In today’s world, your potential marijuana customers spend time on Instagram, Facebook, and other social media sites, as well as on search engines like Google and Bing, looking for information or to buy something. Is your marijuana marketing team spending the appropriate time on search marketing as they are on social marketing? Here’s how to improve your marijuana marketing strategy by combing Instagram, Google, and Bing.
How To Use SEO To Increase Your Instagram Engagement & Followers
Did you know that you can use SEO in your CBD or marijuana marketing strategy to increase engagement on Facebook & Instagram? SEO and social media platforms can work really, really well together for a CBD dispensary and cannabis retail store.
I’ve always believed in a multi-channel approach to digital marketing, and the same applies to CBD and marijuana marketing.
I like to say that I use social media for demand generation, and use Google for demand fulfillment.
Reason being, people don’t go to social media when they have the intent to find more information on a particular subject, right? They also don’t go to social media when they wan to buy something, right?
Where do you go when you want to buy something or search up some info before you purchase something?
I’m betting you hit up a search engine like Google or Bing and type in (or voice search) your query. You’re not hitting up Insta, and neither are your customers.
People use Google very much differently than they use social media. Logic would then dictate that as cannabis marketers and business owners, we need to do the same.
That is, use search marketing to strategically drive “bottom of the funnel” people who are ready to purchase to your website, and use social media marketing to strategically create awareness and generate demand for your marijuana and CBD products.
In this article, we’re going to illustrate how cannabis and CBD businesses can combine Google, Facebook, and Instagram marketing into a brilliant CBD & marijuana marketing strategy.
Search & Social Marketing Strategy Works For Marijuana Marketing
While in real life, Google and Facebook may be fierce adversaries and may even dislike each other. But when it comes to marijuana marketing strategy, these two major digital platforms can be a gift to marijuana marketers.
Let’s look at an example and expand on what we mentioned above. That people don’t typically go to social media when they’re looking for specific information or to buy something specific.
We’ll break it down to two specific cannabis consumer cohorts and the 3 stages of their customer journey.
Remember that these cohorts represent a group of similar people in that cohort and not one specific person. Look at them as marketing “personas” or consumer “avatars”.
Consumer Cohort #1 is a 24-year-old female who lives in the United States, in your city or geographic business area, and has used cannabis a few times in the past, but not a regular user.
They’d prefer not to smoke cannabis but are open to vaping marijuana or CBD, and smoking weed occasionally.
Consumer Cohort #2 is also a 24-year-old female who lives in the United States, in your city or geographic business area, and is a regular user of marijuana for recreational purposes, but has never tried CBD oil or CBD products.
She knows what she likes and she likes to try different marijuana strains from different dispensaries near her, as well as online.
I think we can agree that these are 2 similar people, but each views cannabis differently and therefore uses cannabis uniquely, if they use it at all.
The question now becomes, what type of marijuana marketing strategy do you need to implement in order attract the hundreds of thousands of people in these two different cohorts, and get them to trust your CBD or marijuana brand enough to buy from you, repeatedly?
How Setup Your Social Media Content To Be Congruent With Your Google & Bing Content
The answer to the question above is to implement a marijuana marketing strategy that includes a demand generation strategy for social media and a demand fulfillment strategy for Google and Bing search engines.
You’ll need to adjust your social media content to reflect this new strategy. You may want to post more about your brand and educat customers on the benefits of the products that you sell, without trying to sell them your products, yet.
You should still post product shots and soft “promotions”, but ease up on any hard selling. Not everyone is on their Insta looking to shop, and you also want to make sure you’re marketing to both cannabis consumer cohorts we mentioned above.
Sure, impulse buying is a thing and social media marketing rocks for this, but remember, we building a new marijuana marketing strategy for your brand.
The good news is that your organic reach on Instagram can be much better than that of Facebook because Facebook isn’t limiting organic reach on Instagram, yet (they will be soon!), and that you can maximize your Instagram marijuana marketing strategy by using strategic hashtags, because if you use the right hashtags, you will expand your organic reach to highly qualified people.
Your goals here are to simply grow your following, boost your engagement rate on your social media posts, and increase awareness of your brand. If you’re also able to generate an increase in website traffic from social media, that’s just going to help this overall marijuana marketing strategy.
So now, from a high level, you have your Instagram marketing strategy in place for your products, it’s time to add a demand fulfillment channel to your new marijuana marketing mix.
This is where Google, Bing, and search engine optimization (SEO) come into your strategy. Search is the best channel to reach cohort #2 – the people that are ready to buy marijuana or CBD, now.
One option is to try to run a Google Ads PPC campaign to promote your CBD and marijuana products. However, you already know that it’s going to be a huge challenge and that you run the risk of having your ads disapproved, or worse, getting your Google Ads account shut down.
