Dispensary business plan: Your dispensary offers quality products in a fast-growing industry. To increase your market share, you need to master the art of online advertising. Here are some of the most effective strategies to market your dispensary.
1. Blog Posts
There are two ways that you should use blogging to drive business to your dispensary. Adding a blog to your website can dramatically improve your search engine rankings if you use proper search engine optimization. Some reputable professionals can improve your dispensary SEO. You should also seek out established marijuana-focused blogs and contact them, asking if you can write a guest post on their site.
2. Facebook
Dispensary marketing on Facebook can be tricky, as the site does not permit advertising that has anything to do with drugs. There are still some ways to reach customers on Facebook, however. You can (and should) set up a page for your business. This will allow you to reach customers directly. It is vital that you give customers the option to contact you through Facebook Messenger and that you respond to them within a day (at most).
If you do not reply to a customer’s message quickly, they will go elsewhere for the products and services that they need. While you cannot purchase and share ads across Facebook, you can post videos and stories to your business page to get your customers’ attention. Engaging customers through a Facebook Live video is an excellent way to communicate with potential customers in real-time.
3. Instagram
Like Facebook, Instagram has a policy against advertising marijuana. If you focus on increasing the number of people who follow your Instagram, you can use frequent, relevant posts to advertise your products. Since Instagram is focused on images, you should post high-quality, professional photos of your products.
The key to success on Instagram is to make at least a few compelling posts per week and to use topical hashtags. You can easily search Instagram for variations on widely-used hashtags like #cannabis. When you start to type hashtag on an Instagram post, you will see a list of suggested tags along with how many posts on the site currently include those tags.
The best way to use Instagram to market your dispensary is to network with influencers. These are accounts with thousands of followers. If you can get influencers to post about your dispensary, this can be as effective as a paid advertisement.
4. Other Social Media Platforms
Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest all prohibit advertisements for drugs of any kind. You can grow your customer base on these platforms using some of the same methods you employ on Facebook and Instagram. It is easy to explore and search for the most popular hashtags on Twitter so that you can use them to reach your target audience.
A significant number of internet users get their news from Twitter, so you should contact writers from several media outlets to see if they can mention your dispensary in their articles. This is a good strategy on LinkedIn as well, as you can easily get in touch with professional writers. Pinterest has some limited potential for marketing your dispensary if you can set aside time to post the same professional photographs there that you do on Instagram.
5. Podcasts
If you can start and maintain a podcast, this can serve as a valuable marketing tool. Do some research by listening to some of the most popular cannabis podcasts. You will see that each has a niche, like concentrating on legal issues or how THC and CBD can contribute to overall wellness. Not all podcasts have to be ongoing. You can create a limited series of podcasts if this is more realistic for your dispensary business. Ads for related products can support your podcast. Another option is to persuade a popular marijuana podcast to feature you as a guest.
