With online marketing coming in hot in the cannabis industry, there’s a debate raging among marketing experts over which strategy is best to grow your cannabis business.
In your opinion would SEO or social media marketing be the better option?
Best Options For Cannabis Business Marketing
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Social Media Marketing
Often, businesses will hire an SEO expert or agency to increase their visibility in the search engines without even thinking about social media and the traffic that it can bring to their business.
Similarly, there are those who focus their attention entirely on building a social media following without spending any time on SEO.
Let’s compare both strategies to see which option is best, especially for cannabis businesses.
Targeting an Audience
To bring in relevant traffic to your online presence and (for now) in-store sales, it’s important to target your brands aligned crowd of customers. It is too many targets on social media for you not to find your audience.
Most social media gives you the tools help you specifically target people within a certain demographic who will be interested in your cannabis derived products.
SEO is not quite as targeted. Although you can certainly target those interested in your niche, you generally cannot target a specific demographic.
It's like casting a net in the ocean in the middle of a bait ball feast, you'll get your sardines but you'll also get sharks, dolphins, and maybe a seal or two.
How Much Effort Would I Have To Put In?
To ensure a big return on investment, you’ll want to consider how much effort is required to promote your content via social media and SEO.
With social media, you’ll have to plan and post regular compliant content on the various platforms. While there are a number of platforms available that can make this process easier, you still have to do this on a consistent basis and make sure to follow up with any comments.
Social media marketing is not something that you can rely on to work without putting that work in. Every post you make will have a very short shelf life, so you’ll need to make an effort everyday to have your social media presence known in your territory.
SEO, on the other hand, will require some real detailed work, but once you start to rank your web pages, there will be less ongoing work involved. It gains more attention the longer its on the web.
Which Content Should You Use?
Whether you're cannabis business is performing SEO or social media marketing, you’ll need to create great content, well you know, cannabis is still federally illegal so post compliantly.
The type of content you create MUST make a big impact on your traffic and whether your audience engages with it or not depends on this factor!
When writing cannabis content for your website or blog, usually long-form educational content will work best. This means that you may need to create blogs, listicles, articles, or newsletters of a few thousand words, rather than a couple of hundred.
For social media, images and videos will work best and will be shared across the community if they resonate with the audience. When this occurs and your content starts to be shared, you’ll also see an increase in traffic to your website.
Social Media Marketing Super Tips
Use Cannabis Influencers
Use Disclaimers In Your Copy
So, Which is Better - SEO or Social Media Marketing?
Listen, I believe you’ll see the most benefits from both. SEO and social media marketing in your cannabis marketing efforts is an iron-clad way to be on customers minds.
Write long articles educated your customers about cannabis and embed images and videos into your content. Doing this will only increase engagement and time spent on your website, therefore showing the search engines that your content is good and can be trusted. Plus, people will share your content on social media that they find to be interesting and valuable to their friends.
Search engines nowadays use social media as a ranking factor, so it’s worth building your social media presence as it will help with your website SEO ranking. Building traffic via SEO to your website will also help people to engage on social media too.
So, while SEO and social media marketing are different, they each help the other help you become discoverable and the end goal of both is the same - to help increase traffic to your website, products, or services.
The answer is easy: Do Both!
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