Colorado was one of the first two states to legalize recreational marijuana use helping cannabis become a $10.4 billion industry for the United States in the year of 2018. With state lawmakers keeping this controversial industry at the forefront of conversations, it’s interesting to reflect on the way such a product is marketed.
Regardless of beliefs on the growing business (no pun intended), it’s a true testament that not all digital marketing strategies work the same for every industry. And this is where Denver SEO services come in. But we’ll get to that in a minute!
The list of marketing hurdles in the cannabis industry is long. Not only are there state laws to abide by, but local laws as well. Comparable to marketing in the pharmaceutical, financial, and gambling industries, cannabis is highly, highly regulated.
Traditional marketing tactics are strictly regulated as is digital marketing. In fact, many online and social platforms restrict the marketing of legal cannabis as a whole.
So this poses the question, how does a legal, yet restricted industry market their product in the best way?
Out of all of the avenues of digital marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) will be the most important one to tackle.
SEO is a marketing strategy implemented to increase organic website traffic. This unpaid, organic traffic is extremely important in the cannabis industry as it drives high quality prospects to a website through searches engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
Because traditional and social media marketing campaigns are highly-restricted, having an easy to navigate, optimized website with helpful, useful information will give you a leg-up in the marketing game.
Now, this isn’t to say there aren’t state-by-state restrictions on cannabis websites. The advantage of a search optimized site is having longform content where a good keyword strategy can be implemented to educate your audience in a number of ways.
As always, search engines, like Google, favor quality content. Quality content shows Google that a website is reliable, relevant, current and useful to its users. In return, Google will start increasing search rankings. In a controversial industry, such as with cannabis, it’s important to not only show trustworthiness to website users, but to Google.
By hiring a trusted professional for Denver SEO services, a business in the cannabis industry can maintain marketing compliance, provide an education experience, and create smart content to boost search rankings.
Email marketing can often go overlooked. However, in the cannabis industry, there is great power in an email subscription list.
In the United States, the average person spends over two hours and twenty-two minutes each day on social media and two hours a day on email. If social media is highly restricted, it makes sense to marketing where people are spending the most time getting information. Email.
By putting informational material directly into the hands of a target audience with peaked interest, a business gains brand awareness, has a platform to speak directly to customers, and show expertise in the industry.
Marketing in the cannabis industry in Colorado is interesting and complex! It’s important to hire your Denver SEO services though a professional that understands both industries; SEO and cannabis.
Are you ready to boost your digital marketing efforts through SEO? Our team of professional SEOs in Denver can help!