All industries have their lists of challenges and they can come in various ways. However, as far as the cannabis industry is concerned, its challenges can sometimes be a little too much. These challenges tend to come in areas related to advertising, especially raising awareness and we will be considering them in detail under this post. The discussion will try to cover all the manners that these advertising challenges tend to appear.

A highly regulated industry

To start with, the cannabis industry is a highly regulated one. That means to successfully establish a brand under the industry, a proper understanding of local and state laws is needed to stay out of trouble. The problem here is not these many local and state laws but something disadvantages that happens as a consequence of it. After all, the marijuana industry is not the only highly regulated industry around. The pharmaceutical, finance, insurance, gambling, and many more industries suffer the same fate.

The only major issue here is that the cannabis industry is still different from the ones above as it’s still illegal at the federal level. As such, the industry has to constantly battle marketing problems from the black market.

Advertising platforms have a culture of rejecting cannabis ads

For those actively immersed in the industry, this probably wouldn’t come as a shock. For those who are not aware, then note now that most of the big advertising platforms hardly accept marijuana ads. As much as counterintuitive this might be to the usual multi-channel approach of marketing it’s just the bitter reality.

While in the United States, some states such as California, Arizona, Washington among more have legalized marijuana in some form, this unfriendly attitude by the big advertising platforms is a huge challenge to the proper marketing of cannabis. As a matter of fact, with the changing political realities, Google, Facebook, Instagram and others have all resolved not to let cannabis brands run paid ads on their respective platforms for the time being.

Instagram and Facebook are shutting down cannabis accounts

The difficulty would have even a lot more bearable if it was just limited to banning paid ads. Sadly, it gets even uglier with Facebook and Instagram. These big tech giants of our time have a bad reputation of taking down accounts related to cannabis. This inability for cannabis brands to have an unchallenged presence in the platforms of these big tech giants is a big marketing challenge for the marijuana industry.

Black market peculiarities

As we have stated earlier, legit cannabis brands are forced to compete against black-market sellers. While the law-abiding brands tend to follow the rules related to marketing that seriously hinder their ability to promote their products and services the way they want, black-market competitors don’t follow these rules, putting the legit brands at a disadvantage.

In conclusion, these challenges are not insurmountable as there are strategies around to overcome them. Here at 420 Web Pros we are particularly dedicated towards this mission and are dedicated to being reliable and efficient when it comes to working around the various challenges that plague the marketing of cannabis.