Why Your Cannabis Dispensary Marketing Ideas Aren’t Working (and What to Do About It)
Congratulations, your cannabis dispensary is finally open and online. Now let’s get to the hard part: how do you get people to find you, trust you, and buy from you?
There are many cannabis dispensary marketing ideas, from paid cannabis ads and email marketing to good old SEO and content, that are said to be the best for boosting traffic and increasing sales.
However, we are in an era where cannabis marketing strategies from the past barely make an impact, while some are just too expensive to justify.
One of the cannabis dispensary marketing mistakes many make is using strategies that work in other, more mainstream industries without taking into consideration the unique circumstances in which we operate.
For example, mainstream paid ads work beautifully in other sectors, but they’re heavily restricted for cannabis.
While there are some workarounds for this, they only increase the cost without justifiable revenue increases.
The good news is, there are practical, budget-friendly cannabis dispensary marketing ideas that work for both online and physical retail weed stores in North America.
In this article, we examine the ideas that work today in cannabis dispensary digital marketing and how they may improve your bottom line.
Read on to learn how to market your dispensary effectively.
1. Dispensary SEO Strategy: How to Increase Your Visibility Online
Search remains the primary channel for stoners who want to buy cannabis online or find a nearby weed store.
It is a critical weed dispensary internet marketing tactic that directly impacts your visibility and revenue.
How will potential customers know your dispensary exists if they can’t find you?
Cannabis marketing strategies that ignore SEO mean your dispensary will miss out on free, high-intent visitors and sales.
These are stoners who want to buy and are looking for more product details or options.
Needless to say, most weed enthusiasts can find what they need in the search results. So, you need your dispensary’s website to rank and be the go-to option they click on.
To do this, you will need a proper strategy in place.
Working with an experienced cannabis marketing agency like ColaDigital can help you realize the gains of dispensary SEO within a short time.
The best part is that SEO is a long-term strategy with a lower cost per acquisition compared to most cannabis dispensary marketing ideas.
This means the work you do today keeps paying off for months to come.
There are two approaches to SEO weed marketing, depending on the type of dispensary: national SEO and Local SEO strategies.
(i) National SEO for Cannabis Dispensaries
National SEO is a dispensary SEO strategy to increase your visibility nationwide or in a vast region without targeting specific areas such as a city or neighbourhood.
This strategy serves mail-order dispensaries and regional operators by helping them target potential stoners nationwide.
If your dispensary serves multiple cities, states, provinces or even countries, you will need a robust national or “regular” SEO and keyword strategy.
Retail dispensaries with local locations should focus on local SEO, among other ideas for localized marketing for weed stores.
For national SEO marijuana marketing to be effective, you need a cannabis keyword and content strategy.
Here’s how to market your dispensary to a national audience:
-
Target buyer intent keywords
These are keywords that signal a stoner’s intention to buy a product or strain.
By targeting these high-intent keywords, your dispensary can reach potential stoners already in the later stages of their buying process.
For example, keywords such as “buy THC watermelon gummies online,” “cheap strain,” or “best THC vape” show higher buyer intent. Therefore, they often lead to higher conversion rates.
However, they are also the most competitive, which is where an experienced cannabis marketing agency comes in.
Well-formed SEO cannabis marketing ideas and strategies will help your mail-order dispensary target weed lovers who are actively looking to buy.
-
Your Dispensary Website Matters for National SEO
In addition to a proper cannabis keyword strategy, your site architecture also matters.
Having a crawlable website, indexable category pages, sub-category pages, and unique, keyword-optimized product pages helps your site rank higher. This means more traffic, leading to more sales.
Your dispensary’s menu platform can also make or break your weed SEO strategy.
Using iFrames, also known as embedded menu platforms, such as Dutchie, comes at a serious cost to SEO, as search engines, such as Google, cannot access, crawl, index, and rank your product pages.
With iFrames, you are leaving money on the table.
That’s why our cannabis marketing agency recommends Breadstack for Canadian dispensaries and LeafBridge for USA stores.
These companies offer true e-commerce solutions that help boost traffic, rankings and revenue for cannabis dispensaries.
(ii) Local SEO for Retail Dispensary Marketing
Local SEO is a cannabis dispensary marketing strategy that helps your cannabis business be more visible in local search results.
This is one of the best cannabis dispensary marketing ideas that increase sales for businesses that have a physical location or serve a specific geographical area.
