Calling for delivery is somewhat outdated now that seemingly every person has a smart phone, tablet, or mobile device. Most companies that deliver now utilize a customer service platform via their website. 420 Web Pros can implement a platform to broaden your collective’s outreach to a new patient base.

Some patients will always prefer to see a budtender pick their desired strain out of a Mason jar, just like how some people prefer to see their sandwich made in front of them at a sub shop. It can be a chore, however, for patients with debilitating diseases to make it to a collective’s brick and mortar location, which is where the online customer service aspect can significantly boost patient outreach.

There are already several medical marijuana websites that feature medicine menu’s for each collective, so it’s quite easy to utilize a menu and cart feature on your own website where patients can order their medicine and make their donations. The online ordering and delivery service is also appealing to patients who have safety concerns about traveling with their medicine.

As a collective, if you’re not quite ready to make that jump into providing an online ordering system then another online customer service option is to provide a form for patient online verification.

Waiting in line is something that very few people enjoy. Sometimes it feels like you’re just moving from one line to the other as you go from place to place, whether it’s in traffic, at the grocery store, and maybe even in your own house to use the shower in the morning. To eliminate the waiting process in at least one aspect of your patient’s lives try offering an online verification process to new patients.

420 Web Pros can create a designated area on your collective’s website for prospective members. The same membership application that new patients would fill out in person could also be provided on the website. The patient could then e-mail or fax a completed copy of the application, along with their doctor’s referral, and identification card. Before the patient arrives to the collective’s location, the information provided on the documents could be verified. Once the patient arrives all they have to do is show their identification card, as long as their documents were verified, and their wait time to enter the showroom is cut down significantly.

Quality customer service is what keeps patients returning, and 420 Web Pros can make your site as friendly as possible for that outcome.

In the medicinal marijuana field, April 20, aka 4/20 is THE holiday for the community. We at 420 Web Pros obviously take the holiday seriously considering the number is in the title of our company. With that in mind, if you own a collective we hope you have also put proper preparation into the holiday?

4/20 is likely to be the busiest day of the year for your collective, but it will also be the busiest day of the year for all collectives. There are more discretionary donations to be made on 4/20 than on any other day of the year. The retail industry has Black Friday where more discretionary income is spent on that day than on any other day in the year. That is a holiday for the retail industry, and retail businesses acknowledge that. Target competes with Best Buy, which competes with Wal-Mart, which competes with Macy’s, which competes with other large chain stores. They all may not be selling the same products, but they’re all competing for the same dollars. That is precisely why they all try to top one another with special deals on Black Friday. The medicinal marijuana field on 4/20 is infinitely more competitive on its holiday, because it’s a holiday specific to the needs of one group.

Every collective will be trying to set it apart from other collectives by offering specials on 4/20 like free gifts with a minimum donation and perhaps free food when you enter the showroom. That is good and all, but if you really want to provide a memorable experience for your patients then try thinking outside the box.

Here are a few unique ideas to make 4/20 the most rewarding day of the year for your collective and for your patients.

• Extend your collective’s hours. You remember what it was like to be a kid on Christmas morning. You couldn’t wait to open presents and pull your stockings off the chimney. That was the one-day during the year that you woke up before the sun and you probably even woke up your parents from bed to get the day’s festivities started. Patients start celebrating the holiday early, which means you should too.
• Offer unannounced promotions. Most collectives have taken the time to place ads on the Internet and in magazines about what free gifts will be offered. Surprises, however, often have a long lasting positive impact on the likelihood that a patient will return, in the off chance of getting another unannounced gift. One example for 4/20 would be to give a special gift to the fourth, twentieth, and if you’re really lucky, the four hundred twentieth patient of the day.
• Don’t forget about 4/19 and 4/21. Christmas has Christmas Eve. In the Mexican culture, All Saints Day is celebrated the day after Halloween. For 4/20, why not offer some specials on 4/19 and/or 4/21?

