4 Building Blocks of a Content Market Strategy Unique to Your Dispensary

If you want to make sure that your dispensary stands out among the others, you must make sure that you have a relevant content marketing strategy. So many people think that it is just easy to put content out there on your dispensary and keyword it. It is good to have an excellent marijuana dispensary SEO strategy, however, you will never make it in the business if you rely on this alone. It is very important to make sure that you have relevant content that interests readers. Interested readers equal interest in your dispensary.

Content is not just limited to articles. Content is graphics, videos, written content, as well as infographics. You want to make sure that your content not only advertises and informs. You will want to make sure it educates and engages your customer, every single day. As a cannabis dispensary, you will want to reach all the elements of the customer’s experience. Below are 5 ways that you can get your cannabis dispensary noticed.

1. Blogging

If you do not already have a blog, get one. The blog will act as an information hub for all of the information surrounding your dispensary. You will want to make sure that you keep the site updated frequently. Make sure that you are using the right SEO. You can write pieces that will reach people, instead of writing irrelevant content that is not geared towards your clientele. The better your content is, the more engaging it will be, and it will attract a higher-ranking spot.

One of the most important things that you can do on your blog is to highlight all aspects of the cannabis industry. Do not stick to just one part of it though. Highlight the best practices of those in marijuana retail, share things about marijuana laws, and share any new information about the cannabis industry as you hear it. This will allow you to become the first source people go to for cannabis information. Every day, there is a ton of information coming out about cannabis from even the best content writing services for blog articles like WordLead. Some of this information is true, while other information is false. It is up to you to be a truthful information hub for people.

When you work on your guest blogging strategy, remember that there is never too much guest post blogging. You can blog every single day, as long as you make sure that you are posting relevant topics that people want to read. Make sure that each blog is informative and attention-grabbing.

2. Infographics

Many people learn by graphics. It has been said that about 65 percent of all people, learn better when information is presented to them in graphics, photos, and illustrations. Many people just do not have the time or the want to sit and read through large blocks of texts. You should always have a graphic alternative on your blog to help those that are visual learners.

If you do your infographics right, you will get more potential customers as well as educate your followers. and it will help your marijuana SEO You can also make sure that important cannabis information reaches them as well. Infographics will add knowledge to your customers and the internet.

3. Graphics

When someone comes onto your page, it generally takes 3 seconds for them to decide whether or not they want to do business with you. If you do not engage them as soon as they are on your site, you will lose the business. This is why it is so important to us quality graphics. When building your website you do not want to just go to Google and get the generic stock photos. You will want to make sure that you have quality photos from places like Pixabay and iStockPhoto. These photos will help your website to be interesting enough for people to want to stay on.

If you want to up your graphics game, consider hiring a photographer. A photographer can come out and take pictures of your dispensary, including the products that you sell. This will help people to see what they are getting, and help them to know that you do care about what you are selling.

4. Social Media

You can have the nicest site possible and still fail at your business if you are not active in social media. In this day in age, social media is all the rage, and your dispensary must be involved.

Join all the popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Instagram. You will want to make sure that you engage in all kinds of cannabis dispensary marketing conversations. You should make sure that you are posting fresh content each and every day. This will help to keep your dispensary relevant and in their faces. The more they see it, the more likely they are to come to your website. The only thing that you need to make sure of is, that you keep up with all the rules and regulations of each social media platform.

Cannabis Dispensary Website SEO

In today’s business world of hardly anything being one-of-a-kind, business owners must stand out from the crowd, and even the popularity of pot businesses don’t make them an exception. Pot may be a hot ticket item, but that doesn’t mean any particular shop will be as hot. Step one in setting yourself apart from competitor shops is consumers actually knowing you exist, and this task is accomplished through advertisement.

The landscape of advertising today is heavily reliant upon the internet, meaning SEO is something you want to develop a deep and meaningful relationship with if your shop is to be successful. So, grab a blanket and prepare to snuggle up with SEO.

Get Found With SEO

Did you know that pot shops outnumber the amount of Starbucks and McDonald’s in Oregon? In Colorado, there are over 600 dispensaries, and the number just keeps growing. This is the kind of abyss you’re dealing with when it comes to being found in most urban cities. It will only get harder to be found as more and more states legalize and push a booming pot market forward. Every store, even the most remote ones, are going to find themselves in a fight to obtain and retain customers.

SEO is the tool to help you be seen in that fight for survival of the fittest. However, as SEO has become one of the most important advertising tools around, it too has had to adapt to changing technologies and the ways people search out goods and services.

