Joining the vape industry presents plenty of lucrative opportunities, but it also comes with unique challenges that require some innovation and ingenuity to overcome. The competition is fierce, and you’ll need to make a strong entrance if you hope to become one of the leaders in this niche.
Simply delivering high-quality vaporizers, vape oils, and accessories isn’t enough to get your company noticed. You need to develop a detailed business plan, stay focused on your goals, and invest in a bulletproof vape marketing strategy.
Expenditure on vape marketing in the US alone exceeds $110 million a year. Individual companies spend thousands of dollars to reach a wider audience, boost their lead generation and conversion. However, higher investments don’t necessarily imply better vape marketing plans and better ROI.
If you want to get the most out of vape marketing, you need to know what you’re doing.
So, let’s see what you can do to improve your marketing, minimize your spending, increase your ROI, and get your brand noticed. This vape marketing guide will tell you everything you need to know to take your business to the next level.
Index
- How Big Is the Vape Market?
- The Challenges With Vape Marketing Brands
- Why Is Vape Marketing So Important?
- What Can’t You Say With Vape Advertising?
- Vape Advertising Restrictions in 2023
- The Key to Marketing a Vape Company: Brand
- Getting Started With Vape Marketing
- Industry research
- Competition analysis
- Target audience identification
- 10 Strategies to Market Vape Online in 2023
- Vape SEO
- Vape backlinks
- Vape content marketing
- Vape influencer marketing
- Vape email marketing
- Review sites for the vape niche
- Magazines and newsletters
- Guest blogging on relevant sites
- Valuable vape rewards program
- Vape social media marketing
- What Advertisers Need to Do Next
- Conclusion
How Big Is the Vape Market?
Source: https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/infographics/e-cigarette-vaporizer-market
Since the introduction of the first e-cigarette in 2003, the vape market has come a long way. There are more vape products, more e-liquid flavors, more users, and more vape manufacturers and distributors than ever before.
Just looking at the vaping devices can tell you all you need to know about the vape market growth.
Source: https://www.gminsights.com/infographics/e-cigarette-market
While we used to only have simple cig-a-likes, now we have rechargeable and disposable vape pens, bulky vape mods, powerful pod mods, sub-ohm vaporizers, CBD vaporizers, dry herb vaporizers; the list just keeps going. Without healthy market activity, none of these vaporizer variations would be available, and neither would all the e-liquid flavor options.
Thousands of unique e-liquid flavors are widely available to the public. Tobacco, menthol, and fruit remain some of the most frequently bought flavors, but the constant introduction of new flavorings is grabbing the vapers’ attention. That’s why marketing vape oil can prove to be quite profitable for your business.
The growth of the vape market is also seen in the increasing number of users. In 2011, there were only around 7 million vapers around the world. Today, the number exceeds 41 million. As traditional cigarette use continues to decline, it’s expected that vaping will only continue to become more popular.
The global vape market size is projected to reach a value of over $29.23 billion, experiencing a compound annual growth rate of 20.3%. This exceptional growth attracts new players and creates a fiercer competition that makes it ever-more challenging to come out on top.
These statistics just serve to show how essential it is to boost your vape marketing efforts and work on your brand awareness.
The Challenges With Vape Marketing Brands
Unfortunately, even though the expanding vape market presents plenty of business opportunities, there are some unique challenges that the vape industry faces. The biggest problem is vape legislation in the US.
To date, vapes are one of the top alternatives to smoking. A vast majority of users are successfully choosing vaping to help them quit smoking and avoid the side effects of this nasty habit. Since vapes don’t rely on combustion to produce vapor, they don’t produce many of the combustion by-products that cigarettes do, making them a better option than traditional tobacco cigarettes.
Still, it’s critical to understand that vaping isn’t 100% safe or healthy. Inhaling anything other than clean air can cause damage – whether we’re talking about vapor from vaporizers, smoke from cigarettes, or tiny particles from nail filing.
In any case, since vaping isn’t actually a healthy habit, several countries around the world have introduced vape legislation that would regulate and limit how businesses in the industry can market themselves.
