CANNABIS DISPENSARY LOCAL MARKETING

Sites like Google Reviews and Yelp are platforms for consumers to share their experience with your local business online. While you may view this as a headache, we urge you to see it more as an opportunity to grow your brand and to do it well. First, identify which review sites are being used by your target customers. Have budtenders poll incoming customers and ask your happy, repeat customers if they could write a review for you! Use this budtenders script we created to ask for reviews. Having great ratings not only reflects well on your SERPs, but it’s also a great way to attract new customers. Quantity and quality do both come into play for this. Lastly, offer promotions for check-ins! They are a great way to incentivize someone simply flipping through reviews to come into your store that day.

Ensuring that you have a consistent business listing is beneficial for both your SEO and customer experience – You don’t want them getting lost along the way. We recommend that you build or claim your listings on Google My Business and Bing Places. There are other business listings as well, so sit with your team and discuss whether or not they’re worth your resources. We’ve spoken of this countless times throughout MediaJel content, but if you missed it – Whatever listing you use to make sure everything matches; Business name, address, phone number, website, etc. This is not a place to get creative.

Hashtags are extremely useful and may even surface in SERPS in the Google’s tweets card. Include hashtags across your social channels are both general and local specific to attract local customers as well as those outside your local area.

It’s common knowledge in marketing that 80% of your results come from 20% of your marketing. So, if you’re on a budget, identify which channels and local marketing tactics are working for you and transition your resources to focus on that 20%! Every business is different and something that is working for another dispensary.

The core asset in any local marketing campaign is your local business listing you’re on Google Local, Yelp, Bing Places, Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Local or any of the other thousands of directories, the purpose of your listing is to gain visibility for local search.

Many local search engines allow you add 2-5 categories to help describe your business and its offerings. If you are uncategorized or miscategorized, search engines will not display your dispensary. We’ll speak more on this below.

Reviews and ratings are displayed and repurposed in so many different ways across search results, so it’s important that your not only monitor these reviews but also invest in a strategy to encourage good reviews from loyal customers. While Google doesn’t have any rules on soliciting reviews, Yelp does, so double check to make sure you’re not crossing any lines.

Adding multimedia to your listing has been well-documented as increasing your click-through rates on your listing. While it doesn’t necessarily affect your ranking, it does attract more customers to learning more about you. Choose your photos wisely – Even our smartphone takes high-quality photos. Take a moment to edit them to make them more compelling!

As each year approaches, the weight that social factors hold in local SEO is growing. You’ll want to interact with reviewers by responding to reviews, both good or bad. This will benefit you regarding SEO and demonstrate a good customer experience.

Lastly, in addition to ensuring consistency across all business listing databases, don’t forget about your website. Include complete contact information in a format search engines can read.