If you own and operate collective it is just as important to have a feel for who your patients are, so that you can tailor your website toward their needs. One factor to consider is the location of where you are based. Since locals are most likely going to be the majority of your patients, are you located in an area with a heavy population that is above 50 years old or under 50 years old? That type of knowledge should affect how you disseminate information on your website. Seniors don’t frequent websites as often as younger individuals. But when they do, information should be easily accessible, since they do not spend as much time on the Internet and probably are not as accustomed to navigating a busy website.

The way information is distributed should also be considered. Younger people will be more apt to click on a video, read a blog, listen to a podcast, or be stimulated by a picture. They will also be more likely to utilize social media like Twitter and Facebook, so your collective should have a presence on those platforms, which link to your website.

Knowing your loyal market is important, but as a business owner you likely continually want to tap into untapped markets. That is especially true of the medical marijuana field, since it is ever growing with new patients, but it is important not to exclude your loyal market.

One factor that can exclude your loyal market is the language you use while trying to pursue a new market. If your loyal market is people later on in life it would not be a good idea to start using slang and jargon tailored toward garnering a younger audience. Your loyal market could be turned off by a perceived new direction that you are heading in, which could cause them to search for a collective that better speaks their language.

420 Web Pros is well versed in tailoring content toward specific markets because you certainly don’t want to place an erectile dysfunction ad in Women’s magazines or advertise perfume in the middle of an athletic event. We can also help diagnose your loyal market, along with coming up with some web strategies to garner new markets without excluding who is loyal to you already.

One of the biggest misconceptions about having a website is that it is simply enough just to have one. The only problem is that just like Best Buy and Target, your business is ever changing. Information that you provided on your website during its initial launch can become outdated over time as you change hours of operation, offer new services and products, or even move locations. Having an outdated website can be just as detrimental to your business as not even having a website.

For example, say your website provides a link to a MySpace page, but doesn’t provide a link to a Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube page. That link to an old MySpace page may tell visitors to your website that you don’t update your web presence with the creation of newer forms of social media. That lack of a web presence can have a direct effect on foot traffic to your collective.

Another common misconception is that it is difficult to maintain an informative website, but we at 420 Web Pros can design an efficient Content Management System so your website can maintain a fresh perspective. A CMS allows you to create sub-sections throughout the skeleton of your website in an easily manageable way.

An effective way to keep patrons updated while utilizing a CMS is with the use of a blog. You can provide news and updates directly from your website, rather than utilizing a blog host like Blogger or Tumblr, which will have a different look and feel than your website. Plus, having your blog directly on your website keeps all the information in one place.

420 Web Pros also understands that not everyone is web savvy, so we can design a CMS tailored toward your needs, large and small, and explain it in a user-friendly manner.

Start with ditching your personal e-mail account in favor of an official, more identifiable account. For example, “notification@420webpros.com” just let your customers know about a brand new marijuana strain that helps with certain types of anxiety. They see it ping on their phones while out shopping or at the workplace with your collective’s name on it, and know right away it’s not their cousin Keith with the Phish tattoo. In other words, it gives your cannabis collective a distinct space in people’s inboxes.

420 Web Pros understands that sometimes that same cousin Keith went on a Facebook tagging spree, so now your synched e-mail account is flooded with Facebook notifications. Where is your “notification@420webpros.com” e-mail? Buried? Like any notable publication, your newsletters and notifications should be on time and expected in a regular fashion. We can make your virtual collective’s e-mails look and feel like daily, weekly, or quarterly-released publications as if they were thrown right onto their doorstep by the paperboy (also, sadly, cousin Keith).

Tips: Keep a well-balanced list of e-mails that you regularly send to. Any dead e-mails from unresponsive clients needs to be deleted in order to not be considered spam.

Include sign-up forms on your virtual collective’s website so customers can be aware of your regular notifications instead of scrolling by a random “@420webpros.com” e-mail strewn about your site.

Include incentives for signing up to the newsletter such as give-aways, prizes, or coupons redeemable at your medical marijuana collective.

Your product deserves a regular, consistently updated web service that keeps customers interested and potential customers curious about what your virtual collective has to offer. With a reliable and well-designed email campaign, you can let your members know they’re part of what you’ve built.

