Tag Archives: Cannabis Marketing

How to Market Cannabis Where Your Audiences Socialize 1

How to Market Cannabis Where Your Audiences Socialize

Advice & Tips, Cannabis Marketing,

When it comes to marketing your product effectively and boosting your brand equity, you must have a good knowledge of your target audience. Of course, having this knowledge is a journey. As noted by Nic Shafer of Precision Extraction Solutions, this journey should start with ensuring that you meet your audiences where they normally socialize.

Get started with extensive research

Don’t rush into implement any type of marketing technique. You should first take the time to learn about your audience so that you can have a good understanding of what they need. Unfortunately, marketing budgets usually restrict businesses. Resultantly, they will not be able to use every possible marketing platform at once.

To deal with this challenge, it is paramount to understand the particular channel where your would-be customers socialize. Also, you must understand the things that are important to them when buying a product or service. A good understanding of your target audiences will go a long way in helping you to know the best marketing platform you have to use.

A two-pronged approach is required to know where your customers spend most of their time. This approach needs quantitative research that evaluates the existing data. Afterward, you will use qualitative research through a direct conversation with your existing customers. For qualitative research, surveys, focus group discussions, and questionnaires have been recommended by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Identify sub-channels

Through the research, you will be able to identify sub-channels. This ensures that you don’t have to deal with the marketing noise and, thus, focus on what you need. These sub-channels can be YouTube Channels, niche social media groups, and so on.

Don’t use all platforms for your marketing strategy. Just focus on the particular ones that your audiences often use.

After establishing a relationship with your customers, it is possible to diversify your marketing strategy confidently. In the long run, this will be beneficial to your business. In fact, it can be the single most important factor that will take your cannabis business to the next level.

In addition, you should take advantage of consumer demographics and psychographics to find the best social platforms and marketing techniques for your business. Also, you need to get more information from your existing clients. The information can be extrapolated to cater to the needs of your prospective clients.

Change is imminent

Marketing channels and tactics change from time to time. Therefore, don’t be rigid in your marketing approach. The strategies and platforms that worked some months or years ago may no longer be effective today.

Be always ready to change your cannabis marketing strategies. However, before making any change, learn about your customers and readjust your marketing strategies to suit their needs and preferences.

In conclusion, cannabis marketing is as dynamic as the marketing of most other businesses. You must meet your customers where they usually socialize. So, you must continue to update your knowledge, learn more about your target audiences, and tweak your marketing channels and tactics as the market demands.

Obstacles Advertising Cannabis 2

Obstacles Advertising Cannabis

Cannabis Marketing, History, Trends,

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.

Branding Cannabis 3

Branding Cannabis

Advice & Tips, Cannabis Marketing, Trends, , ,

Over the past few years, the Cannabis industry has witnessed lots of deciding moments and this is mostly due to the changes in all the regulations and laws on cannabis in a lot of countries. Some of these countries legalized it totally while some just made the already existing regulations concerning Cannabis usage more liberal. Consequent to these new laws and regulations, the Cannabis market has continued to become busier by the day, which means it is bound to be one of the biggest ministries in years to come. Besides, this means more efforts will be dedicated to Cannabis marketing and branding than before. However, the industry is still in early development, so certain challenges are inevitable.

Strategies and tactics

Strategies are very important in the Cannabis industry but not easy to get. A good amount of companies in the industry have exhausted a lot of money on marketing, but most of the effort has resulted in nothing but failure. What this indicates is that Cannabis branding demands beyond being different. It comes with certain challenges that are not present in other industries. Brand building requires consistency.

The successful Cannabis brands are the ones that are clear about their audience and they deliver to them accordingly. For instance, the brands make use of a sophisticated luxury concept and leverage on their quality product and image. On the other hand, others focus more or an artisan narrative by making use of experiences and tours in their dispensaries.

The importance of partnerships and influencers in the overall strategy can also not be overemphasized. By running influencer marketing campaigns through certain platforms, Cannabis companies can easily get around stringent advertising regulations of social media. In like manner, some brands have been partnering successfully with popular personalities to achieve the same result.

Establishing your brand in the marketplace

It is good to consider how to present your brand to the public. You must be conscious of your consumers and their view about your brand but this is a thing quite hard to achieve in the Cannabis industry. There are lots of misconceptions about the industry and its products so it is often quite tough for a cannabis brand to market itself to the public. Due to the fact that Cannabis is not legal in all places and is illegal by federal law, promoting it is sometimes still frowned upon.

For example, some of the most popular promoting channels such as Facebook and Google prohibit advertising services or products connected to the Cannabis industry. Thus, you don’t have the privilege of using the regular channels that you would if you were selling a different product or service. Therefore, you must contemplate the way to enter the market as well as the effective ways to promote your products or services within the existing restrictions.

The important thing to note here is that there are still certain ways through which your brand can be introduced and marketed to people. The channels to use include publications, websites that belong to the Cannabis industry as well as events, trade shows and social media pages of the industry.