Traditional SEO vs New SEO

If you’re even vaguely familiar with the traditional SEO model, then you already know it was predominantly keyword-focused and heavily laced in redundancy. As such, it made some website copy border on nonsensical gibberish. Some carpenter from New York, for example, would simply write: “Joe is a carpenter. Joe is a carpenter in New York. As a New York carpenter, Joe specializes in carpentry New York. If you need a carpenter in New York, call Joe the New York carpenter.”

To the glee of almost every intelligent copywriter in the nation, SEO today focuses much less on such redundant keyword gibberish copy. Today’s SEO is all about focusing on the natural language search that one would use when asking a question on the internet.

It’s important to recognize the driving force behind SEO switching gears. An article by Reefferr points to smartphones. Indeed, smartphones have changed the way in which everyday folks search and find things. Day you’re driving as you ask Siri to find the nearest gas station, restaurant, hotel, or pot dispensary. You don’t ask your smartphone for this info in broken sentences like, Joe – plumber – New York. No, you ask in as complete a sentence as possible to achieve the most relevant, expedient, and comprehensive results.

Your Cannabis Dispensary And SEO

The above doesn’t make SEO keywords irrelevant. It’s just to demonstrate that they’re not the only, much less most important, focus in today’s SEO landscape. You see how people search impacts SEO. Now, let’s look at how where they search for your cannabis business affects SEO.

A solid SEO strategy will cover five bases:

1. Social Media

According to Pew Research, 68 percent of Americans use Facebook; 73 percent use YouTube; and 22-35 percent use other social media portals like Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and WhatsApp. The majority of these users log in at least daily, making social media an ideal portal to engage existing and potential customers and direct traffic directly to your website.

2. Directories

A big mistake is being afraid of negative reviews. Yes, some will leave complaints, but, if you have excellent customer service and products, then you’re likely to get far more good credit than negativity. Use legitimate directories, such as Yelp and Wikileaf, to boost your online presence, generate reviews, and get your NAP+W (name, address, phone, website) in front of customers. Be cautious, however, of sketchy directories and having misinformation within directories as these mistakes will hurt, not help, you.

3. Google Business Profile

Do you take a paper map around with you? Likely not, and your customers aren’t likely to have one either as they’re searching for your dispensary. Having a Google Business Profile automatically indexes your NAP with Google, enabling it to show up in Google Maps.

4. Blog It

To be seen, you’ll need a consistent influx of quality content. Content should be relevant, timely, and useful. Blogs discussing legalization issues from several years ago don’t cut it. Readers won’t care and therefore won’t click on your blog. Use the portal to drive traffic by discussing current events, in-house promotions, legalities and educational content, products and services, industry news, and local events.

5. On-Site SEO

If you know the basics of SEO, go for it. Just know that there’s no shame in taking professional help how, when, and where you need it.

DIY SEO Quick And Dirty To-Do List

Ready to get your hands dirty with some SEO? Here are a few quick tips to get the ball rolling in the right direction:

•Use image tags so that Google can index images.

•Correctly name all URLs.

•Use header tags to organize and structure content in a logical manner.

•Use applicable title tags on each page of content.

•Use ideal keywords throughout content, but don’t go overboard or overthink them; remember, natural speech is key.

•Research most applicable, trending key words for the niche and subject of content.

•Use long-tail keywords, especially in blog content.

•Don’t overuse a keyword; “pot” and “weed” shouldn’t be your default keywords for every single piece of content.

•Title tags should have keywords.

•Meta descriptions should be seductive enough to lure searchers.

•Ensure content pages are user-friendly, meaning they should be searchable, not make visitors hunt down the information they’re seeking. Don’t ask multiple click-throughs of visitors looking for the fundamentals.

•Optimize your website for speed.

•Use Google Analytics to track the progress of your cannabis dispensary SEO strategy via traffic numbers, conversion numbers, and data showing you how visitors are searching through your site.

•Link out to nonprofits, professional organizations, and guest blogs.

DIY Quick And Dirty Don’t Do List

You know what you should be doing with SEO to get your dispensary seen. Now, it’s time to consider the wrong moves you don’t want to be making:

• Just say no to buying links. It’s inefficient and often ineffective. You’d be better served to use the money to pay a popular food truck to add your location to his vending route.

• Be a no-spin zone. Copycat spinning of articles doesn’t fly with Google. Keep posts fresh.

• Pretend the phrase “keyword density” doesn’t exist. It’s irrelevant today.