You wouldn’t be too far off in saying that ad applies to most, if not all of your recent Google searches with even the slightest hint of vagueness. Sure, you’ll probably get the typical unnerving site or two when looking up “vintage hats” or “dry wall repair,” but do you want your online medical marijuana store or virtual online collective popping up the 25 recent midnight showings of “Cheech and Chong’s Up In Smoke” or “My Aunt Edna’s Totally Rad Pot Banana Nut Bread Recipe?” Certainly, that’s not the world the medical marijuana community lives in. It is professional, efficient and ready to serve its medical marijuana patients with the utmost respect and care. With proper the proper tools, Search Overload Syndrome is a thing of fiction.

Nothing related to Kevin Costner has ever rang as true as this: “If you build it, they will come.”

Medical Marijuana SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the highly-strategic practice – excuse me – art of employing phrases and keywords in your website in order to gain the right amount of awareness and specificity the medical cannabis community needs to steer their Google boats in your virtual collective’s direction. At 420 Web Pros, we’ve mastered this art in order to deliver the most advantageous starting point for your medical marijuana marketing campaign. Building your collective with the right tools will not only save your clientele hours from old clips of “Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle,” but give them a seamless experience from using their favorite search engine or social network to finding your virtual collective.

But where does medical marijuana SEO fit into the rest of my campaign? And, please, spare the Costner references.

At 420 Web Pros, we’ve honed, with Batman-like efficiency, the skills to push your online marijuana marketing campaign to its fullest potential. Instead of smoke bombs, Batarangs, and dental floss (okay, maybe dental floss), our utility belt is equipped with such things as impeccable web and print design, a full understanding of point of sale integration, a passion for professional branding and marketing and effective copywriting as it pertains to the ever-growing and ultra-booming medical marijuana industry.

Holy web presence, Batman!

Online Ordering is the best way for a collective or delivery service to ensure the privacy and discretion of it's members!

When  you buy  a bottle of wine the clerk puts it in a paper bag, if you’re buying an adult magazine it comes in a black plastic bag. When you add or remove something from your safe deposit box you are escorted into a secure room with no windows or cameras and left alone to do your business. Catholics make confessions in a small, secluded box hidden away from the congregation and contracts are negotiated in board rooms behind closed doors. In our every day life we take lots of measures to ensure privacy and safety when going about our business, but for some reason the status quo of acquiring medicine is to wait in a line with a bunch of strangers, listening to every word spoken between patient and caregiver and watching anxiously as the entire transaction takes place. It seems backwards that something so private should be such public spectacle but this is simply the way medicine has functioned in the US for decades and the medical marijuana community seems to follow largely the same behavior. But where pharmacies and hospitals would still have you wait in line, spouting your ails and treatments aloud for any passerby to overhear, the medical marijuana community and medical marijuana delivery service can provide a safe and discreet alternative that traditional medicine cannot: online ordering.

Any collective operating a medical marijuana delivery service or dispensary knows that patients appreciate discretion and the more steps an organization takes to protect it’s member’s privacy, the more likely that group is to have a strong and loyal membership. The need for privacy and safe, secure transactions is something that our clients have expressed to us again and again and was ultimately the need that drove us to create our Virtual Online Collective complete with online ordering. This solution provides collectives with the next generation in safety and security for it’s members, allowing for a level of privacy and discretion unsurpassed in the medical and caregiving industries. When members have the convenience to log in to a secure website and place their orders over an encrypted data stream directly to the collective, and have it delivered discreetly to them at home they know that they are being taken care of and that their privacy is as important to the collective as it is to the them. This is what sets great organizations apart from your run of the mill collectives; paying attention to the details that ensure the privacy and security of your members is protected as much as possible.

