Digital Marketing for Dispensaries Is Crucial: Here's Why

Digital Marketing Is Effective

Whether it’s print ads, TV commercials, direct mail, or outdoor billboards, many businesses find success with traditional marketing methods.

But fewer people are reading newspapers, more people are streaming, and it's really easy to chuck your junk mail right into the recycling.

So where can you reach your target audience?

Online.

Digital marketing is absolutely crucial for establishing an online presence for your dispensary. More and more people are researching products, services, and brands online before spending their hard-earned money. An optimized digital presence will make it easier for potential customers to find your dispensary and to learn more about your products.

Plus, digital marketing has a much broader reach than traditional marketing, ensuring that your marketing communications aren’t limited to a small audience. Digital marketing for dispensaries provides your brand with consistent online visibility, allowing customers to reach out to you more easily.

Digital marketing also allows for a higher level of engagement and interaction with potential customers. A mobile-friendly website and an established presence on search engines and social media platforms will help customers to connect and interact with your brand. By comparison, traditional marketing methods can typically only be relied on to raise awareness, not to interact or engage.

Digital marketing captures more qualified leads than traditional marketing.

Digital marketing tactics such as keyword planning and retargeting can help you find valuable leads instead of waiting and hoping that they come to you. Plus, email marketing and loyalty programs can help your dispensary sell more to its current customers, boosting the value of your average customer.

Digital marketing can connect potential customers to your dispensary’s products much more quickly. Blogs, social media content, and other forms of content marketing can be a great way to connect potential customers directly to the products they may be interested in, and different digital marketing tactics can be used to push potential customers further down the purchase/marketing funnel until they are finally ready to buy.

Cannabis Marketing for Dispensaries Is Less Restrictive

As the cannabis market evolves, the rules and regulations around cannabis advertising are in a constant state of flux. As is, most states and provinces have their own framework of restrictive regulations that makes it difficult for dispensaries and other cannabis companies to engage in traditional marketing.

For example, in the state of Colorado, retail marijuana establishments cannot use TV or radio advertising unless they're sure that over 30% of the viewing or listening audience is over the age of 21. Meanwhile, in Connecticut, dispensaries are prohibited from displaying cannabis brand names or graphics related to cannabis on the exterior of their facility.

Restrictions such as these make traditional marketing much more difficult and much less effective for dispensaries, making digital marketing vital for attracting foot traffic and growing revenue.

Cannabis Digital Marketing Is Agile and Easy to Measure

Digital marketing is also much more agile than traditional marketing. Instead of rolling out a big campaign and hoping for the best, agile marketing focuses on rapid iteration and relentless testing. Digital marketing allows your dispensary’s marketing team to conduct quick experiments like A/B testing and make immediate adjustments depending on the results.

Agile marketing helps your dispensary digital marketing team to quickly respond to fluctuating priorities, unforeseen industry developments (hello, coronavirus), and sudden changes in plan. Plus, agile marketing prioritizes open and transparent communication that keeps stakeholders in the loop at all times.

Agile marketing is possible because digital marketing makes it easy to accurately measure the results of your marketing campaigns and initiatives.

Thanks to a variety of tracking tools like Google Analytics, you can measure the results of your digital marketing and SEO campaigns in real-time. This prevents dispensaries from wasting valuable marketing dollars on campaigns that may not actually produce results. If you're working with a smaller budget, or simply wish to spend your marketing dollars as carefully as possible, agile digital marketing is for you.

Everyone Else is Using It

Lastly—no one likes this reason—but, you need to be doing digital marketing because your competition is doing it. Don't let them steal your customers or control the search results and outrank you! If you don't use tools like SEO, SMS, Geo-Ads, and Google Ads, your competition will make the most of them and score more sales.

Want to learn more? Let's talk about the different digital marketing tools you can use to maximize your reach. Give us a call!