Did you know that more than 90% of retail spending happens in store? Or that 70% of consumer spending takes place within 15-20 miles of home or work? And let’s not forget that local customers spent over $4.8 trillion in-store.
All of these stats are telling you one thing: ignore local marketing at your own peril!
The Power of Local Marketing
Local marketing is a distinct strategy that deploys highly focused tactics to the potential customers in your local area. Neighborhood or local store marketing is a great strategy for dispensaries and local cannabis businesses. Since there are restrictions for selling products online, local marketing can be of crucial importance.
1. Get Involved With Your Community
This is the easiest way to know with the people of your area. Customers are constantly online searching for nearby businesses. If you don’t have a strategy in place, you could lose out to the competition.
Here are just a couple of things you can do to get involved with your community:
-Sponsor local sports teams or clubs
-Purchase local ad space
-Host events.
-Promotion through the local chamber of commerce
-Customize direct mail announcements and promotions
Sites like Yelp and Google Reviews are great platforms to interact with your community. Identify the review sites being used by your target customers. Urge your customers to share their experience online by writing reviews. You see, when you have great ratings, you can easily attract more local customers and improve your search engine results. Also, offer promotions for check-ins, which are fantastic ways to incentivize customers to come into your store that day!
2. Rank for Local Keywords
In order to succeed with a successful local marketing campaign, you’ll need to incorporate
organic SEO. Your cannabis business needs to implement the keywords that people are using in search of the services and products that you offer.
You need to understand how the hierarchy of search engine results pages works. When a customer searches for a cannabis business in your area, there are local results followed organic. Local search marketing involves increasing your dispensaries visibility with local SEO.
3. Social Media Savvy
Social media is an incredibly effective way to promote your cannabis business. It’s a great strategy to connect with your customers and get feedback on cannabis products. But in order to succeed, you need to craft a balance between being informative and promoting. Never forget to engage your followers on a personal level.
4. Reach Local Influencers
Influencers can create content that people enjoy while developing an active audience that trusts and values their opinion. When you engage with thought leaders and experts, you can grow the visibility of your cannabis brand or business. This will help create a lasting relationship with your local audience. When you increase your social media exposure, it builds trust with your target audience.
5. Optimize for Mobile
A high percentage of online users use mobile more often than a desktop. You need to ensure that your user experience is optimized for mobile users. Review your content to make sure that your text is sized correctly, product images are displayed properly and that each CTA button is visible.
Conclusion
We hope you found this article useful! What do you think of local marketing? Do you think it’s something you might want to use in the future?
Go ahead and let us know in the comments! We can’t wait to read them.
Author Bio:Bjorn Wallman is the co-founder and CEO atHazy Marketing, a specialized marketing agency catering to the cannabis industry. Founder and CEO at Once Interactive as well, he has 8+ years of experience in transforming businesses to digital. Also a designer, crossfitter, Liverpool FC fan and a tech geek.