In a community that is overrun with opportunistic groups simply trying to find a way to make money and scam the system, the strength of a collective is directly tied to the confidence and trust of it’s members. A healthy and prosperous collective is one that goes to great lengths to assure it’s members that it is serious about privacy and the service it can provide. This is represented in a number of ways such as the quality of the dispensary, the medicine it offers and the solutions it provides to it’s members. Additionally, one of the most important ways that a collective can promote confidence among it’s patients and project an air of legitimacy is to create a cohesive branding strategy and carry it across every aspect of the collective. The labeling should match the logo, the signage should match the labeling, the decor should compliment the signage and it should all tie together with a crisp, modern website that keeps members informed and up to date with everything happening at the collective. If the collective is operating a delivery service to capitalize on the convenience and discretion afforded by taking the medicine directly to the patients, they should absolutely give their members the ability to discreetly place their orders online and leverage the unmatched safety and security of the internet. With cell phone hacking, the Patriot Act and a number of other major ways in which phones are no longer safe, an encrypted data stream sent directly from the patient’s computer to the collective is the 21st century solution to the privacy concerns of compassionate caregivers and patients alike.

As the medical marijuana community and industries continue to grow and expand, the need of medical marijuana collectives and delivery services to reassure their members and protect their privacy grows on a daily basis. There are countless reasons why patients would want to have their personal and medical information kept secure and until now collectives didn’t have a great deal of options when it came to providing discretion for members. Thankfully, the days of having no other choice but to walk in to a brightly colored building and wait in line with a bunch of other patients while acquiring medicine have come to an end. Secure online ordering gives collectives and delivery services the strength and confidence to guarantee their patient’s discretion and give them an advantage over their competition. The internet has made possible a new level of privacy and convenience never before realized among the medical marijuana community and those rushing to adopt these new technologies are the ones who will ensure the prosperity of their organization for years to come!

If you want to improve your visibility among people's search results, you have to engage the search engines. It takes time and a strategy, but the payoff can be huge!

Every industry has it’s own unique set of trends and mores, few more so than the Medical Marijuana Industry. In a marketplace that has become overrun with competition it can be difficult to get your message out or draw attention to your organization.  Having a great looking website is a good start, but the coolest website in the world won’t do much for you if noone sees it. If you’re even thinking about taking your 420 organization online, you better have a solid medical marijuana SEO strategy to make it worth your time. If you haven’t considered marijuana marketing, now is the best time to get started!

Maybe you haven’t thought much about what it means, perhaps you haven’t thought about it at all but medical marijuana online marketing is every bit as important for an organization’s web presence as it’s website or it’s Facebook account.  Every time you do a search on Google, Bing or Yahoo you get millions upon millions of search results in a fraction of a second.  Most people will not look past the first page of results, and those that do will likely never go past five or six pages worth of results before getting discouraged and trying a new search.  So even if you’re website is 100% relative to a person’s search query, if you come up on page 13 or 250 or 10,000 nobody is ever going to find you.  If you want to be found, you’ve got to get in to those first few pages.  If you want to be a big player, you’ve got to get on page one. In order to do so you’ve got to identify the search terms that are most applicable to your organization and really go for it.

But once you’ve figured out the keywords and phrases that best describe your organization, how in world do improve your search engine ranking?  Therein lies the delicate and ever evolving art of Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  SEO is the practice of expanding the awareness of a website among search engines by employing numerous tactics in order to build strong associations between a website and certain keywords.  When all the right seeds have been planted, search engines in their unending crawl across the Internet will come across these seeds and begin to build associations.  The different tactics that SEO providers use in order to plant these seeds are tightly held secrets, and are constantly evolving in order to be compatible with search engines that are constantly growing and changing their search algorithms.  It’s is both an art and a science and at 420 Web Pros we excel at both ends of the spectrum.

A marijuana SEO account with 420 Web Pros will allow your organization (collective, dispensary, delivery service, grow house, ect.) to attract the attention it needs to grow and flourish. Patients in your community will be able to find you on Google, collectives in your area will discover your farm when they search for growers and like minded supporters will know about your event when they surf the web looking for activities in their community. The Internet is the greatest informational tool in the history of mankind but it doesn’t help much if people can’t find the information about you! Can you afford to be without a marijuana SEO strategy when so many of your competitors are listed ahead of you?

Didn’t think so.

"Why" is the key to success. Why dictates the How and the What that will deliver results.

