A national survey on vaping conducted in 2018 revealed that 9% of the American adult population, roughly 34 million people, constitutes moderate to regular vapers. The substantial ready market attracted countless investors to set up shop in the vaping industry.
However, regardless of the ever-growing vape market customer base, customer acquisition remains a big challenge for most vape vendors. Online and traditional media restrict overt advertising, limiting contact with potential consumers. While vape product marketing is dicey, it is doable. Find out how to promote your brand’s premium vape juice flavors and venture into new vape markets below.
1. Position Your Brand as a Consumer Education Hub
The internet is rife with businesses peddling countless products due to the immense potential online platforms present to vendors seeking to venture into new markets. However, the downside to the crowded marketplace is numerous adverts that cause advertising fatigue among potential consumers, causing them to avoid engagement with sales brands.
Consequently, effective customer acquisition strategies entail offering a value proposition rather than direct selling. Customers respond to and share enriching content, like consumer education pieces, generating organic traffic to your website.
Therefore, helpful information like types of vape products, buyer’s guides, vape kit maintenance, and vape tutorials attract more engagement. Moreover, investing your marketing resources into consumer education helps position your business as an authority in the vaping industry.
You can achieve your consumer education goal by posting blog posts about pertinent vaping subjects on your website; blogs are also fundamental SEO tools. Use Keyword tools and data from your analytics page to create evergreen content that potential and current customers will find helpful and shareable. Alternatively, you can create a community forum whereby consumers interact and share their vaping experiences. Consumer education helps nurture trust and confidence in your brand, prompting consumers to buy your products.
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2. Create and Implement an Online Marketing Strategy
The FDA regulates vapes and imposes display requirements for vape product advertisements; it recently issued marketing denial orders for over 50,000 e-juice flavors. Besides the FDA, major search engines and social media platforms restrict paid adverts that stimulate or make vaping seem attractive from their platforms. However, you can do much more than blogging to promote your vaping business online despite such restrictions. Here’s how to do it:
Search engine optimization (SEO): SEO is an essential part of digital marketing, which entails positioning your brand to rank top in a search engine’s algorithm. These are some of the most effective SEO strategies:
· Optimize your product descriptions, landing pages, about pages, and social media pages providing valuable content.
· Use internal links and backlinks on your blogs and landing pages.
· Enhance your website’s navigability with a user-friendly interface, shopping category filters, and a word-predictor search function.
Email marketing: While social media platforms and search engines impose bottlenecks for marketing vape products, email marketing tools have no restrictions. Statistics show that email marketing has the highest ROI of all online marketing strategies and that personalized emails have a 50% open rate. Therefore, create prompts that urge customers to submit their email addresses without coming off as pushy and create a customer database.
Lead-generation tools and web browser analytics: These tools help you monitor customer behavior and create customer cohorts based on customer behavior commonalities. Use the submitted contact information from your customer database to send emotionally appealing content that addresses innate customer needs to specific customer cohorts.
Promote your website in top vape sites: You can also have reputable independent vape-centric websites feature your brand on their platform or pay for pop-up ads on such websites and legit mobile vape apps. You can also enlist your brand on reputable online vape shop directories for enhanced visibility.
3. Consider Influencer Marketing
While social media platforms can restrict vape product direct advertising, they cannot sensor individual opinions on vaping. Therefore, influencer marketing is a viable marketing strategy to boost your vape business.
Some vape marketers are wary of influencer marketing due to supposedly high budgets and difficulty in measuring ROI. However, you can lower influencer marketing costs by partnering with micro-influencers and nano-influencers rather than macro-influencers with exorbitant rate cards. Moreover, micro-influencers and nano-influencers have better engagement rates that translate into better ROI.
A clear influencer marketing strategy with preset KPIs and associated metrics also increases campaign success. However, the most crucial element is selecting an influencer whose brand aligns with your business’s core values; give them creative freedom.
Photo-centric and video-centric channels work best for influencer marketing. So, have an influencer post about their favorite vape flavor from your product catalog and other relatable experiences that will draw customers.
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4. Incentivize Potential Buyers
Consumers attach great importance to added value and actively search for brands with a little something extra to offer. Meeting customer needs for supplemental value will endear your brand to your customers.
Even though the FDA prohibits issuing free vape samples to consumers, you can offer alternatives like complimentary gifts, bulk purchase discounts, and free shipping according to specific terms and conditions. You can also utilize email marketing to inform customers of your latest deals.
Conclusion
Despite multiple bottlenecks on vape marketing, vape marketing campaigns are powerful if targeted at a ready audience with the correct message. Using these simple tips in your marketing strategy will help you nurture leads and grow your vape business.
