How To Promote a Dispensary on Facebook
It’s game on and you need a dispensary marketing plan for your cannabis retail store. Maybe you’re wondering how to promote a dispensary on Facebook?
People on Facebook are much different than people on Instagram so your plan to promote your dispensary on Facebook should be different than your Instagram marketing plan.
This article will focus on how to promote your dispensary on Facebook and provide 5 actionable dispensary marketing tips you can implement today.
To learn about how to promote a dispensary on Instagram, please see this article focused on your Instagram marketing strategy.
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5 Dispensary Marketing Tips to Promote Your Dispensary on Facebook
The following 5 dispensary marketing tips will help you to promote a dispensary on Facebook via organic social media tactics.
We’re focusing on organic social media strategy for your dispensary as an alternative dispensary marketing plan to paid Google advertising.
While it is possible to advertise cannabis on Facebook and Google, this post will outline 5 social media marketing tactics to use to promote your dispensary on Facebook.
1. Target and Engage With Your Local Audience
One of the most effective ways for your cannabis dispensary to get a huge amount of organic reach on Facebook is to post content that sparks a relevant conversation between your followers.
It’s not so much that your followers are engaging back with you, the cannabis brand or dispensary, but more so that your followers are engaging with other people following your brand, based on the content you posted.
For example, you can target your local customers with localized content relevant to the locations of your dispensaries. This can include current events, news, sports, or even the weather.
You can use this as an opportunity to show that your dispensary cares about the community and is knowledgeable and/or participates in local events.
Your dispensary can also use Facebook to poll customers by asking questions related to their
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Your dispensary marketing team should tie this into a contest where customers would post photos of them using your cannabis products on Facebook or Instagram, and tag your store to win a decent prize from your dispensary.
Another question to ask your audience to engage them on Facebook is for them to document their experience in your cannabis retail stores. You may be able to glean some useful information that will help you increase customer service and/or sales.
To encourage this feedback you should also attach this to a promotion where a lucky customer gets some sort of bonus value delivered online or the next time they’re at your dispensary.
The point here is that engagement drives reach on Facebook so it’s important that you, your budtenders, or your dispensary marketing agency engage and interact with your customers directly.
You’ll be much more successful with the organic social media marketing for your dispensary if your potential customers are interacting with your content and contributing to a conversation rather than simply reading the post as they scroll by it in their feed.
2. Educational Cannabis Content is King
Recreational cannabis has only been legal for a short time in many parts of the world. Therefore, there is a ton of misinformation about both recreational and medical benefits of the plant.
Many cannabis companies have been focused on their brand and have
Today’s recreational marijuana consumer has many different cohorts, which means many different target audiences. Each different consumer is super curious about cannabis and may consume it in many different ways.
We’ve covered this topic in further detail
For the purpose of this article, the point here is that with legalization being so new, generally speaking, your target consumers are searching for information on cannabis, CBD, THC, edibles, concentrates, dabs, and hundreds of other facts about weed.
One of the most effective ways for a marijuana dispensary to use Facebook is to target educational content to the Facebook audience.
Generally speaking, according to Statista.com, the majority of Facebook users is 25-44.
This chart shows the age distribution of Facebook users in the United States as of January 2018. As of that month, 26% of U.S. Facebook users were between 25 to 34 years of age.
However, if you dig deeper into the chart above and start to consider the different segments of your target audiences, you can see that Facebook has a large number of users aged 45+.
Cannabis education would be very useful to those over the age of 50 who may want to consider CBD as an alternative to any opioid medication these people may be using to manage pain.
Since these users are primarily using Facebook, your dispensary marketing plan should include educational posts related to the benefits of your CBD oil or Indica dominant strains, and target these to reach this highly lucrative audience.
If your target is a younger audience, say 19-34 in Canada and 21-34 in the USA, and you wanted to promote your Sativa strains, edibles, and concentrates, you may not want to use Facebook and instead focus on Snapchat or Instagram.
To learn how to reach a younger audience please see our companion post on how to promote your dispensary on Instagram.
