How To Use Instagram Guides For Your Cannabis Or CBD Business

Have you heard of Instagram Guides?

In the latest update, Instagram added a guides tab, which is shoppable and able to backlink to the original post. 

There are three types of guides that you can create Places, Products, and Posts. Creating one of these guides is an excellent way to combine your content and share other people’s content on Instagram.

What Is Instagram Guides?

Guides are collections of your posts and other users’ posts related to a particular topic. Think of guides as Instagram’s version of a Pinterest board, or a highlight reel for your posts/shoppable products, or as your very own curated digital content catalog.

The guides you set up can be about anything you want, but I would encourage you to create relevant guides for your business. For example, when this feature rolled out, I made my first guide for Holiday gift ideas from Women-Owned Business Owners of products that I use daily. One of the most significant parts of guides is that they are shareable, meaning that other users can share your guide as a DM, in their story, or as a post. The other businesses are also notified that they appear in your guide. 

How Can My Cannabis/CBD Business Use Guides?

With the three categories; Places, Products, and Posts, the possibilities for how your business can make use of this feature are endless.  

The stipulations for paid advertising of cannabis-related products are just something that we are going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future, but creating a guide can be a great workaround for this. 

Let’s say for example that you are a dispensary, you can use the product guide to feature products specific to your dispensary. Posts to your guide could include adding flower photos from the feeds of your growers, and any photos from the feeds of the brands that you carry as well as the posts that you curate for your feed.  Think of it as a mini online “storefront” showcasing the incredible hand-curated products you select to sell in your dispensary. 

This way when people have seen your guide and they step into your dispensary they will know the caliber of product your carry. 

I have had a few B2B and other service providers reach out and ask me how they can use guides. B2B service providers can create guides related to your industry’s news, highlighting your posts related to the industry, and share other posts that resource another part of your industry that you do not specialize in but are essential. 

Share Your Guide 

Since this is such a new feature that snuck in the right under the holiday time, many users are not aware of this feature. To bring awareness, make sure you share the guide that you worked so hard to create in your stories and on your feed. Remember that the content you add to your guides will alert that specific user and they will share the guide as well.

If you need ideas on how guides could benefit your business, reach out for a FREE 20-minute consultation on making this feature work for you.

Six Important Ingredients For A Highly Effective Cannabis And Hemp Web Design

The purpose of your cannabis and hemp businesses website is to attract, engage, and convert your target audience with both eye-catching photos and well-written cannabis and hemp content. There are six things that I have noticed that are missing on existing cannabis and hemp websites that are quick and easy fixes you can do yourself.

Simplicity is key. When you present a site to the world wide web with inconsistent images, colors, and designs it can be visually discouraging to your audience, making the website more challenging to navigate. To correct this, aim to highlight the most essential info and keep the overall appearance sleek and easy to read.

Relevant Cannabis Content. The more quality cannabis content your website has, the more favorable it will be to search engines. Consistently sharing valuable content is one of the most potent ways CBD & Cannabis business can overcome the annoying advertising restrictions. Remember to change the file names on your photos to support relevant search terms.

Mobile Friendly. It’s beyond outstanding that your cannabis or CBD website is mobile-friendly. This means that visitors should easily be able to accurately access what it is they are looking for on their mobile device.

Strategic SEO. When you focus on specific keywords and terms that your audience is using that are relevant to your business, your company can rank higher in a search by just using these terms. Optimized SEO on your site is what separates the first result you find in a Google search versus the last page.

Quick load Time. Getting a visitor to your website is one thing, getting them to hang out and click around on your site is another. If your website doesn’t give them what they want fast enough, they are going to leave. Sorry that’s just the cold hard truth.

Visible Contact Form. Make sure that its really apparent on how your visitors can quickly contact you. My recommendation would be creating an apparent and straightforward contact form. Remember that you want to make the contact form as simple as possible and easy to find for people to get in touch with you.

Herbn Media builds out simple and easy to navigate Squarespace hosted sites for cannabis and hemp business owners. If your business requires a site, SEO audit or SEO coaching session contact me today.

WTF Actually is Digital Marketing

First and foremost a lot of people that I run into think that marketing and advertising are the same, they are similar, but they are not the same. We all know that in the world we are currently living in that we as an industry can not advertise online in any form. Therefore, I'm going to really quickly explain what the eff marketing actually is.

Marketing is an essential area of management attention that is determined through continuous observation, research, and analysis to answer questions such as:

Who are your customers?

How do they think?

Where are they located?

How do they make their buying decisions?

Advertising is clear communication to people about the promises that your business makes to them.

Let's begin by thinking of your brand as a house. Your brand colors, logo, packaging, mission, website, customer service and photography is the structure of your product. When all of these aspects align the outside of your house is complete. However, nobody wants to live or visit an empty house. We need furniture, we need to decorate the walls we need to make people who visit us feel comfortable and cozy.

The comfortable and cozy feeling that is what digital marketing is. Digital marketing is a piece that tells your story. I know that you have pieces in your house that have a tale attached to them. That chair you got from grandma or the artwork on your wall that you collect because it reminds you of somewhere that you've been.

Your brand also has a story that wants and needs to be shared.

Here is real life, for instance, many of us can relate to:

It's a Saturday afternoon, and you're walking around the grocery store, and you see a cheese vendor set up, you get closer, and the friendly face asks if you want to try a sample of their latest and greatest flavor, that's marketing.

While you're standing there and shoving your face with cheese, the friendly sample person begins to tell you that the beautiful grassy pasture, the ethical practices they use and the solar heated barn that the cows live in is what keeps the cows happy and really the key to what makes the flavor what it is, that's advertising.

They've identified:

1. You're not a vegan and are into cheese

2. You run errands on what is probably your day off or a significant amount of downtime, and you are a leisurely shopper. Because people in a hurry ain't got no time for a cheese sample.

3. You live in the vicinity of the store where the cheese is delivered.

4. With your attentive listening, they've established that happy cows are something that you care about and can get behind by handing over your money for a block of cheese.

When they run an advertisement on social media or tv, you will watch it, and it will resonate with you, even if you think it's not.

Digital Marketing is obviously doing this all online which is why you have to know the answer to those four crucial questions every time you post. If and when the opportunity presents itself to the cannabis industry that we can begin running ads, to run a successful ad the knowledge of analytics on which posts are performing the best is the equivalent to the stuff your face with cheese and chit chat moment in a grocery store.

Sharing your brands' story is going to set you apart in this industry because it will begin to build trust with your target market. The cannabis industry is the wild west right now, there are potential customers of yours that do not carry all of the knowledge on CBD or THC that you do and part of your job is to tell the story of why your product will help them.

Beautiful packaging and photos are only going to get your one of a kind product so far. Sharing the story behind your brand is what will set you apart.