• Ranking should be on the back burner. It once was a forefront thought in SEO, but your focus nowadays should be on killer content.

Use this guide to get your pot dispensary on top of its SEO game. Remember, if a consumer can’t find you, then they can’t buy from you.

Understanding Digital PR: Why the Digital Part is Your Priority

In an era when so many people go online to find information, collect feedback, or compare brands before making purchase, the right type of online public relations approach matters. That’s one reason why traditional offline PR is not sufficient. If you’re serious about building a brand and creating a presence in today’s world, you need to pay attention to digital PR. Here are a few things you should understand about digital public relations and why they are so important.

What Constitutes True Digital PR?

There are those who see digital PR as being a lesser component in the public relations effort. That’s a fatal mistake that you want to avoid. In fact, your digital efforts should drive the overall PR effort, not the other way around.

If you really want your digital efforts to serve as the beginning or the foundation for your public relations strategy, it pays to understand what goes into those effort. While some do see parts, they don’t necessarily see the entire puzzle.

Here’s the real gist of effective and real digital PR. It does include social media and it does include building effective backlinks. It’s also about all the things that fall in between. That includes effective ad placement, interactive online media beyond social networks, video as well as visual, audio, and text content, and a few other elements. In short, it’s not just about one or two aspects of creating an online presence. It’s about creating a multi-faceted digital presence that ultimately informs and shapes the offline public relations that you do.

What’s the Point of Making Digital PR Your Priority?

The fact is that consumers rely increasingly on the Internet to make buying decisions. You see online shopping increasing from one year to the next. You notice that sites dedicated to consumer comments and ratings continue to proliferate. Even in your own buying habits, think of how often you conduct a quick search to find the right restaurant, select a retailer for new living room furniture, or to find the best deals on new electronics.

A strong dispensary marketing strategy, SEO and online presence must include proactive efforts to reach out, inform, and gain the trust of consumers. You can do that with digital PR.

That online public relations effort also provides the foundation for your offline PR. Simply put, effective digital PR typically translates easier into commercials, magazine ads, and billboards that traditional PR translates into an online environment. Making digital the priority ultimately helps your use of traditional public relations much simpler and more direct.

How You Can Make the Most of Digital Resources in Your PR Efforts

It’s good to know how your competitors are using backlinks. That’s one reason you want to make use of SEO tools like Moz or Ahregs to get an idea of the statistics of where they are using them and why. That helps provide clues as to how to use them on social media, guest blog posts, and even message boards that are indexed online.

Many online tools provide good ideas of what outlets have some relevance to your company’s offerings. It’s up to you to take that information and relate it to what you know about your targeted consumer market.

Ask yourself a few questions. What type of content themes attract the right audience? Where are they likely to look for that content? How much should be evergreen and how much should be topical? What does my audience want to read or watch right now?

The answers to those questions help you create a digital PR presence that reaches your target audience in more than one way and can be measured with KPIs. Instead of focusing on one or two approaches and calling it done, you may have a dozen or more online avenues. The more of those your target consumer base sees, the easier it becomes to remember and eventually give your products a try.

Make the most of online tools to decide where content is placed and even what keywords should be in any text you prepare. Think about making use of resources like Answer the Public and Google’s Keyword Planner. The inspiration you find there will be invaluable.

Remember that this approach applies to all your online efforts. Whether you are talking about a guest post in a digital magazine, developing infographics, making social media posts, structuring landing pages, or even making an appearance on a blog, the right elements of a digital approach pave the way for immediate results. Readers like what they see, click on the links, find more they like, and ultimately decide to give your products a try.

Cannabis Marketing Metrics or KPIs

Launching a cannabis business is exciting, for sure, but after the big day comes and goes, what remains is often more than a little daunting. For example, let’s take successful cannabis marketing.

Successful marketing can make the difference between a brilliant new business that grows wings and flies and that same business that closes its doors a year or two after launch day. Many entrepreneurs get so panicked by this thought they simply start throwing themselves at any and every marketing idea in hopes of getting the word out about their business.

These entrepreneurs definitely get an “A” for effort. But chances are high they aren’t getting the marketing results their business needs and deserves to survive and thrive.

Yet the question these new entrepreneurs often have is valid – how will you know what works if you don’t just try everything and see what takes?

And this approach can work if you have unlimited time and cash to pursue every road, no matter how off the beaten path it may be. But most new entrepreneurs don’t have that kind of time or cash to give their new business that critical mass toehold in the cannabis industry.

Here, what is needed is to streamline and focus efforts – not putting all eggs in a single basket, per se, but putting eggs strategically into only those baskets that are most likely to deliver the desired business growth results.

