Promoting a company that relates to vaping is one of the most difficult tricks to perform in the world of online marketing. Some people don’t even discover all of the restrictions that exist for vape marketing until they’re already launched their brands – and by then, they’ve already invested significant money and have no idea how to proceed.
The Challenges of Vape Juice Marketing
The biggest restriction in vape marketing is that you can’t advertise on popular networks like Google, Facebook and Bing. As soon as those networks discover that you’re advertising vape products, they’ll ban you. You also can’t put your products on popular third-party marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. It’s the same situation; if you get caught, you’ll be banned – and everyone gets caught eventually.
In the past, some vaping brands worked around the limitations in traditional advertising by recruiting social media influencers on Instagram and Facebook to promote products to their followers. That strategy, however, is no longer allowed; both platforms have recently banned influencer marketing for vaping products. Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, many popular YouTube personalities have also begun to distance themselves from vape reviews.
So, what options are left? How difficult is it to market an up-and-coming vape juice brand like Second City Vapour in 2020? That’s what we’re going to explore in this article.
Content Marketing and SEO
As a vape brand, your most important source of traffic will always be Google’s organic search results. You want your website to show up in the results for as many different search terms as possible, and the way to do that is by creating top-notch content for your website. In marketing your vape juice brand, you should spend the majority of your time creating the best content for your site that you possibly can. Create attractive product pages that look great on all screen sizes and describe your flavor profiles in an appealing way. Make sure that your product pages project a brand image that will appeal to your target audience. We’ll discuss that in greater detail shortly.
In addition to having top-notch product pages, your website should have a library of informative blog posts covering as many different topics as possible. When you’re launching a new website, you’ll find that it’s much easier to generate traffic with informational content than it is to get commercial content to rank high on Google. Do your best to publish blog posts that answer questions, solve problems and help people make informed buying decisions.
Brand Image Development
If you’re a vaper yourself, you’ve probably noticed that many vape juice brands don’t actually differ that much in flavor from one another. The various vape juice brands of the world are all using the same flavoring agents, and there are only so many different ways of combining those flavors. For that reason, you could actually say that flavor development isn’t really the most important aspect of marketing a vape juice brand. In fact, the brand’s image is even more important.
When you’re launching a new e-liquid brand or promoting an existing one, think about your target market and what you can do to reach that market. Don’t worry about the flavors that your target market wants; think about the way that their chosen vape juice brand should make them feel. Your goal is to craft a brand image that cultivates the desired feeling among your target market. If you can do that, you’ll be successful. In developing a vape juice brand, you should work at least as hard on the brand’s image as you do on the flavors themselves.
Vape Site Advertising
The big advertising networks like Google and Facebook might not allow vape brands to advertise, but you shouldn’t let that get you down because there are still plenty of paid advertising options that exist for vape brands. If you visit vaping blogs and forums, you’ll see that all of those sites subsist on paid advertising. Just as a network like Google AdWords won’t allow vaping companies to bid on keywords, Google likewise doesn’t allow vaping sites to earn revenue from displaying AdSense placements. Therefore, vape sites earn their revenue by working directly with companies in the vaping industry.
If you explore the advertising options available on vape blogs and forums, you’ll find that it’s often surprisingly affordable to buy placements. If you create an appealing advertisement, you’ll likely find that the campaign will be quite successful. After all, advertising on a vape site means that you’re bringing your products directly to the people who are most likely to be interested in buying them.
Business Relationship Development
When you develop a marketing strategy for your vape juice brand, you’re probably going to spend much of your time thinking about how you can get your message out to the consumers who might want to buy from you. You may find, however, that it’s even more efficient to forge relationships with businesses who already have their own marketing strategies and customer bases in place.
We’re talking, of course, about vape shops and distributors.
Companies in the vaping industry have enviable profit margins. Although you certainly want to preserve those margins as much as possible, it’s likely that you can also sacrifice some of those profits if it means that you’ll be shipping dozens of bottles at a time instead of just one or two. Many e-liquid brands actually earn far more revenue from their wholesale operations than they do from selling direct to consumers.
If you have a high-quality product that you can produce in quantity, contact distributors in your region and see if you can get your product added to their catalogs. Remember that distributors are selling products to businesses – not consumers – so they’re going to want a very attractive pricing structure.
You can also potentially get your vape juice stocked in brick-and-mortar vape shops by contacting the owners of those shops directly. One of the best ways of doing that is via direct mail. Print a nice flyer and mail it – along with a few product samples – to vape shops. Tell the owners of those shops that you’re willing to give them a great introductory deal on an initial purchase if they’ll add your products to their shelves.
Jason Artman is the owner and author of eCig One. A professional freelance writer and SEO consultant with more than a decade of experience, Jason works with vaping companies around the world to increase their targeted web traffic and improve their revenue.