3. Create a Facebook Group For Your Dispensary
Why include a Facebook Group in your dispensary marketing plan?
As we mentioned above, Facebook prefers content that sparks conversation between people on Facebook and therefore gives these posts get much higher reach than others.
Facebook groups have an awesome reputation as a place where like-minded individuals, who share a common interest, are brought together within a public or private are of Facebook.
If you don’t create a Facebook Group for your dispensary right away, my recommendation is that you start by joining a cannabis-related Facebook Group.
By doing so you’ll give yourself many useful opportunities to improve awareness of your customer and to be helpful to group members posting questions about cannabis.
Some tips for starting a cannabis retail Facebook Group include:
- Design and brand the Facebook Group similar to your existing brand.
- Optimize the Group’s description, about, and other information with keywords related to “buy weed”, “buy weed online”, “by weed need me”, and other terms your target uses to find a dispensary.
- Create a relevant cannabis education content strategy and posting schedule to create conversations among group members.
- Design and produce high-quality, relevant, and engaging visual content to post daily.
- Set rules and guidelines to avoid spammers, people selling their products, etc.
- Publish/Pin these rules to top of the Group page.
- Ensure a closed group in order to monitor interaction, keep out haters, competition etc.
- Encourage members to post, share their cannabis-related questions, photos and videos.
- Cultivate a cannabis community with a lowkey selling.
- Retarget group members with a paid ads in their newsfeed.
- Collab with other cannabis professionals and invite them to the group.
- Track and manage overall post engagement, measurement, and reporting.
4. Take Your Dispensary Live on Facebook
I’m sure you’re probably asking why? Or maybe, “who watches Facebook Live anyway?”
Well, According to Facebook, it leads to 6x more interactions than regular videos on average.
So how do you use Facebook Live to promote your dispensary? Some examples include:
- When you host a vendor at your retail store – Go Live and introduce the vendor, their products, and use this as an opportunity to promote your dispensary
- When you provide a happy customer experience – Go Live and showcase that experience to followers and use a local hashtag to spread the Live video locally!
- If a customer happens to drop a compliment about your budtenders or dispensary – Go Live and share the customer’s compliment with your followers!
- The next time you hire a new budtender – Go Live to introduce them!
- If you’re working with a cannabis influencer, micro-influencer, or brand ambassador – Go Live and give them control of your Instagram for an afternoon to do a Live takeover!
5. Just One Post Per Day on Facebook
Back in the day, it was OK to post several times on Facebook, but these days it makes very little sense to do so and here’s why.
It’s best to focus on one high-quality, relevant, and strategic post per day on Facebook.
Your Facebook organic marketing should be more of engaging with your target in a meaningful way than just simply posting content for the sake of it.
We typically lay out a 30-day content calendar for all organic posts on Facebook and ensure we have a wide variety of post types.
For example, some posts would be related to cannabis education whereas other posts may be related to your new CBD oil or selection of edibles.
You also want to reshare useful content from relevant sources that will provide value for your Facebook fans and followers, and of course, share personalized content from your dispensary.
Your marijuana marketing plan should include just one post a day on Facebook and be sure to test your post types and continue to use the ones that provide the highest engagement rates.
We Can Help Promote Your Dispensary on Facebook!
So now you know a few options on how to promote your dispensary on Facebook without advertising. Which one will you implement into your dispensary marketing plan?
If you’re looking for Instagram marketing ideas for dispensaries please see How To Promote a Dispensary on Instagram.
The dispensary marketing tips discussed above are organic marketing tactics that can help increase engagement and your following on Facebook.
However, if you’re interested in trying digital advertising as part of your dispensary marketing strategy, we can help you with that as well!
ColaDigital.ca is a data-driven, performance based dispensary marketing company with over 20 years experience in digital marketing startegy and execution.
We’ve been able to advertise medical cannabis on Facebook and Google and are currently running paid ad campaigns on Google for cannabis-related services.
Check out our social media management and social media advertising services to see if there’s a fit with your dispensary’s marketing needs.
If you have a current project in mind please contact us for a free consultation by using the form below.
We’re ready to help you grow!
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