Top 5 Benefits of Digital Marketing for Cannabis Brands

If you’re a cannabis entrepreneur, you know how important digital marketing for cannabis is for the growth and sustainability of your brand. But did you know just how important it is? Are you aware of how much more effective, measurable and sustainable it is? Here are our top 5 benefits of digital marketing for cannabis brands.

What is Digital Marketing for Cannabis Brands?

Before we jump into describing the benefits of digital marketing for cannabis brands, let’s describe what it is. Digital marketing is another word for internet marketing. It’s about solving a problem that someone has by offering them your product or service and doing so online. Before digital marketing businesses reached their target audience by using radio, TV, print, or word of mouth. But this outdated model is difficult to measure any return on investment.

Some forms of digital cannabis marketing include optimizing your website so customers can find it on Google (also known as search engine optimization, or SEO), website display ads, blog posts, social media, and email marketing. We are spending more time than ever online, and there is no end in sight. While this is a generalization of digital marketing, everything holds true for cannabis brands as well. With this in mind, let’s dive into the benefits of digital marketing for cannabis companies.

1. Target Your Audience More Easily

Google Facebook keeps track of online user activity, and you can gather similar information to offer customers relevant products. One of the best ways to do this is through gathering a list for your loyalty program in person and collecting their names, email addresses, and phone numbers.

Once you build your email list, you can offer your target audience a free pre-roll or a percentage off of their order for joining the loyalty program. This information can then be inputted into a database that accurately tracks customer behaviors and preferences, then sends them increasingly personalized offers that turn them into happy return customers.

2. Engage Your Customer From Start to Finish

In the age of radio and TV ads, a business would throw something at the wall in the form of a spot and hope it stuck. If it stuck, a customer would come into a store and possibly buy. This was a roll of the dice and the customer journey was not discussed. With digital marketing for cannabis brands, all of this has changed.

When a customer decides to take action, such as sign up for your mailing list, or follow us on social media, we can track the steps they take and hopefully influence their decision to come into our dispensary. When they do that, we can offer them incentives to become return customers by getting them to mention our online ad in a brick and mortar store, and then request feedback from them.

This feedback can be either in person or online via a Google review or both. Not only does consistent customer feedback improve brand loyalty and the overall customer experience, but it also helps us gain valuable insight into their thoughts about you. From there, we can improve their experience by implementing their feedback.

3. Stretch Your Online Cannabis Advertising Dollars

Some business owners believe that great digital cannabis marketing will cost them a fortune. High-yield ROIs can be obtained with affordable digital marketing campaigns and can reach more customers earlier and more often than traditional advertising. Scalability becomes easier as ROI can be measured at every step of the customer journey: from your initial call to action offer to the point of sale in-store.

One of the most cost-effective ways of doing this is through a quality social media presence. Most of your potential customers are already using platforms like Instagram, and engaging them with quality content can cost very little, other than investing your time.

Email marketing, SMS messaging and blogging are even more great ways to engage with customers. If you engage your customers the right way with social media, they are more likely to share your content on their profiles and interact with their friends about the products they like.

4. Measure Your Results With Accuracy

With traditional marketing and advertising, measuring the effectiveness and results of your marketing budget is difficult. It is impossible to gauge how many people have seen your print ads that appear on newspapers or billboards. It’s also very difficult to measure which ads were effective in making real sales. When it comes to digital marketing, this is not a problem.

Digital marketing lets you measure everything worth measuring, such as how many clicks your ads get, and how long your users stay on your website. With built-in digital tools like Google Analytics for email marketing campaigns, SMMS messages, you can monitor the exact engagement each of your digital marketing campaigns receives.

A quality digital marketing agency can help you prioritize your most important customer data, which is typically referred to as Key Performance Indicator (KPI). When you outline your goals and then build your digital marketing strategy, you and your digital marketing team will define metrics that best represent your ideal outcome. These KPIs include customer acquisition cost, cost per click, and customer lifetime value.

5. Build Your Brand’s Credibility

Perhaps one of the best ways that digital marketing for cannabis brands is beneficial is its ability to build your brand’s credibility. Through your informative, engaging, and valuable content, you can address customer concerns and questions, show you understand the industry and your customers, and clarify concepts that the “canna-curious may have.”

Ways to begin effectively building your brand awareness and its credibility are to answer common questions that customers may have about products or services, posting images of your business to show it’s a safe and welcoming environment, and so on.

As you build your brand, improve your cannabis business marketing, and grow your online presence, one of the main goals of a quality digital marketer will be to ensure that your brand ranks as highly as possible in the organic search engine results pages (SERPs) for your area. If you are ranking highly on Google search, this indicates your authority on a topic and establishes your brand as a thought leader in the evolving cannabis industry.

Ready to Get Started with Digital Marketing for your Cannabis Brand?

If you find yourself agreeing with all of the above, KPI, SERP, and ROI are terms that sound like Greek to you, Clutch & Associates can help. We offer a multitude of services to build or improve your online presence, from website building, to blog posts, and help with SEO strategies. We have turnkey packages that can find your startup needs and anything in between. Get in touch with Clutch today and schedule an intake call!