It is possible to advertise marijuana on Google. We have examples on how we have been able to advertise medical marijuana on Facebook, Google, and YouTube. You can read the case studies for more information. If it’s something you’d like to try for your marijuana products, please contact us for a free consultation.
A better option of marketing cannabis and CBD on Google is to use SEO and content marketing as part of your marijuana marketing strategy. There are no advertising restrictions when it comes to the content you publish on your website, and, you’ll always own and control all of your website content.
SEO for marijuana companies is the most effective digital marketing tactic to get your website content to show up in search engine results for searches related to learning more about marijuana and CBD or looking to buy marijuana or CBD online.
In the next section, we’ll discuss how to implement a marijuana SEO strategy into your marijuana marketing mix to capture cannabis cohort #2.
Strategically Add Google & Bing Search Into Your Marijuana Marketing Mix
Do you believe that your Instagram followers will use Google or Bing search engines when they are looking to buy CBD or weed, online or at a store near them?
Some, if not all of them certainly will. So will other Instagram users who saw your content in their feeds because they follow some of the hashtags you used in your Instagram marketing.
After all, you are using Instagram to create awareness and generate demand of your products as part of your marijuana marketing strategy. You also use Instagram as a branding tool for your marijuana company.
When your Instagram followers aren’t on social media and are using search engines to find information on cannabis and CBD products, or maybe they are ready to buy marijuana or CBD online, you want them to find your website on page 1 of their search results.
If they do find your site in search, they may recognize your brand name because they follow you on Insta. They may click on your listing and land on your site and start to feel immediately comfortable because they recognize your brand from their Instagram feed.
But in order for these people to find you in a search engine your website and it’s content, code, and metadata needs to be optimized for search engines to be able to index your website and content accordingly.
That is, Google needs to know what searches they should show links to your website and what searches to not show your website.
SEO makes your website search engine friendly. A marijuana SEO strategy will help Google know that your website is relevant to marijuana product and CBD product searches. Marijuana SEO makes it easy for Google to find your site, which makes it easier for customers to find your store.
Here’s an example of how to use content and SEO to get found in relevant marijuana and CBD product search results:
1. Keyword Research
By conducting keyword research marketers are able to find the exact search terms and questions/queries that people are actually typing into a search engine when they’re looking for information about marijuana and CBD , or the questions they ask Google when they want to buy marijuana or CBD products online.
The idea is to compile all these relevant search terms and then identify the most profitable search terms for your business.
For example, let’s say you sell CBD and you’re looking for content ideas to attract to cannabis cohort #1. The people who are just looking to be educated on marijuana and CBD and are not quite ready to buy.
Your goal is to find questions that you can answer in the form of an SEO optimized blog on your website as well as content on in your daily social media feeds.
Here’s an example of some free keyword research provided by Google’s “autocomplete” feature. This is a super cool way to get the keywords and queries people are actually typing into Google.
Google is telling us that in addition to “where to buy CBD oil”, people also search for buy cbd oil amazon, cbd oil for pain, best cbd oil, cbd oil benefits, cbd oil for anxiety, full spectrum cbd oil for sale, and organic cbd oil.
Now you have popular & data-driven topics to create content to publish on your website. Use this data to create high-quality, SEO optimized blog articles for your website.
2. Write Blog Content
So what does a marijuana marketer do with this information identified above? They use this data to craft relevant blog content as part of their marijuana marketing strategy.
The idea is to create super useful, high-quality blog content, that is SEO optimized for search engines, and formatted for easy reading/scanning for users, and publish that type of content regularly on your website.
You one article isn’t guaranteed to rank just because you have one article on your site SEO optimized. All your website pages need to be optimized with a marijuana SEO strategy, as well as your images, and your metadata.
To get your website content to rank, you need to regularly publish content on your site and drive traffic to the site.
The more traffic you get to your site from relevant search terms, and the longer they stay on your site, the higher your site’s relevance and authority in terms of how Google views your site.
So don’t just publish one blog on your site based on the keyword research you do. Instead, create 1 relevant and high-quality blog article, that is SEO optimized, each week.
If that’s not possible, plan on publishing at least 2 blog articles each month. This will build and boost your site’s relevance and authority of marijuana products, which will boost your domain score, and increase your search rankings.
3. Optimize Blog Content
If you want Google, and your target market, to find your content, it needs to be strategically optimized for the keyword phrase you’re looking to rank for, as well as optimized for the many other semantically related phrases that are similar to your main keyword.
This is where the search engine optimization comes in. You need to ensure all of your website content, pages, blog articles, and images, are optimized with an SEO & keyword strategy so your content can be easily found online by your target customers.
SEO is a complicated process and requires some experience as well as technical SEO skills.
If you’d like one of our marijuana SEO experts to implement an SEO and keyword strategy on your site, please contact us for a free consultation.
