Digital Marketing for Cannabis Dispensaries

What are some effective strategies?

In the age of information technology where more and more customers are buying products and services online, it is just appropriate that you too establish your business presence on the internet. By increasing your business visibility on search engines, for instance, it gives you an opportunity to increase the number of leads that will eventually turn into paying customers.

But here’s the truth: building an online presence isn’t the same for all types of businesses. In other words, some businesses are relatively easy to promote online, while others are not. This is particularly true with non-risky versus businesses that are considered high-risk, such as the cannabis dispensaries.

Just like other businesses belonging to the high-risk industry, digital marketing for cannabis dispensaries is more challenging because some online marketing platforms tend to provide more weight only to conventional types of business. For instance, leading social media platforms such as Facebook do not allow the promotion of products like cannabis. Pay-per-click advertising programs such as Google AdWords prohibit cannabis companies from using their advertising platform as well; they termed it “recreational drugs”.

The question now becomes, the fact that some leading marketing companies do not allow their platforms to be used for marketing of high-risk businesses, what should be your approach for digital marketing for cannabis dispensaries? What are the strategies you should consider?

My recommendation is this: be holistic with your strategy.

Digital marketing comprises an array of strategies and it makes sense to make use of them instead of using just a few platforms. In that way, should one channel is underperforming, you still have other strategies that could potentially deliver your goal for your cannabis business.

Here are some digital marketing approaches to try:

• Establish your own website – the last phase of converting leads into paying customers should happen at the platform which you have full control, and that is your website.
• List your business to local listing – Perhaps not all local business listing/citation sites allow the inclusion of products like cannabis into their listing, but there are listing that are dedicated to high-risk businesses, so take advantage of them.
• Optimize your website for search – While the leading search engine Google has been pretty clear about their position about high-risk businesses, our historical data on website performance show that even websites for products that they call “recreational drugs” still rank in search results. This means that you can still generate prospects that are coming from search engines. SEO should be part of your strategy.

To learn more about some other strategies that you can implement for digital marketing for cannabis dispensaries, contact us at (858) 605-2806.