As such, local SEO is non-negotiable for retail cannabis dispensary marketing.
According to recent research, over 80% of consumers search for local businesses with keywords such as “cannabis dispensary near me,” and are more likely to visit the physical location.
Not yet convinced?
Over 28% of those searches result in a purchase, which is an incredibly high conversion rate.
Want to see more visitors and orders rolling in and your revenue skyrocket?
Optimize your dispensary for local searches and rank on Google Maps.
Local queries such as “cannabis dispensary near me” and those that mention a specific location, city, or street, are the holy grail for a retail store’s foot traffic and same-day conversions.
With a proper local SEO weed marketing strategy, you may rank in the Local Pack: the three businesses that appear at the top of the local search results in the map block.
So, how do you market your dispensary locally?
-
Optimize Your Website With Local SEO Focus
Local SEO for weed stores is the key tactic to ranking high in your area and being featured in the Local Map Pack on Google.
Ensure you have localized cannabis content on your website, target local keywords and earn backlinks from local businesses and institutions.
Creating localized landing pages for nearby neighbourhoods and suburbs you serve is a good way to achieve this.
-
Complete Your Cannabis Google Business Profile
Claim and fully complete your Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, with your name, address, phone number, hours, and product categories.
Optimize the GBP page with keywords from your cannabis SEO strategy.
We also recommend regularly uploading SEO-optimized images to your GBP page and embedding your name, address, phone number, and a few strategic keywords into the metadata.
Improved local visibility leads to more walk-ins and same-day orders, all without ongoing ad spend.
2. Cannabis Dispensary Content Marketing that Converts
Is content marketing for a cannabis dispensary relevant today?
Yes. Content is still King when it comes to cannabis dispensary marketing ideas.
We are in the AI era, where tons of pot content is published daily, flooding the market and strangling the voices of many businesses.
This, however, makes it even more crucial for your dispensary to stand out, separating itself from all the noise.
Those who manage attract organic traffic and eventually increase sales and revenue.
Most dispensary owners think that content = blogs. But that’s only half the story.
There are several types of content that you must consider in your cannabis dispensary content marketing strategy to be successful.
These include cannabis product and category pages, which help funnel traffic into conversions.
(i) Blog Content: Attract Traffic, Educate Stoners
Despite the mounting research evidence regarding the benefits of cannabis, there is still a lot of misinformation floating online.
Cannabis blog content provides an avenue where you can educate potential customers and create trust.
Google consistently rewards original, high-quality content that demonstrates qualities of E.E.A.T.: Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
As such, if your blog content informs, educates and answers questions that stoners may have, it will rank better on Google.
To create such blogs that resonate with weed enthusiasts and perform better in search results, you must first understand stoner intent.
What is a pot lover looking for when they search for phrases like “best budget flower online,” “best weed dispensary near me,” or “is cannabis good for sleep”?
Understanding user intent helps you provide value to stoners, increasing your trustworthiness. People only buy from cannabis brands they trust.
But for this to happen, your marijuana content has to reach the audience. As such, you must optimize it for search engines using relevant keywords, captivating titles and structuring.
In-depth cannabis blogs and reviews provide an opportunity to target keywords, offer value to cannabis enthusiasts, and boost your search engine rankings.
This builds trust, increases traffic, and conversion rates.
(ii) Content Beyond Blogs: Product, Category & Sub-Category Pages
Many cannabis dispensary marketing agencies focus their efforts on blogs, how-to guides and reviews (top and middle of the SEO funnel).
But without the bottom SEO funnel content, they lose out on higher conversion rates.
A potential customer goes through several stages in their buying journey: awareness, consideration and decision.
We map our SEO cannabis content marketing strategy onto these different stages to attract the right people, guide them and convert them into customers.
Blogs attract stoners, but to drive conversions, you must guide them with other types of content that educate them about your dispensary products, ultimately leading to a decision.
This is where category, subcategory and product pages come in.
Category, subcategory, and product pages educate potential customers about the dispensary’s products, including the various types available, before directing them to specific products of interest.
Along the way, the stoner gets a chance to compare your products with others, learn about the ingredients, the effects they produce, dosage, and the prices.
This type of content sells and ranks. As such, you must incorporate high-intent keywords such as “Best budget flower” or “high-THC gummies for evenings.”