In the US, you need to follow strict FDA regulations that govern everything from manufacturing to advertising and promoting e-cigarettes. The main reason for such limitation is the rising number of young vapers in the country. In the UK, where vape youth usage is significantly lower, rules regarding vape marketing and promotion are slightly more lenient.
Why Is Vape Marketing So Important?
Regardless of where your business headquarters are and whether you need to follow the rules of vape marketing in the US, the UK, Australia, or anywhere in between, you need to commit to developing a clear vape marketing plan. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to get your business off the ground and off to a good start.
Your vape marketing consultant can help you develop bulletproof strategies that meet all the requirements without breaking any regulations. With a strong vape marketing strategy, you’ll enjoy several critical advantages.
Primarily, you’ll improve your brand awareness and ensure that your business becomes visible to as large of an audience as possible. Whether you have vast expansion plans or want to retain a status quo and keep your customers loyal to your brand, you need to ensure that you reach out to as many people as possible. The first step to lead generation and conversion lies in boosting your brand awareness, which is achieved through vape marketing.
Secondly, you’ll establish a strong, authoritative presence that shapes your brand reputation. Your vape marketing consultant will ensure that what you say through your marketing campaigns is in line with your brand voice and persona. The more unified your brand appears in its approach to marketing, communication, and message you are projecting, the easier it will be for you to maintain a positive reputation that shapes how your audience perceives you.
Ultimately, vape digital marketing will help you boost your sales and increase revenue. Keeping your products and services on the radar will pique your customers’ interest, incentivize them to look into your offer, and make a purchasing decision that suits both you and them.
Without a qualified vape marketing manager and a thought-out plan, you won’t enjoy any of these benefits. Not only will vape marketing keep your business afloat, but it will also ensure that it thrives.
What Can’t You Say With Vape Advertising?
Since the vape industry is very specific and highly regulated, the first thing you’ll learn from your vape marketing manager is that you have to be very careful with your message. You have to measure your words and be very clear about what your products are and what they’re not.
Under no circumstance should you:
- Target or try to appeal to audiences under the age of 21 (18 in some regions).
- Make health claims, even for devices commonly sold for medicinal use.
- Make safety claims.
- Be misleading about the ingredients contained within your products.
- Be misleading about where your products can be used.
- Make claims that your products are smoking cessation devices.
Although rules and regulations regarding vape products can vary from state to state, these are the general guidelines you need to follow during your marketing campaigns. You’ll need to be very explicit in your messaging and ensure that you don’t make dishonest or misleading claims in your advertising.
Additionally, you’ll need to follow the FDA rules and include a warning that occupies 20% of your ad space and that states nicotine is an addictive substance.
As rules are continually being updated, it’s in your best interest to keep an eye on vape marketing news to see whether you need to change your approach. Do thorough vape marketing research to get a firm grasp on all the nuances of the law in your area before you launch your ad campaign.
Vape Advertising Restrictions in 2023
Although digital marketing has opened many doors for businesses across niches, vape digital marketing is a different story. You cannot rely on the most popular strategies for PPC campaigns or paid advertising on Google and social media channels.
Google doesn’t allow for any type of tobacco product advertising, including pipes, hookah lounges, cigar bars, electronic cigarettes, herbal cigarettes, and more. You cannot make use of paid Google Ads for any type of product that simulates tobacco smoking.
Facebook and Instagram have their restrictions as well. You cannot promote tobacco products, vaporizers, electronic cigarettes, or other products that simulate smoking. However, you can still create blogs and groups that connect people interested in tobacco-related products, as long as you don’t overtly encourage buying and using said products.
Keep in mind that while there are many restrictions for vape online marketing, there are still many more ways you can promote your products without investing in paid marketing campaigns.
The Key to Marketing a Vape Company: Brand
If you want to be successful in marketing vape oils, vaporizers, and accessories while following all guidelines and regulations, you first need to focus on one thing – establishing your brand. It’s the key to promoting your company and attracting audiences.
Establishing a brand is quite different from establishing a business. Anyone could start a business. Just in 2020, over 804,000 businesses were founded in the US alone, despite the challenges with the COVID-19 pandemic. All you need is a product and a business plan. But what is it that makes your product unique?
