The cannabis industry is booming. From the cultivation of plants to the manufacturing and distribution processes, there are many aspects to consider in running a successful cannabis business.
But what makes your cannabis business tick? What sets it apart from others?
Continue reading to learn more about how to grow your own unique weed empire.
1. What is your business model, and what does it entail?
Each cannabis business model guides activities that focus on success. But it’s crucial to understand the types of businesses operating in the cannabis sector. This means knowing that we have canna-businesses that touch the cannabis plant, and ancillary businesses that don’t.
Plant-touching Cannabis Businesses
Plant-touching cannabis businesses are responsible for handling the cannabis. This can include touching raw cannabis flower, infused flower, and other marijuana products. These businesses must get licensed by the state, or states, in which they operate. They also tend to be under more scrutiny with intense regulations and more compliance-related risk.
These businesses include cultivators, laboratory testing and research, processing and manufacturing, distribution, dispensaries, delivery services, and social consumption operations. Since these businesses handle cannabis plant material, they generally have more risk and are subject to intense regulations.
Ancillary Cannabis Businesses
Ancillary businesses, on the other hand, are not involved in growing or processing cannabis plant material. These operations don’t touch the cannabis plant at all. Instead, these companies focus on areas like financing, legal support, and consulting for cannabusinesses, lab testing services, construction, packaging, tech products, branding design, or marketing campaigns to promote weed products.
These types of cannabis enterprises may not need licensing as they’re less involved in handling marijuana itself. Rather than touching the marijuana plants themselves, ancillary businesses provide services for those who grow cannabis or manufacture and sell weed products.
Once you know what your cannabis business does and how it’s different from others, you can dive deep into your niche and create unique marketing materials that speak to your target audience’s needs.
2. How do you market your cannabis brand to customers?
Regardless of if you operate a plant-touching or ancillary cannabis business, you need to know how to market your cannabis brand. You might need to promote your marijuana and CBD products, or perhaps you run a cannabis CPA firm that handles cannabusinesses’ financials.
For any cannabis company, you need to have a strategy to effectively and creatively market it. Here are some of the basics for how best to market weed products or services.
Consider leveraging as many channels as possible—from traditional social media advertising like Facebook ads to more unique strategies like influencer shout-outs on Instagram. Your customers are online; make sure that they can find you there too!
Marketing doesn’t stop when people buy from you either – follow up with your customers post-purchase by sending them promotional materials every now and then about new items available at your store (even if those items aren’t what they originally bought).
Lastly, make sure to be transparent with your customers about what you should expect when buying cannabis. One of the frustrations that people have with cannabis is not knowing what they’re going to get when they go into a dispensary. Anticipate these questions by including information about your products on your website or in-store and being proactive with any customer service inquiries about product descriptions, pricing, etc.
Everyone has their own preferences for how cannabis should be consumed too – so make sure you offer options! Whether it’s smoking flower joints, using concentrates like vaping oils or waxes, incorporating edibles (like pot brownies), or even cooking with weed as an ingredient; customers want variety and will gravitate towards stores that can provide it.
Marketing Your Cannabis Business Organically on Instagram
As a highly visual marketing platform, Instagram is excellent for marketing cannabis operations. This is especially the case if you’re selling hemp, CBD, or marijuana products. High-quality images and social media-style videos go a long way in promoting businesses in this space.
Instagram is great for cannabis businesses for other reasons, too. For example:
- When it comes to cannabis products, the effects of what customers consume are often primarily felt in the mind and body. Instagram’s image filter tools can help make customers feel more at ease with their product choice by showing the satisfaction the products offer appearing in photos.
- You get a chance to show off all aspects of the life cycle of your business – not just final packaging shots and retail locations where consumers will purchase them. Images showcasing how plants grow over time is another great way to showcase different parts of weed production that many don’t think about or might be unfamiliar with.
- Use Instagram to help tell the story of your brand in a different and interesting way than what customers might find on other social channels like Facebook or Twitter. This can be done by showing video clips taken while you’re at work — documenting how plants grow over time, for example. Daily organic posts and stories are also beneficial for giving consumers a bird’s eye view of your operation, which can establish trust.
- Boosting your customer service through Instagram is also an option. As you establish brand loyalty with images, videos, and insight into your company, you can combine this with excellent in-store and social media customer service to make a lasting impression.
- Brand ambassadors and Instagram influences for marketing marijuana and CBD products can help. However, this strategy can be limited. Measuring your ROI with influence marketing is challenging, but it’s possible. This also encourages more word-of-mouth marketing and user-generated content that has the potential to increase your brand’s reach.
Using Facebook to Reach More People
For cannabis businesses targeting people 45 and older, Facebook is the go-to. Facebook has an older crowd that loves authoritative, educational content. Plus, if you’re planning to market on Instagram, Facebook owns it. So the similarities between these platforms and how they easily integrate with one another can be useful.
