DISPENSARY WEB DESIGN
One area of marketing that largely gets overlooked by dispensaries, especially when they are just started out, is the need for a clean, professional website to represent their brand. Unfortunately, many dispensary owners, in particular those who aren't able to or interested in selling online, view a website as unnecessary, and either don't have one at all, or have one that is poorly designed. Just imagine a potential customer who's first interaction with your cannabis shop is this second rate website with ugly images and an unsightly layout. Chances are you just lost a customer before they even set foot inside your dispensary
The Hood Collective offers premium web design services for cannabis dispensaries to ensure that their online presence can help directly lead to increased foot traffic and online orders. With multiple platform options (primarily Wix or WordPress ) to choose from, we'll provide a professional, sleek digital hub that has the ability to scale up with you as you grow. All our dispensary websites include standout layout and design, a fully customizable feature set, and built in SEO, while also being easy to update moving forward, so that your website info never becomes out of date. Best of all, our web design services are affordable for dispensaries of all sizes.
Why Your Dispensary Needs A Professional Website
As with most brick and mortar businesses, we meet with a lot of dispensary owners who just don't see the need for a well designed website. In many cases, even when they do have some online presence, it's with an amateur website that lacks functionality and aesthetics. They figure that most of their business is built around foot traffic, and they choose to focus their marketing on local advertising, whether it's billboards, local cannabis magazines, community events, and social media. These are all obviously important, but by ignoring an effective website, you are missing out on some key opportunities to connect with your potential customers.
First of all, many people prefer to research a business before they choose to shop there. If you have an old website, or have no online presence whatsoever, a lot of customers will immediately be turned off and turn elsewhere, most likely the dispensary right down the street from you. For many cannabis customers, especially newer consumers who may not be familiar with the industry and culture, your website will be the first thing they see. Providing helpful and welcoming information is a great way to establish your brand before they have set foot in your shop.
A well designed website should be your digital marketing hub, that connects with, both literally and stylistically, with your digital ads, social media accounts, events calendar, email campaigns, and more. Best of all, your website is available to your customers 24 hours a day, even when you are not. It allows you to connect with and impress your potential customers wherever and whenever they are, whether they live down the street from you or are driving past your location during a vacation.
Of course, one of the most important functions of a dispensary website is search engine optimization. Local SEO is one of the cheapest, most effective ways for dispensaries to increase their organic traffic, and it all starts with a well designed website. When someone in your neighborhood does a search for 'dispensary near me' on their phone or laptop, you want your dispensary to be the first one they see. If you don't have a website at all, or your website hasn't been optimized for local searches, it's unlikely your business will appear at all, let alone near the top of the first page.
How To Ensure An Effective Cannabis Web Design Strategy?
A lot of cannabis business owners wonder whether there's any difference between dispensary web design and web design for a more traditional business. Maybe on the surface they seem like the same thing, but if you were the owner of a pet store, you probably wouldn't hire a web designer who specializes in creating sites for aerospace customers. The cannabis industry is a unique field, with special rules and regulations, and a long history of stigmatization. It only makes sense that you would want to hire a web designer who specializes in the cannabis industry.
As an example, we were recently building a web site for a dispensary in Oregon, whose owners were based in New York. They wanted us to include photos of cannabis consumption on their website, without realizing that it was against state regulations for licensed cannabis businesses to use depictions of consumption in their marketing materials. If they had hired a website design team that was unfamiliar with the cannabis industry, it wouldn't have mattered how amazing the website was. They would have been forced to pay a significant fine for violating state advertising laws!
The kind of dispensary website design you are looking for also matters. A medical dispensary in a medical marijuana only state probably requires a very different tone and functionality than a recreation and medical dispensary in a location where cannabis has been available recreationally for a number of years. These are the kinds of distinctions that only come with hiring a dispensary web design team that is familiar with the industry, and knows what pitfalls and stereotypes that need to be avoided.
WHY HIRE THE HOOD COLLECTIVE FOR YOUR CANNABIS WEB DESIGN?
The Hood Collective features a dispensary web design and development team that has worked in the legal cannabis industry for many years. We understand the challenges faced by dispensary owners, and we offer a number of affordable web design and dispensary branding packages that have been created specifically for the industry. Our premium web sites include e-commerce options, are fully scalable, and are suitable for businesses of all sizes, whether you have a single location, or dozens. Best of all, our completed web sites will fit seamlessly with your brand's style, with highly customizable templates that will match your aesthetic, rather than force you to conform to a specific look or feel.
Our friendly and talented web designers have one goal, to ensure the long term success of your dispensary.