The Role of Marketing Metrics

But how do you know which baskets to put your eggs into? To answer this question, what you need is something called marketing metrics.

Marketing metrics is data, pure and simple. Where do you get marketing metrics for your cannabis business? You need to collect them!

The simplest and most common way to collect marketing metrics is by setting your website up to automatically capture data about web visitors and customers. Many entrepreneurs like to use Google Analytics to do this because the service is free and there are lots of online tutorials to help analyze the data.

But there are other services as well – the important thing is to choose a service to collect data that will become your cannabis business’s marketing metrics.

Once you have Google Analytics (or your selected service) installed and working with your website, you will need to wait at least a month (and ideally six months) to give the service time to collect raw data and organize it into metrics for you to review.

Essential Marketing Metrics for New Cannabis Entrepreneurs

Once your cannabis business website is capturing data and beginning to generate useful marketing metrics, your next challenge is to make sense out of the data and what it can teach you.

What you need to avoid here is getting bogged down in the statistics (metrics) themselves. You could easily spend all day, week, month, year just analyzing metrics. So your goal is to hone in on the most important metrics – the ones that tell you what is working and what is not working with your cannabis marketing efforts.

Here are seven of the most important marketing metrics your website can generate for you and how to use them to grow your cannabis business.

Metric #1: “Unique Web Visitors.”

The word “unique” is the most important word here. A unique visitor is a single real person who has visited your cannabis business website. The more unique visitors who visit your website each day, the more opportunities you have to capture sales.

NOTE: There is another similar metric called “Total Web Visitors.” This is not the same metric! The one you want is called “Unique Web Visitors.”

Unique Web Visitors can tell you loads of useful information, including how many people visit every day, hour, or minute, where those visitors are coming from (around the world and online), when they are most likely to visit (days, times) and where they go when they arrive at your website.

Metric #2: “Bounce Rate.”

In website lingo, the word “bounce” means “leave.” So your “Bounce Rate” tells you how many visitors arrive at your cannabis website and then quickly leave again. Bounce Rate is calculated by clicks. You need to have at least two or more pages on your website in order for the Bounce Rate metric to be meaningful for your cannabis marketing efforts.

A visitor who bounces is one who arrives at your site and then departs before clicking on anything – a link, a menu button, an email signup box, et al. If that visitor arrives at your site and clicks on anything at all, they will not be counted in your bounce rate even if they leave after clicking.

Your website’s Bounce Rate can tell you whether the content on your web pages is engaging visitors and potentially converting them into customers. A high Bounce Rate generally means your website content needs improvement because visitors are not finding the information they are seeking.

Metric #3: “Referral Sources.”

This metric tells you where many of your website visitors are coming from. In other words, where did they go online before they visited your site? Where are they hearing about your cannabis business online?

Here is an example: let’s say you have a Twitter presence for your cannabis business. You look at your Referral Sources metric and see a high rate of referrals from Twitter. This tells you that Twitter is a potentially good place to continue your marketing efforts.

Metric #4: “Alexa.com Ranking.”

Alexa.com is a marketing service that focuses on website ranking based on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) parameters.

So where using a tool like Google Analytics will help you benchmark your website’s performance today against your website’s performance yesterday and make adjustments, Alexa.com’s data can then help you benchmark your website’s performance against that of competing cannabis websites.

Metric #5: “ROI (Return on Investment) for Marketing”

So now you are reviewing your cannabis marketing metrics and making adjustments to the content on your web pages. You are also evaluating how your cannabis website is performing versus your closest competitors and adjusting your advertising to capitalize on what seems to be working well.

This gives you a new data set – ROI, or Return On Investment. Your ROI tells you how well a given advertising or marketing campaign is performing. In other words, did that campaign generate enough website sales to justify your expense?

Keeping a close eye on cost versus profit for each marketing campaign will help you make better use of every marketing dollar in your budget.

Metric #6: “CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).”

The CAC of each marketing campaign can be calculated as follows: total marketing profit minus total marketing expense divided by the number of new customers the campaign generated.

In other words, how much did it cost you to win each new customer’s business? The more you study your marketing metrics, the better you will get at generating new business without overspending on marketing to do so.

Metric #7: “Lifetime Value.”

As you no doubt know by now, there are so many different types of customers! Some will buy from you once and never be heard from again. Others will keep coming back day after day and year after year.

The “Lifetime Value” metric is vital to ensure you aren’t spending more to attract new cannabis customers than their estimated business is worth.