When you pull up a company’s website and it looks as alive as a skeleton, chances are you immediately look for a different business instead. You probably do the same when a company doesn’t even have a website in the first place. How, then, can you justify your cannabis business not having a website? Or, if you already have one, how can you justify it not absolutely sparkling?
A web presence of some form (even if it’s bare bones) is allowed in nearly all medical or adult-use cannabis markets. In an environment where many platforms are unreliable at best and many avenues are off-limits in the first place, it’s not an understatement whatsoever that your cannabis brand’s website is its most important asset. Keep reading to learn exactly why this is true and how to perfect your website while marketing your brand.
1. Your website can't be taken away from you.
We’ve all been there: You post organic cannabis content or ads on a social media platform, and the platform removes them because they violate its content or advertising policies. There’s a good chance this has happened to you, even if you went out of your way to comply. Maybe you’ve even had your entire account taken down and there was basically no appeals process or restitution. This doesn’t happen with websites for legal cannabis businesses, especially on an open-source content management system (CMS) like WordPress.
Your website is part of your owned media portfolio, meaning that you control it, not a third-party such as TikTok or Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp). It feels like a pretty safe bet to say you wouldn’t just up and delete your website (though an occasional redesign and ongoing content updates are both smart). Suffice it to say that your website is your most secure digital asset.
If you’ve built your website with an open-source platform like WordPress, there’s little to no chance your website could disappear without your consent. “Open-source” basically means “decentralized,” so there’s little to no content moderation. And even if you use a prominent web hosting service or content management system, there’s minimal history of these entities removing content that isn’t patently illegal on every level.
In short, your website is your house. Everything that’s you is in it, and nothing inside it can result in it being taken away.
2. Your website is the central hub for all your marketing.
Picture this: You have a stunning Instagram account filled with beautiful photos of your products and videos of customers talking about how much they love your services. What do you do from there? Without a website, those customers are stuck on your Instagram and have nowhere else to go to learn more about you from an official source.
Don’t put your customers in this position. Build not just any old website for your cannabis company, but instead a gorgeously designed, fast-loading, easy-to-use website that tells your customers everything they should know about you. That starts with basics like your address, hours of operation, and basic information about what you do (or any of these items that apply to your business). It continues big-time with all your educational content, product pages, and service pages.
Taken as a whole, this website content serves as a centralized hub and single source of truth for your brand. It’s exactly the right destination for all your marketing efforts.
Within this centralized hub, you have the greatest amount of control over your story and the values you convey in your marketing. Although no one is saying to get rid of or even deprioritize other platforms, you should use them primarily to direct people to your website.
3. The data you collect from your website is yours.
Your website is as much a wealth of information for your customers as for you. It can tell you who’s visiting your site and what pages they’re clicking on, and it can empower you to build an email list. Since you’re collecting this data through your website, it’s your intellectual property. That’s right — all this highly actionable marketing data is yours to keep.
You can learn so much from this all: the demographics of your customer base, which products or services are most popular, which educational topics on your blog attract the most attention, you name it. All this information dictates your next steps in marketing, so why would you give it to another platform? That’s essentially what you do when your primary internet presence is on social media instead of your website.
Although social media analytics are far from meaningless, they’re not exactly your intellectual property. You’re renting from a hostile landlord in a good neighborhood. When you move on, that data doesn’t come with you. When someone gives their contact information through your website, that’s yours to keep.
4. It’s easier to measure return on investment (ROI) with a website.
All the website data discussed in the previous point comes from equipping your website with Google Analytics (also known as GA4). This platform helps you analyze revenue data too, giving you a clear way to calculate your return on investment (ROI). Because you have control over your website, you get much better insight into every aspect of your business that generates revenue. From customer demographics to the number of products sold in a certain category, GA4’s insight helps you better understand the investment you’re making in your digital presence.
5. It’s necessary for brand recognition.
Unfortunately, scams and fake accounts are everywhere on the internet: unsolicited pay-to-play emails, DMs from strangers that just read as being off. When you get these messages, you surely look for proof that the sender is real. And when customers want to confirm that your business is real, they look specifically for your website. It’s how you build trust and brand recognition (which go hand in hand) in one fell swoop.
Beyond just signaling “hey, we exist, promise,” your website is your hub for establishing and advancing your branding. It’s got your logo and color story all over the place. It’s how you establish your Five W’s in exactly your voice and personality. It’s where customers go to learn why they should choose your cannabis company, and it’s where you give them all the reasons why. That it shows you’re not fake is the cherry on top.
6. Websites grow with you.
Chances are, you’ll eventually launch new products or services or open new locations. These are exciting changes, and you should be proud of them and get the word out! Information about these changes should live on your website, and it’s easy to make that happen. You add new pages, make them clearly reachable from your homepage, and set them up for maximum readability by search engines like Google.
On your website, everything you want to put in front of your customers goes right where they can see it and load all the details in their entirety. The best part is that, if your website is well-built and well-structured, any new pages you launch stand a much higher chance of appearing toward the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). Properly building and structuring a website, though, gets into complex SEO and design considerations. This is precisely where cannabis marketing agencies come into play.
Build, maintain, and elevate your website with CannaContent
Amid today’s search-first consumer journeys and anti-cannabis social media environments, a website that all your marketing points back to is an absolute must. Not that simply having a website is enough — it’s only half the battle, if not less. Your website needs to load quickly, contain HTML coding that encourages Google to surface your content in searches, and do so much more. That’s to say nothing of strategically choosing content topics and creating content in the first place.
Sounds like a lot, right? With CannaContent on your side, it won’t be. Through our services, which we tailor to every cannabis company we work with instead of offering “one-size-fits-all” solutions (these never work), you get so much more than just a new or refreshed website. We handle all your technical, SEO, copy, and design needs to establish your single source of truth, put you ahead of your competitors, and grow your revenue. Book a no-obligation consultation today to learn exactly how we do it — and how we’ll do it for exactly your business.