It’s not all about the numbers. When it comes to cannabis marketing and SEO, it’s mostly about your understanding of your target audience. In this article, we show you how researching and analyzing your target audience can help your brand increase ROI from online marketing.
How Cannabis Marketing, SEO, & Audience Research Work Together
Cannabis marketing isn’t just about your target key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, keyword rankings, time spent on the website, and online sales.
Effective marijuana marketing is also about completely understand your target audience, collecting and analyzing the information, and crafting a strategic cannabis SEO and blog content marketing campaign around that data.
When you focus your cannabis SEO strategy around the right target audience, you’ll be driving much more highly-qualified potential customers to your website, which will ultimately lead to a higher website conversion rate with increased revenues.
So how do you research and analyze your target audience in order to launch an effective cannabis marketing and SEO campaign? We’re going to show you in this article.
We’re assuming that you already have a website and have Google Analytics installed, active, and properly set up to collect audience data and e-commerce transactions. You’ll definitely need Google Analytics for this.
Here are 4 strategic tactics to gain insightful information about your target audiences to help you create a lucrative cannabis marketing and SEO strategy.
1. Identify Who’s Coming To Your Site & From Where
One thing I’ve realized since I’ve been doing SEO since 2004, and specifically doing cannabis SEO since 2017, is that many cannabis and CBD companies do not have their Google Analysts setup correctly.
One step that is often missed by many CBD, hemp, and cannabis websites is to simply enable the Demographics & Interests reports in your site’s Google Analytics.
It’s so easy to do, you’ll be pissed that you, or your web developer/SEO person, didn’t enable it initially when you launched your site. Reason being, you can’t collect any audience data until you enable this function.
Once you’ve enabled your audience data collection you’ll have access to a super useful range of information about who is visiting your website including, age, location, and online interests!
Pro Tip: How To Apply This Cannabis Marketing Tactic
Being aware of this information will allow you to identify just who your audience really is and which demographics your cannabis marketing strategy should focus on most, or least.
Gaining insight on the people that most frequently visit your website is super valuable to the other cannabis marketing and advertising tactics you’re using your online marketing strategy. For example:
- These analytics will provide qualified insight into your target customers so that you’re able to adjust and optimize your cannabis education strategy – a.k.a. your blog content marketing strategy.
- You can use this customer data to strategically target your cannabis advertising to your most lucrative geographic areas. This help to reduce marketing costs by eliminating low performing regions and focusing media spend on high performing regions.
- This data could shed some light on your current strategy and you may realize that it doesn’t align with your target markets or your company’s goals. This is good news, not bad. You can now reassess your current cannabis SEO strategy and adjust your target keywords and content strategy accordingly.
2. Use Cannabis Keyword Research To Identify Demographics Data
Keyword research for cannabis websites is an essential and effective digital marketing strategy for all companies in this space. There are too many advertising restrictions to deal with on other platforms, whereas with SEO, there are none. Zero, zip, zilch.
Your goal here is to research short-tail, long-tail, and semantically related keyword phrases that are relevant to your cannabis or CBD products. This is important, do not overlook the search intent and relevance of each keyword phrase you choose.
Once you have 25-40 highly targeted keyword search phrases, narrow that down to your top 5 that represent your brand best. You’ll spend time researching these top 5 to find the demographics associated with each term.
We suggest using the free search demographics tool Demographics.io to get this audience data. Here’s an example using the short-tail keyword “cbd oil”.
Another free tool you can use to get audience demographics data using cannabis-related keyword research is Google Trends.
This tool will also provide you with audience demographic data based on keyword research, tied to a certain location, as well as how the keyword phrase has trended over time. Here’s an example using “cbd oil”.
Pro Tip: How To Apply This Cannabis Marketing SEO Tip
I’m sure you’re beginning to see that identifying demographic info like age, gender, and location can help your Cannabis SEO in many ways.
If you have a retail cannabis location as well as an online store, local SEO and local link opportunities are vital tactics to implement.
Using the age and gender data can help you further optimize content strategy for blogs and for social media platforms.
The data will help you determine the best cannabis or CBD topics, interests, terminology, and trends that are relevant to these targets.
3. Social Media Channels Can Provide Lucrative Social Insights
If you didn’t know this already, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are one of the quickest and most effective ways to gather information about any specific audience segment.
Did you know that you can view demographic information about your fans & followers via your company’s Facebook business page?
Even better, use a tool called Followerwonk to view data from your competitors and other cannabis or CBD brands. This tool provides a nice visual word cloud to show you what social media users are talking about.
Pro Tip: How To Apply This Marijuana Marketing Idea
If you use the word cloud tool in Followerwonk, it can help you identify a list of other keywords that you may have missed. These terms can also present valuable content marketing ideas to target top, middle, or bottom of the funnel customers.
4. Look For Questions Your Potential Target Market Are Asking About Cannabis or CBD Products
You may not have realized this yet but Google has been showing answers to user search queries directly in the search results and on the search results pages. This means that for some questions, users don’t even need to go to a company’s website for the answer.
This is why identifying common questions about CBD products, cannabis strains, and the health benefits of each, and publish this info on your website in SEO optimized blog content is an important cannabis SEO strategy.
You can use cannabis and CBD keyword research tactics to determine the long-tail search queries of your target audience so you can place relevant content in front of them at the right time – when they are actively searching for answers to their questions.
What are long-tail search queries and why are they important?
Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase or when they’re using voice search.
35.6 million Americans used a voice-activated assistant device at least once a month in 2017, per eMarketer—a year-over-year increase of 129%.
Long-Tail search queries can be a little bit counter-intuitive, at first, but they can be hugely valuable if you know how to use them.
Here’s an example: if you’re a dispensary that sells cannabis strains, CBD, and other marijuana derivatives online, as well as in a local retail shop, the chances are that your website’s pages are never going to show up near the top of an organic search for “cannabis”, “marijuana”, or “CBD”, because there’s too much competition.
This is especially true if you’re a smaller cannabis company or a startup.
But, let’s say you specialize in hemp-derived CBD products for women, 45-65+ who want non-psychoactive CBD products to help them manage anxiety, stress, and pain management.
Then keywords and blog topics like “best cbd cream for arthritis pain”, “best cbd products for acne scars”, and “cbd oil for wrinkles before and after” are going to reliably target the right consumers who are looking for exactly that product that you sell.
Pro Tip: How To Apply This To Your Cannabis Marketing
Simply create high-quality, user and SEO optimized content with topics that answer the common questions to attract long-tail searches from your target audience, and the chances of you showing up on page 1, or even better, as a direct answer in the search results will increase significantly.
We Can Hemp You Optimize & Manage Your Cannabis Marketing
If you’d like our help in optimizing your cannabis marketing by identifying and analyzing your target audience, we’re ready to provide you with experienced cannabis marketing services.
We highly recommend implementing a cannabis SEO and content strategy to drive traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, and fill the top of your sales funnel.
We provide SEO & UX Audits for existing websites, or we can implement a new, customized cannabis SEO strategy on your site, along with a blog content writing plan to increase your website’s authority & relevance.
Please call us for a free 30-minute consult or email us to request a quote.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!