There is a certain something that sets really great organizations apart from everyone else. Something that can turn “good” into “great” simply by recognizing it. It’s not a person or a place or a thing . . . it’s a reason.

Today’s medical marijuana marketplace consists of thousands of vendors and hundreds of thousands of patients. It can be very overwhelming to a new or struggling organization trying to establish itself among all the clamor. There is so much competition that even the most prominent of providers face hurdles maintaining a high level of visibility and interaction among the community. This fierce competition validates the need for a greater understanding of how success works, and the key elements to achieving a notable and lasting presence.

There are a thousand books defining success and at least as many strategies claiming to outline the path to greatness, unfortunately most of them miss the most important element, the element that makes everything else fall into place: Why. Why do you do what you do? It seems like a pretty elementary question, but you’d be surprised just how many people don’t have an answer. For the vast majority of the working public, their job is nothing more than a paycheck, which is ultimately a result and not a reason. Marketing guru turned activist Simon Sinek has made quite a bit of noise preaching the virtues of “Why?” and the natural consequences that follow it. In September of 2009 Simon addressed the TED conference and spoke about the great titans of industry and society such as Apple and Martin Luther King Jr. and made the argument that Why they did what they did is what makes them special. Why something is done will dictate how it is done and ultimately what the end result of that is. And the more a person or organization believes in that why, the more profound the results will be for everything that comes as a result of it.

This truth does not apply only to computer companies and social rights activists, it is every bit as relevant to the medical marijuana industry as any other. People might pay attention to you for a bit if you lure them and plead with them, but it won’t last long and doesn’t leave a lasting impression. The way to really attract the attention of people and convert them into loyal members or consumers is to appeal to their sense of why. When you appeal to a person’s sense of why, you create in that individual the association that they are interacting with you not because you asked them to via advertising or promotions, but because they want to due to a shared interest. If you’re Apple computers the reason you’re in business is because you are passionate about design and technology, and as a result your products reflect that and naturally appeal to hundreds of millions of people who are also passionate about design and technology. If you’re a collective owner, you should be passionate about organic medicine and the many positive ways it can affect peoples lives, as a result your organization will naturally attract people who feel the same and you will create a fundamental loyalty that no advertising campaign on earth can compete with. This is what separates ”the great ones”, what allows people to achieve extraordinary results: Doing something because they believe in it. If you’re doing what you’re doing because you’re passionate and you believe in it, you will achieve results beyond that of others who are simply in it for the results.

Why do you do what you do? It’s the question that inspired us to create 420 Web Pros and has led us to the point we’re at today, the industry’s #1 creative firm for web, print and branding! We started doing this because we felt passionate about the medical cannabis movement and the need for a re-branding of the whole industry. We felt that it was time for the world to take notice and recognize the legitimacy of marijuana as a medicine and an economic opportunity. Part of achieving that goal was recognizing and addressing the desperate need for professional design and branding in order to showcase how far cannabis has come since the days of Woodstock and VW buses. Marijuana producers and collectives have become a vibrant element of our local communities that are respected and embraced, and the branding surrounding these organizations should reflect the hard won legitimacy they have earned. Because we started with this philosophy as the backbone of our organization we’ve had a tremendous response from the medical marijuana industry, meeting people and gaining clients from all walks of life across the country. Even we didn’t anticipate the overwhelmingly positive and inviting nature of the reception we’ve received, which stands as a testament to the power of why! Like minded individuals and organizations have flocked toward our unique approach to medical marijuana marketing and medical marijuana web design and have joined our crusade to elevate the medical cannabis industry.

You can always tell the difference between someone who is involved for the results versus someone who is involved for the cause. A person who believes in what they’re doing will try harder, reach farther and dig deeper than any person who is simply being compensated to achieve, no matter the compensation. It is why grass-roots movements work, it’s how small companies achieve what multi-million dollar corporation are unable to do. It’s why two groups who do the same thing can have vastly different results. At 420 Web Pros, we are driven by why. It’s the reason we got in to this business and it’s the reason we’re #1.