Why Your Online Dispensary Needs a Marketing Strategy
Do you have the right marketing strategy for your online dispensary?
It’s tempting to think that you don’t need marketing for some products. After all, marijuana is a desirable product that many people need for medical reasons. Why would you need marketing to get them to buy it, especially when they can easily buy it online?
However, the reality is that every business needs a marketing strategy, even an online dispensary. If you don’t nail down your marketing techniques, your competition will quickly take over.
In this guide, we’ll show you exactly why your marketing strategy is so important to the success of your online dispensary. Keep reading to learn more!
1. Save Time
One of the main reasons to have a strategy is to save time down the road. If you plan ahead now, you won’t waste time fumbling through your marketing later on.
Marketing strategies are complicated. If you don’t think ahead, you won’t be able to make the organized moves that will allow you to succeed.
With a strategy, you’ll ensure that your efforts can really work, so you won’t have to backtrack later on. It’s a “work smarter, not harder” approach. Don’t waste time on a marketing campaign that doesn’t have a strategy. Instead, plan ahead to save your precious time.
2. Stay Focused
There are so many different ways to do marketing for an online dispensary. If you don’t have a plan, you won’t be able to keep your focus throughout the process. You might even feel overwhelmed or lost if you don’t start by narrowing down your options.
When you make a marketing plan, you can choose the strategies that will work best for your business, and leave the rest behind. This helps you focus your efforts on the areas where you’ll see the most success.
You need to break down your strategy into the individual parts so you can see how they’ll all work together in the end. This focus allows you to fine-tune your work and concentrate on the right steps at the right time.
3. Beat the Competition
If you don’t have a strategy to use, you’ll quickly lose your customers to the competition that does. Marketing is how your online dispensary attracts the customers it needs to thrive.
Make sure you have a plan, so you don’t let the competitors get ahead.
4. Help Customers Find You
You already know that customers are looking for the product you’re selling. However, if you don’t have a marketing plan, they’ll find your competition instead of your company.
For example, if a customer types “Ventura mmj delivery” into Google, they’re looking for medical marijuana delivery in the Ventura area. The companies that come up first in the search results will be those companies that have a marketing plan.
Your business might have exactly what they need, but if you haven’t focused your marketing efforts, they might not even find your company’s name in the search results.
5. Target Search Engines
This leads to the next important point: a marketing plan is essential for SEO.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is what allows customers to find your company in situations like the one above. When a customer does a Google search, Google selects which websites to show based on how well that site does SEO.
With SEO, you’ll use things like keywords, blog posts, images, and links to make your site show up above your competitors’. However, if you don’t have a marketing strategy that involves SEO in place, your site won’t show up in your client’s searches.
SEO isn’t just something you can throw together at the last minute – you need a strategy to really make it work.
6. Produce Great Content
Content, such as videos and blog posts, is an important part of SEO and marketing overall. Without a strategy, you won’t be able to produce excellent content that gets the attention of your customers.
People are exposed to tons of online content every day. To make yours stand out, you need to plan ahead. This means keeping up with trends, making a content calendar, and covering the topics that your customers are most interested in.
A strategy gives you the time to research and develop this great content for your customers.
7. Use Social Media Effectively
It’s tempting to think that social media will be an easy part of marketing. After all, many people use social media recreationally. However, when it comes to using it for business purposes, you’ll need a strategy.
Social media posts need to be strategized to best reach your customers. You’ll need to know exactly what kinds of things they want to see. For example, does your clientele respond best to text posts, or videos?
A good social media strategy also involves lots of research. You’ll need to find out when your customers spend the most time online, so you can post at those times for the most engagement. You’ll need to review your approach from time to time and use analytics to see how well it’s working.
With a solid marketing strategy, you can seamlessly integrate social media into your overall business approach.
8. Predict Challenges
All businesses have challenges. If you have a marketing strategy in place, you can anticipate some of the marketing challenges you’re likely to face, which will make them much easier to overcome.
In fact, if you know your challenges ahead of time, you might even be able to turn them into strong points for your company.
9. Prioritize Tasks
Some marketing tasks are more important for your business than others. Use a strategy to help you prioritize the tasks that will get you the most results first.
This makes your efforts more effective, by breaking down the time you spend on marketing in the most strategic way. You don’t want to spend more time on tasks that will get minimal results while neglecting the tasks that would get major results.
Does Your Online Dispensary Have a Strategy?
If you don’t have a marketing strategy yet, it’s time to change that. Don’t wait – every day you work without a marketing strategy is a day your competitors can get ahead.
For more on marketing, check out our guide to content marketing here.