The rise of cannabis has been a long time coming, but the movement boomed at an age in which the Internet is widely used. Along with the prevalence of the Internet, social media began to take the world by storm. In fact, many social networking platforms are used for various campaigns, including advocacy and political ones.
One industry that benefitted from the value offered by social media is cannabis. Advocates of the plant and marijuana law reforms use such platforms to educate and show their support. They also use it to campaign for positive changes that can have implications on politics.
Aside from these two sectors, the marketing arena has also been utilizing what social media has to offer. Applied to the cannabis industry, social media as a marketing platform offers a great opportunity for businesses to disseminate information about their company, products, services, promotions, and other similar campaigns.
For starting companies, branding is an important aspect of their marketing strategy. It helps establish the reputation of the company while setting expectations for the target market. If you own a cannabis business looking to rebrand your company or you are thinking of launching a business, you might want to take advantage of what social media has to offer.
Branding Your Cannabis Business
Let’s start with your branding. You need to give a lot of thought to your brand. A brand is what makes your company distinct from other companies. Specifically, it is the name, symbol, design, and other things that can identify your company. The goal is to do your best to make sure that the target market thinks of all things positive when they hear your brand name or see your logo. In a way, branding is essentially creating the first impression for your company and its offerings.
Because of this, you want to take some time brainstorming for the brand. One of the things you want to take into account is your identity. What do you want your company to be known and stand for? Defining your brand identity is important. For your cannabis business, you want to look at your business plan. This can give you an idea about what it is all about and how it can reflect on your products or services.
Some of the most important aspects of your branding are the brand name, logo, colors, tagline, message, ideas, and values. You should be able to translate this into the packaging, design, and marketing materials.
Creativity is the key when doing branding for a cannabis company. You want to make sure that it shows what aspect of the cannabis industry you are trying to tap into. Are you going to the medical cannabis market? Do you want to cater to recreational marijuana consumers? Are you interested in the CBD market? Remember that all of these are in your business plan and the creative treatment of these things can help in your branding strategies.
Why Social Media?
So, you now have an idea of how to brand your cannabis business. You have a whole lot of options to market your brand. You can go the more traditional route and make commercials, radio advertisements, and posters. You can also combine traditional and more modern means of marketing your brand by using a mix of traditional and digital marketing practices.
Social media is one of the hottest and most used online platforms. In the United States last year, there are 231.47 million, which means that 70% of Americans are active on social media. This shows a 3.1% growth compared to 2019 figure amounting to 6.9 million individuals and it is only expected to grow over the years.
With the number of people already on social media, you already have millions of people waiting for you to publish your marketing materials. However, keep in mind that creating profiles on these platforms is just the beginning. You will need to create content and get ahold of your target market on social media. This could be the most important part of the whole process. Then, promoting your page to reach your intended audience is the next big step.
Maximizing Your Facebook Engagement
To make sure that your pages and content reach your target market, you need to make sure that you are on some of the most important platforms in the United States. Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the US, which showed a growth of 1% from 2019 to 2020.
However, you want to remember that many people who are active on Facebook are older individuals. In fact, younger generations tend to be active elsewhere than on Facebook. This is a great thing because it gives you an opportunity to promote cannabis, your company, and your offerings to individuals who are in need of some convincing.
The best thing about this platform is it can carry all kinds of content, from short captions to full one articles to images and videos. It also has the Story function, which allows you to post temporary content, just like on Instagram.
Moreover, it offers additional engagements though the Messenger Chatbot. Remember that Messenger is connected with the Facebook website so that users can easily get in touch with the businesses they want to connect with.
This gives you an opportunity to provide excellent customer service. Say you are not online to reply to your customers’ messages. You can let a chatbot send a message notifying the other party about your hours and that you will get back to them during these hours. You can also use the chatbot to provide smart assistance even without a human person behind the screen.
Aside from Messenger, you can also engage with your customers in other aspects of Facebook like through comments, replies, and reactions. Doing all of these on Facebook lets you create an organic connection with your target market, which can eventually help provide organic results.
Expanding Your Instagram Reach
The next big thing in social media is Instagram. It is a preferred platform for marketers, influencers, online boutiques, and many brands. Instagram is known for being a photo-focused platform, despite letting users post short videos and longer videos on IGTV. Like Facebook, it has one of the biggest shares of users with expectations to increase over the next years.
The main thing about Instagram is it helps users curate the content they want to publish. The artsy feel offered by this website further provides an advantage, especially if you plan on focusing on aesthetics as a selling point of your brand. Once your prospective customer visits your profile, they will see your well-curated feed of images.
As a marketing platform, this can offer a series of photos not only of your merchandise but also your marketing and branding materials. While Facebook’s feed shows a complete context for your posts, showing photos and videos, as well as captions and comments, IG’s feed lets users see photos first.
So, when they interact with your post and view them, you are sure that they are interested in what you have to say. Leaving comments on your post hammers down the point. Replying to their comments is also a great way to engage with your target market.
Establish a Presence in Cannabis Business Social Network
Aside from the more popular platforms, you have a few other choices that can help boost your brand. One thing to note about these sites is they are intended for general use. In short, anyone can use them, making it a melting pot of businesses and consumers. As cannabis is a pretty specialized market, you want social media sites that are more targeted to your intended audience.
Your best bet here is cannabis social networks. The main point is that they are marketed to people interested in marijuana. It helps people connect with other people with the same love for the plant. Some even function just like the more mainstream options. The most important thing is there are a lot of sites that allow them to buy and sell products, much like an e-commerce site.
Besides the business-to-customer approach, there are sites that cater to business-to-business matters. What you need to do is simply make a profile on these platforms and get in touch with other businesses whose services or products can help you conduct your business.
If you are a startup company that is looking for investors to help launch the business, there are social networking sites for that as well. This lets you put your company out there and market it for potential investors. It may take some time, but this can be your chance to expand your business, develop your products, and even establish more branches.
The Bottom Line
Social media is not only good for forging connections with people across the globe. For cannabis business owners like you, it can be a great platform for your branding activities that can help boost your company’s brand, sales, and revenues.