5 Cannabis Marketing Tips that Work!

In 2017 alone, North Americans spent $9.2 billion on cannabis products. That figure is projected to grow to an extraordinary $47.3 billion by the year 2027.

Considering this kind of exponential growth, entrepreneurs everywhere are trying to break into the cannabis market. Unfortunately, today’s market is much more competitive than years prior. That means that businesses need to employ cutting edge cannabis marketing strategies to compete.

Of course, the cannabis industry is still very new. This leaves many cannabis business owners wondering, what are the best cannabis marketing strategies to improve my business?

If you’re looking for some amazing and effective cannabis marketing tips, check out the top 5 below.

1. Cannabis Friendly Advertising Methods

The cannabis industry still operates in a legal gray area. Although cannabis is legal (to some degree) in 39 states, it is still federally illegal. This not only means that federal prosecutors can crack down on cannabis even in states where it’s legal, but that regulations concerning the plant can be very strict.

One of these regulations prohibits majors social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram from hosting cannabis related advertisements. Even Google and YouTube don’t allow them. This forces cannabis marketers to get creative.

Rather than rely on these social media giants to host your advertisements, look for non-traditional and non-mainstream methods. One of these methods is programmatic ad buying.

With programmatic ad buying, a software will place your bids, display your ads, and optimize them for you. You can even hire someone to handle the software for you.

Another non-traditional route is to take on real world marketing opportunities. Media outlets like podcasts are becoming more popular, and are a great platform to share information about your brand.

Look for local events where you can set up a table and engage the community. You can even host events and speaker panels that will help people connect with your brand.

Don’t hesitate to read more now to find out about cannabis legislation.

2. Create Useful Content

Many businesses have social media accounts and websites. Many even have a blog where they regularly post content. Many don’t, however, keep that content relevant and useful.

We’ve all been there – where we tried to search for information, but could only find useless, fluff blog pieces. If you want your brand to succeed, don’t pollute the Internet.

The key is to find out what your target audience wants. Once you do that, you’ll know what kind of content is valuable to them. This can be anything from educational blog posts to funny videos.

More specifically, Twitter posts often rank higher than many web pages on Google. If your content is relevant enough, you have the potential to be picked up and go viral. That will increase your brand engagement exponentially.

3. Don’t Push Content, Pull It

Many brands push out content because they think quantity will drive their social media interaction. As previously stated, quality is much more important than quantity.

Additionally, cannabis brands can find their social media accounts deleted without warning. There’s nothing worse than spending hours and days building social media traction only to have it disappear overnight.

The best brands know that they shouldn’t push content, but pull it. This entails real users generating their own content about your brand. It’s more organic and authentic, and it shows.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to reach out to brand ambassadors who can use their influence to advertise your brand. These days, the best brand ambassadors don’t have millions of followers, but are medium-sized and considered more authentic by their followers.

Many brands pay for these brand ambassadors to promote their products. If you’re lucky, you can even find brand ambassadors who will work for free samples. The trick is that you are circumventing the loophole concerning no cannabis advertisement on major social media sites.

4. Monitor Your Performance

You won’t know if any of these tips are working without tracking and analyzing your social media performance.

Google Analytics is an industry favorite when it comes to websites. For social media, there are free and simple in app tools for tracking and analyzing data.

Through tracking and analyzing the performance of your content, you can see what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. If you put out more of what your audience loves, you can improve the marketing of your brand.

Followers and likes, impressions, engagement, clicks and traffic, and mentions are all metrics that you need to track data for. This data will help you improve the quality of your social media presence, and help you avoid posting things your audience does not care for.

5. Engage the Community

Building relationships is important for any business. These relationships are necessary for people to trust your brand and grow to love it.

In the cannabis industry, relationships are paramount. Think about the foundations of cannabis – it’s a market that was fought for by activists. This makes it especially community oriented.

It’s essential for cannabis businesses to get out there and engage the community. This is partially done through non-traditional advertising methods like radio shows and health and wellness fairs, but it also needs to be done without the promotional element.

This can be accomplished through social media, engaging other real people through likes, comments, and shares. This will increase the number of social media interactions the community has with your brand, building rapport.

These authentic interactions with people who actually care about your brand are infinitely more valuable than interactions with people who are not emotionally invested.

Cannabis Marketing Tips

If you’re on social media, you know much of it is already devoted to cannabis marketing. There are endless users on the biggest sites promoting cannabis brands. It’s up to the cannabis business owner to tap into this resource.

The challenge is that cannabis marketers are limited by the legal regulations of the industry. Most of the biggest names are prohibited from doing business with the cannabis industry, which means the marketing team needs to get creative.

If these top 5 cannabis marketing tips helped you, don’t forget to check out our other useful marketing articles.