How to market your dispensary

Have you tried these dispensary marketing ideas?

Marketing isn’t typically considered a fun thing for businesses to do. A bad marketing plan can eat into your dispensary profits, but only if you choose temporary solutions. Certain websites require monthly fees to stay on the top of their listings and can increase their cost without warning. Campaigns in local newspapers can lead to a burst of traffic, but again, they require a continual investment to reap the rewards.

If you want to continually increase your reach, website traffic, and customer base, consider the following marijuana dispensary marketing strategies.

Reach your customers through dispensary content marketing

It’s easy to forget how much reach you have through your own website. Content marketing isn’t just about posting random blogs, videos, and pages—it’s about creating targeted content that reaches your most profitable customers or expands customer bases you’ve wanted to build. Creating content your users can actually use is a cornerstone of marijuana dispensary search engine optimization.

We’re going to walk you through the beginning steps of targeted cannabis content creation.

Step 1: Determine who you want to target

You’ll probably want to look at your overall sales figures by product category and customer demographics, but you may already have a hunch about who you want to target. The demo you’d target to increase edible sales is different than the demo you’d choose to improve brand awareness.

Your goal determines your target demographic.

Let’s consider 30 – 49-year-old cannabis consumers for our example.

According to Statistica, this group makes up 10% of the US population.

So we’ll dig deeper.

According to headset.io, Flower is most popular with Gen X followed by vapor pens and pre-rolls. If you want to reach this demographic, then you’ll want to investigate how, why, and when they choose to use each and determine which products you’ll want to build out content for based on your dispensaries potential ROI or lack thereof.

Step 2: Identify your content gaps

There are a wide range of potential content options for a dispensary. You can add new pages, blogs, create videos or even a podcast.

Continuing on the 30 – 49 year old track,

The NY Times reported Gen X (35 – 49 year old’s) as spending more time on social media than any other demographic group.

According to the contently.com, Gen X shares images and videos in nearly equal measure, values blog articles above other written or visual content, and prefers content that is entertainment related followed by healthy living, world news, and technology. Their social platform of choice? None other than Facebook.

What does that mean for your strategy?

If you want to target this group, you’ll want to post blogs that contain videos and images which you’ll then share on your Facebook page.

That covers your content types and includes the most shared content type among this demographic.

Step 3: Identify content topics and start creating

How do you figure out what to post? While, when it comes to cannabis you certainly want to err on the side of caution regarding anything that might violate federal laws.

You can see that healthy living, entertainment, and world news are at the top of the preference list for this age group.

Unless that world news is cannabis-related, you can skip it and go straight to technology.

Healthy living content topics for our dispensary:

We aren’t giving away the farm here, so you’ll need to do your own research to determine topics of interest. When it comes to healthy living and cannabis you’ll want to take note of:

• Trending cannabis health topics
• Activities and cannabis
• Health studies and cannabis
• Any local events, new stories, or information that crosses over into these categories

If you do choose to write about health topics, just don’t forget to cite all of your sources and not to spread any misinformation. A recent Google update penalized lifestyle websites for false claims, and this carried over into the cannabis sector.

Why utilize content marketing?

This is one of the best ways to help your dispensary SEO efforts. Traffic and dispensary profit gains from content marketing typically increase over time instead of dissipating because all of your new content bolsters your website as a whole. Even if the content isn’t localized, the worldwide traffic boost will also increase your local relevance in areas like maps and for specific demographics like medical marijuana when you post niche relevant information.