Facebook and Instagram both offer tools for e-commerce. So if you sell products, it’s best to have business accounts set up for each of these platforms.
Facebook has a shopping template that connects to e-commerce sites, too. This transforms your business’s Facebook page into a shopping platform, encouraging potential customers to shop cannabis and CBD products on your Facebook page and posts.
One of the best tools on Facebook for cannabis businesses is the Facebook Messenger Chatbot. This is how many dispensaries market and provide top-tier customer service.
Since your customers likely have plenty of questions about your products, you can customize your Chatbot on Facebook to answer some of the most common questions fast. By providing quick automated responses with a chatbot, you’re enhancing the customer experience. And this drives customer purchase decisions.
Facebook videos, Facebook Live, and Facebook stories also come in handy. Video content is easy to consume, and just like with Instagram, you can include various video styles and lengths to engage with your audience.
Search Engine Optimization for Cannabis Business Marketing
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is one of the best organic marketing techniques for cannabusinesses. This strategy is a long-term play that typically takes six to 12 months. However, some cannabis business operators observe results in as few as three months.
SEO is about making your business visible on the search engine for relevant keywords. A good SEO strategy will ensure that when a person types in a keyword, your business appears for it.
This strategy includes things such as content creation, website optimization (including meta tags and keywords), ranking tracking, and pay-per-click. It’s important to note that SEO is not a one-time task: it requires ongoing monitoring of new developments in Google Trends, seasonal keyword trends, changes in customer behavior from year to year. So it’s essential to keep track of these metrics.
Another important aspect of SEO is that it needs to be paired with off-page efforts. These include things like link building, social media marketing, and email campaigns.
The right strategy will help ensure you’re optimizing for the long term – not just today’s metrics or search engine results page (SERP) rankings. And as your website gains more authority with high-quality, relevant content, your website will rank higher in search engines.
Using SEO to market a cannabis company typically involves the following:
- Performing a comprehensive SEO audit of your website
- Checking over the SEO audit report to analyze errors and omissions that are impacting search engine optimization and Google indexing
- Preparing a baseline keyword rankings report to examine what your website ranks for and what search query keywords it targets
- Fixing priority errors and omissions revealed in the report and creating a new SEO and keyword strategy, which should include on-page copy, image optimization, and back-end metadata.
- Conducting a new keyword rankings report to determine where your site ranks following SEO strategy implementation, month after month.
Blogging for your Cannabis Business
Populating your website with weekly SEO-optimized blog content goes hand-in-hand with SEO. This is how you can target more keywords, gain authority, and gain traffic from search engines.
While posting on your site is beneficial, it’s also ideal to do guest posts on relevant blogs. To do this, find blogs in your niche that are higher ranked and more authoritative than yours. This is a good way to get high-quality backlinks from other sites with relevant content.
Guest posts can also increase the number of people who visit your site through social media shares or blog links on a third-party site. Many websites accept guest posts, and this can be a cost-effective way to promote your blog, especially if you or someone you work with is an expert in the cannabis space.
3. What are the benefits of using your cannabusiness’s products or services over other competitors?
Why should someone choose your business over the competition? Set yourself apart in your niche by highlighting the benefits of your products or service.
This can be done in a variety of ways and is often highly individual based on what you offer. Here are some ideas:
- Provide consumers with an exclusive product that people cannot get at other companies. For example, if you specialize in tinctures, list how easy your tinctures are to use, or perhaps explain the effects.
- Offer additional services that you provide with your products – for example, if you offer cannabis seeds, highlight the fact that they are organic and grow into particularly potent plants when grown indoors.
- Provide excellent customer service to make sure people feel appreciated when they order from your company. This could be as simple as adding personalized thank you cards to orders or following up with customers to make sure they are happy.
4. Who are the people behind the scenes that make up your cannacompany’s team?
Your team is your company’s lifeblood. Consumers want to see who’s creating your products, providing services, and keeping the business operating. This also helps to improve business trust.
Here’s what you can include on your website (and share to your social media accounts):
- Include a customer testimonial page that features your team. People like to see what other customers have said about your company and the products/services it offers.
- Write an “about us” section of the blog where you can highlight all of your employees, as well as their skill sets and interests outside work. This will help people get to know who they’re buying from on a more personal level.
- Include your team’s story on the “about us” section of your site, and use it to tell potential customers about how you got started. If there is a particular struggle or obstacle that led to the founding of your company, share what happened so other people can learn from it.
Your cannacompany may be one person strong with an idea for something new in cannabis. Or it could have three partners who all bring different skills together into their business venture – determine which type you are, and show potential customers who you are!
