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.

Educating The Masses On Cannabis And Hemp

On a flight from Portland to Chicago, I sat next to a man a few years younger than my grandpa. We made that stranger next to you plane conversation. As we were making our descent into O'hare, he asked me what kind of writer I am. I told him that I work in the cannabis industry. His face said to me that he was caught off guard. He asked me how I got started, and I told him that it was because I wanted to get off of my anti-depressants and that my grandpa has that complicated arthritis and I got him on CBD to get him off of the prescription drugs that were causing him so many different kinds of side effects. He told me that he also has that complicated arthritis and that he doesn't want to take prescription drugs either. That he and his wife are trying to live a very holistic and natural life. I told him that I'm not at all qualified as a healthcare person. That once he starts CBD, it's going to be experimenting to get the dosing right. I suggested he start with the smallest dose and see how he feels after that. If after a week he doesn't feel anything try increasing the dose.

I offered him a few suggestions of the products I've got my grandpa on.

He wrote the suggestions down and asked me so many more questions. I gave him my card and told him to email me and that I would send him the regime that I have my grandparents on.

He lives in southern Illinois, and he's nervous that the state of Illinois just legalized the consumption and what will that mean for the land that he's lived in his whole life.

The man in the row in front of us was eavesdropping and turned around to ask me a few more questions about how CBD could help him.

The world outside of the legal states is starving for the information that is living in your brain. This is why your CBD and cannabis business needs to blog or have a Pinterest presence. People deserve to hear the facts directly from the people who have been in the industry since before it was a legal industry. Our job of being the pioneers in this industry is to educate and create the future before big business gets their fingers in on it.

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.