Well-written, optimized product and category content increases conversion rates and reduces dependency on paid ads, especially when used alongside other cannabis dispensary marketing ideas.
3. Programmatic Display Advertising for Cannabis
Imagine a world where you can retarget every potential customer who visits your dispensary website with tailored display or video ads while they are online on other platforms and websites?
We have the perfect solution: programmatic display advertising for cannabis dispensaries.
Programmatic display advertising is the automated process of selling and buying digital ad resources using real-time bidding systems.
Unlike traditional search and social cannabis advertising, programmatic platforms provide your dispensary with hundreds of thousands of available ad spaces instantly.
This system leverages data and algorithms to target stoners across websites and platforms precisely, decide where and when to run the ads, and how much to pay. All while delivering the ads in milliseconds.
Programmatic display advertising comprises demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs) and ad exchanges.
DSP software enables your cannabis dispensary to purchase digital ad inventory.
SSP is the technology that facilitates the selling of ad space on websites and apps through the ad exchange.
The ad exchange is a visual marketplace where your dispensary can buy ad space on the suppliers’ websites in an automated, real-time bidding process.
Our partner DSPs allow for cannabis advertising, so we don’t have to jump through hoops to get your dispensary advertising approved or avoid being blocked.
Considering only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit, retargeting is a must for cannabis dispensaries.
Our programmatic display advertising solution allows you to retarget potential stoners who have shown an interest in your cannabis products.
This means better ROI for your cannabis dispensary marketing spend.
4. Google Search Advertising
Is it possible to advertise cannabis using Google search advertising?
Yes. It is possible. But it is certainly not easy. The same applies to advertising cannabis on Facebook.
That said, we have been able to advertise cannabis on Google successfully, even getting high conversion rates while coming in under budget in some cases.
Our cannabis marketing agency offers a compliant PPC advertising strategy, including keyword and competitor research, campaign setup, optimization and Google Ad account verification for licensed dispensaries.
Check out our cannabis advertising strategy for more details and case studies.
Dispensary advertising may be coming to the mainstream with Google announcing a cannabis business advertising pilot program in Canada in mid-2025.
5. Email Marketing for Dispensaries: Personalized Approach for Repeat Business
When it comes to long-term business and connection with stoners, none of the other cannabis dispensary marketing ideas can beat email marketing.
Email marketing provides an opportunity for predictable repeat revenue as well as building a loyal customer base.
Including email marketing as part of your overall strategy provides an opportunity to establish a direct, personalized connection to weed lovers who have an interest in your dispensary’s products.
To build a loyal customer base, you have to do more than just send promotional emails to stoners.
Use emails to share insights about the cannabis industry, as well as engaging and informative cannabis content that resonates with stoners.
The goal is to position your dispensary marketing emails as a resource rather than a promotional tool.
This helps develop a connection with the stoners that extends beyond transactional value, making them feel valued.
Email marketing can be integrated with your overall dispensary marketing strategy to drive traffic to your website, gain user-generated content such as testimonials, and reinforce a customer’s connection to your brand.
6. Real Cannabis Menus Matter
If your dispensary is using an embedded iFrame menu, you’re leaving traffic and conversions on the table.
And it’s not a minor technical nitpick: it’s the difference between organic product pages that rank and a menu that doesn’t even appear on search.
Search engines often struggle to access and crawl menus within iFrames, meaning all those optimized product descriptions and photos you upload may never be indexed or ranked.
Your dispensary may be losing revenue this way.
Our cannabis marketing agency recommends menus that provide a fully fledged website structure, such as Breadstack for Canadian dispensaries and LeafBridge for US stores.
Unlike third-party iFrame menus, Breadstack and LifeBridge enable full customization, from high-quality images to detailed SEO product descriptions that help potential customers find exactly what they want, thereby increasing revenue.
We Can Help You Execute Your Dispensary Marketing Ideas Effectively
For maximum benefits, we recommend combining several cannabis dispensary marketing ideas.
However, it may be quite a challenge because of the hoops a cannabis dispensary has to jump through that other businesses don’t.
We can help.
Our cannabis dispensary marketing agency offers services including national and local SEO, content marketing and digital advertising solutions.
We help you implement Breadstack or LeafBridge, two revolutionary solutions designed to drive higher conversions through the power of SEO.
Take full advantage of digital cannabis dispensary marketing with our tailor-made SEO and advertising solutions.
Contact us for a free consultation or to request a quote today!
