cASE sTUDY
Medical Marijuana Industry
Business Objective
As a new business marijuana dispensary practice needed to scale quickly. In order to achieve enough sales of product every month, the staff must be consistently receiving a steady stream of leads from potential customers inquiring about their products. The #1 goal of their digital marketing campaign was to drive leads via organic and local search in the form of online form fill submissions, phone calls, and driving directions. They engaged with us on our Local Search program to get more traffic, increase web presence and accurate, optimized listings on Google, Yelp and dozens of additional directories.
Business prime objectives were:
- Increase organic presence for relevant keywords to drive organic traffic to their website.
- Optimize website to make sure that the organic traffic is being driven to the site and is converting via form fills and phone calls.
- Increase local search presence on mobile devices to drive leads via driving directions, phone calls, as well as additional traffic to their website.
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The Challenge
Over the last couple of years, this vertical became a very crowded space to do business. With over 20 competitors in a 15-mile radius the business needed to find a way to achieve organic local listings. Fast.
Our Strategy
The Local Management team developed a blended media strategy including local listing optimization based on social content & website blogs. Our team thoroughly researched the “in & out” of the medical marijuana industry, how beneficial it is for medical marijuana patients, the research on marijuana medicinal effects, and marijuana legislation in state and the country.
Our strategy was to optimize their website with proper meta data and onsite optimizations. We then followed up with adding relevant content with targeted keywords to their site, which included both page content and blog posts. We also created backlinks that targeted core business keywords and branded keywords.
Local Management team then launched and promoted the dispensary’s social media accounts, including building followers/likes, engaging with FL and traveling patients, and adhering to Facebook’s strict guidelines on marijuana promotion. Local Management team also gave the marijuana marketing campaign the boost it needed through providing a complex content marketing and SEO strategy. This strategy included creating and regularly posting unique and SEO friendly blog articles that would engage their readers, and published content to their multiple online platforms.
We then optimized their Google My Business (GMB) page to make sure their listing was correctly set up. We also acquired additional content from established media news outlets and other high authority websites reporting on medical marijuana to the GMB page and then added schema markup to the site.
Per Google-approved categories guidelines, the closest we were able to get to possible MMJ based categories- health club and alternative medicine practitioner. What our business knowledgeable team did is add Medical Marijuana, Dispensary, MMJ, Cannabis, Detox and various other business focused keywords to aide with search volume. We also added citations to help build their local presence online.
Value of Investment
The blended media strategy worked. Within 90 days the ongoing campaign started generating impressive results. ROI Result of our blended strategy was about 20 confirmed appointments a week, making this channel the best performing at a Cost Per Lead of only $20.
Keyword improvements delivered the following results:
- Dispensaries near me – 64% improvement in search and now ranking in position 3
- Recreational dispensary near me – 51% improvement in search and now ranking in position 3
- Best medical marijuana dispensary – ranks in position 1 now
Next Steps
With a successful first strategy, the MMJ Doctor is expanding his marketing in other cities/states with our exclusive MMJ vertical specific directory sites, Email network & custom built display network.
- The website appears on the first page for over 220 keywords/queries.
- Google My Business page had an increase in driving directions month over month.
- Google My Business page had an increase in views, driving directions, and phone calls which resulted in a 150% increase in leads coming through the website.
- Medical dispensary – ranks position 1.
- Marijuana dispensary– ranks position 2.
- Organic traffic to the website was up 16% month over month.
- Search queries were up 2% month over month which means the website is ranking for more keywords.
- Search impressions were up 19% month over month which means the website gained visibility in search results.
- Facebook earned almost 15,000 total reach in first 60 days.