basic SEO. But if you’re unsure about it, you can always outsource to a digital marketing company or a freelance writer. These people are experts at making websites easy to find on a search engine. They may advise you to create a blog and post regular blog content featuring relevant keywords and terms people are searching for when looking for a dispensary, which can help boost your rankings in the search engines.
Social Media Marketing
If you think that social media marketing isn’t effective, think again. Simply put, your business needs to be where your customers are. In this day and age, that means social media.
About 59 percent of the world population uses some form of social media. Those numbers are even higher for certain sites like Facebook.
Social media marketing makes it easy to build a targeted, custom client base. You can even decide how easy or complex you want it to be. Maybe you want a simple business page. Maybe you want to invest in some targeted ads.
Regardless, any business needs to be on social media, engaging its audience in meaningful content, and leading them back to its website.
User Friendliness and Organization
The last thing you need to increase your online sales is pretty simple. Your website and digital marketing campaigns need to be easy to use and well-organized. If it’s not, customers simply won’t use it.
One good way to handle this is by putting together a dispensary operations manual or standard operating procedure. This applies to all areas of your business, but it’s relevant for digital marketing, too.
A standard operating procedure outlines all the tasks and goals of each member of your team and each part of your business. It helps everyone know exactly what they’re expected to do.
Since social media marketing is a consistent and ongoing task, you can bet that it needs organization, too. For online sales, this combines marketing with customer service. It involves everything from fixing website issues to fielding customer complaints, making social media posts, and more.
Conclusion
Increasing online sales for your dispensary doesn’t have to be hard, but it is a coordinated effort. To do it effectively, you’ll need to understand dispensary SEO and social media marketing. But when it is done well, it is the best possible way to get more customers through your digital door.
