By Joel Espinoza, directs NJ Advance Media’s Cannabis advertising sales efforts.
Joel Espinoza, NJ Advance Media
As New Jersey expands medical marijuana use and pushes along the path toward legalization for recreational use, new and established businesses are looking to enter or serve the cannabis industry, including a heavy focus on CBD product marketing to consumers. Marketing to the cannabis industry is complicated.
Legal cannabis markets across the U.S. are subject to strict advertising rules, and many of these laws and regulations are set on the state level. Since cannabis is federally listed as a Schedule I drug, digital platforms often impose their own rules. For example, Google doesn’t permit cannabis businesses to run AdWords campaigns, and, on social media, cannabusinesses can lose their accounts if their ads are flagged.
While challenging, there are opportunities to market to the cannabis industry in the digital environment in New Jersey. – Joel Espinoza
Strategic content marketing initiatives can boost the visibility of websites and position businesses as experts. NJ Advance Media currently works with many companies on native advertising initiatives and your content can be amplified both on NJ.com and within the NJ Cannabis Insider. Digital display advertising, while regulated, presents options to market to cannabis related businesses – and NJ.com is the most popular and most trusted local website in the state to reach your audiences.
While news and information sites can attract broad consumer and business audiences, data is essential to targeting the right audience. As a modern publisher and the company behind NJ.com, The Star-Ledger and NJ Cannabis Insider, NJ Advance Media has a clear and highly actionable view of the issues our readers care about the most as well as a way to categorize their content consumption into targetable audiences. We partner with some of the world’s largest data providers. Taken together, that wealth of information provides the edge businesses need to better understand their customers, anticipate and respond to changing markets, and target new audiences, who will be their customers of tomorrow.
The Cannabidiol (CBD) Market is forecast to grow from USD 1.04 Billion in 2018 to USD 16.32 Billion by 2026, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.7%, during the forecast period. – Reports and Data
More specifically, a digital campaign on NJ.com can be highly targeted and efficient whether targeting medical audiences interested in CBD, businesses looking to serve the cannabis industry or other related segments. Audience targeting can include laser focus toward very refined segments such as:
- Medical Marijuana Treatment Ailments such as people with back pain, arthritis, diabetes, epilepsy, chronic pain;
- People diagnosed with Chronic Pain: sports injuries, migraines and heavy RX Fillers;
- Cancer medication patients;
- Business audience segments such as legal, agriculture & equipment, real estate &construction, finance, accounting, banking & insurance, healthcare, transportation& warehousing, software & information technology, government & politics and marketing & advertising;
- Marijuana legalization news content consumption;
- Marijuana news content consumption;
- And, custom audience segments created just for you.
As the publisher of NJ.com’s NJ Cannabis Insider, New Jersey’s leading Cannabis business intelligence brief, we at NJ Advance Media understand the complex regulations surrounding cannabis related marketing. Whether leveraging NJ.com, NJ Cannabis Insider, social platforms or creating content to make businesses website more visible, we are poised to guide businesses through this ever-evolving landscape.
Need my contact info? Here you go: jespinoza@njadvancemedia.com and (818) 634-3236. Learn more at njadvancemedia.com/cannabis.