Below, I’ll describe a high-level overview of how to optimize your marijuana blog content.
Quick Guide: How To Optimize Your Blog Content
- Pick your primary keyword (KW) phrase, preferably long-tail.
- Choose your secondary KW phrase.
- Use your primary KW in your blog page title (H1 tag).
- Use your primary KW in your blog title and ensure it’s wrapped in an H2 tag.
- Try to use your primary KW in the first paragraph.
- Use your secondary KW in the first paragraph.
- Be sure to use your primary KW, and secondary keyword throughout the article a few times, but do not over do it and stuff KW into your article just to use your primary and secondary KWs. Instead, use long-tail, semantically related KWs throughout the article.
- Be sure to use short paragraphs. Don’t have large blocks or text in a paragraph. Go for 2-3 sentences per paragraph, maximum. Spacing out your blog content this way helps format the article for easy reading for your visitors on mobile and on desktop devices.
- Add images to the article to add further formatting and space to your article making it a better user reading experience.
- Optimize your images by:
- keeping the file size to 150-200kb maximum (helps your page load faster, speeds up your site)
- including the primary KW in your image file name
- use your primary KW in the image ALT attribute
- use your secondary and semantically related KWs in your ALT attribute, TITLE attribute, and description
- Proofread your article. Test how it renders on mobile, tablet, and laptop devices.
- Publish your article and submit the new url to Google and Bing search engines for indexing.
So after you’ve published your article you should consider amplifying your new blog using digital advertising to drive relevant traffic to your site.
But before you do, you also have some new social media content to share and add to your marijuana marketing strategy.
Using Social Media and Google Search Together
Your blog article isn’t just for SEO and search engines. It should be used on your social media platforms as well.
Your goal after publishing a new piece of content is to drive traffic to that article from as many sources as possible including social media.
The more traffic that you get to your new content, the more it shows Google the relevance of that content and your site as a whole.
This helps to develop relevance and authority. If you haven’t guessed yet, relevance and authority are 2 of the 3 main Google ranking factors with trust being third.
Every time you publish a blog, you need to share it on social media to let your followers know about your new useful content.
If your keyword research was on point, many of your followers will be interested in your new content because it likely answers the questions some of your followers have about the marijuana and CBD products you sell.
Here are some ways to use social media to drive traffic to your website and/or blog content:
- Promote the post in your Facebook and Instagram feeds.
- Promote the blog in your Instagram Stories.
- Partner with an IG influencer who has more than 10,000 followers and you can get them to do an Instagram Story with a “swipe up” call to action that links to your site to read the article. In order to utilize Its swipe up feature, the IG account must have a minimum of 10,000 followers.
- Use digital advertising and sponsored content on third-party ad networks that allow for CBD and marijuana advertising like Mantis & Outbrain. Advertising will get you much more reach than the other options mentioned above.
In addition to the options listed above to promote your marijuana content, we have another unique way to use social media and Google together in your marijuana marketing strategy. This tactic may help increase your followers and therefore your reach.
UPDATE 2021/2022:
Learn how to advertise CBD on Facebook & Instagram in this updated article.
How Your Optimized Blogs Help Increase Social Engagement
When your new blog content starts to rank in search engines for your target keyword phrases, you’ll be driving qualified people to your website, for free. Free because its organic search – not paid PPC.
As you continue to publish content and develop your site’s relevance and authority, your rankings will increase and you’ll maintain a stead stream of relevant traffic to your website from Google and Bing search engines.
Since you’re driving good traffic to your site, for free, you should create some sense of urgency or excitement in the form of a contest on social media.
So when users land on your website from organic search, they see an image or “custom banner ad” on your site prompting them to enter a contest.
The deal is they have to like your FB page or follow you on IG in order to be entered into your contest. Once they’ve done this, they are in the contest, but even better, they are now part of your marketing funnel!
You need to make sure the prize is of value to your audience and something that they can’t easily “get” anywhere else for this tactic to be effective. A simple gift card or discount may not be enough, but you can test that and go with what works.
Are you seeing the benefits of how you can use SEO and social media together?
We Can Help You Use Social & Search To Maximize Engagement & Revenue
Our cannabis marketing team can help you craft, execute, and manage an effective marijuana marketing strategy using search engines and social media.
We’re also able to work with your internal marketing team and share our experience and expertise with marijuana SEO and marketing CBD on Instagram.
If you’re looking for a cost-effective way to combine your in-house social media marketing with our expertise in marijuana SEO and search engine marketing, here’s an example:
Your team can manage the daily social media posts and Instagram Stories, along with daily community management including growing and engaging with followers.
Our team will handle the keyword research, blog content writing, initial website SEO optimization, and the ongoing marijuana SEO strategy for your business.
If this sounds good to you, please contact us for a free consultation or to request a quote.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!