Your vape oils probably have the same ingredients as any other vape oil on the market. You probably have the same vaporizer suppliers as several other businesses in the niche. So, why should your target audience start doing business with you? What’s your story, your business philosophy? Your mission statement and your goal? How are you different from other companies in your industry? The definition of your brand lies in the answers you provide to these questions.
Your brand image sets the tone on how you market your products, how you lead your audiences through the sales funnel, how you generate leads, and how you communicate with your customers. With a strong brand, vape marketing becomes easy because you’ll have definitive, brand-specific rules that govern how every business process is supposed to be handled.
Getting Started With Vape Marketing
Once you have your brand, you need to follow a few other steps before you team up with a vape marketing consultant and start developing a strategy. The most important steps are as follows.
Industry research
Industry research is of the utmost importance. It will help you identify the major players in your niche, gauge the overall industry performance, and determine your own position in the market. Without proper industry research, you’ll have no starting point for vape marketing.
You’ll need to perform both local and global industry analysis to determine how you can enter the market and make a profit. You can use your findings to assess the gaps in the market that you can take advantage of, identify the most common mistakes, analyze your risks, and plan out your business strategy.
Even after you’ve been in the vape business for a while, it’s in your best interest to perform regular market research. It is invaluable to your ability to predict trends, potential threats and develop the best approaches to handling them.
Competition analysis
Industry research can help you identify your main competitors on a local and global scale. However, it’s not enough to simply know who your competitors are. If you want to improve your vape marketing efforts, you need to perform a thorough competition analysis. It will help you in more ways than one.
First and foremost, you’ll learn about your competitors’ main strengths and weaknesses, which will, in turn, help you analyze your own. You’ll see how your competitors are marketing their products, which of their strategies are giving positive results, and which ones are inefficient.
You’ll also gain insights into product pricing, which is critical for your success. If you price your products too high compared to your competitors, your customers will avoid you to save money. If you price your products too low, your customers will be under the impression that they’re of low quality.
Perhaps the most important aspect of competitor research is that you’ll learn how you can make your brand stand out. If you’re too similar to your competitors – with a similar logo, brand name, message, same-looking website, etc. – you could accidentally send your customers to them with your vape marketing. Your business will become a copycat with no USPs (Unique Selling Points) and no real value.
Target audience identification
Finally, you’ll need to identify and analyze your target audience. After all, without them, you cannot hope for your company to stay in business for long. It’s your audience that will guide all your business decisions, vape marketing strategies, expansion plans, and more.
You need to understand precisely who your audience is. What are their pain points, their likes, dislikes, preferences, shopping habits? Are they college students who love experimenting with different vape oil flavors? Are they working professionals trying to quit smoking?
The more you know about your target audience, the easier it will be for you to appeal to them. It will help you establish the right brand voice that’s relatable to them, the right approach that they’ll enjoy, the right marketing strategy that’ll convert them to loyal customers.
If you don’t have a specific target audience in mind when developing your vape marketing plan, you cannot know how to relay your brand messaging to them and how to get their attention.
You can learn a bit about your target audience from industry and competitor analysis. From there, you can work on creating a buyer persona. As you continue generating more leads and customers, you can continue analyzing them and using the information to enhance your approach.
10 Strategies to Market Vape Online in 2023
With the information you’ve collected through industry, competitor, and audience research, you can start working with your vape marketing consultant and creating strategies that drive results.
As mentioned, although you have limitations for vape online marketing through paid ads on Google or Facebook, you still have plenty of options that can take your brand to a whole new level. Take a look at some of the best vape marketing strategies you can implement.
- Vape SEO marketing
Since you can’t advertise through Google and Facebook ads, the only way to get noticed online is by focusing your efforts on organic marketing. That means boosting your vape SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Vape SEO marketing involves improving your site’s visibility on search engines by using relevant vape keywords, increasing your site’s loading time, optimizing it for mobile viewing, and more. Many of the vape online marketing strategy guides discussed through this list are interwoven with vape SEO, highlighting just how important a good SEO strategy is.
Search engines like Google prioritize excellent user experience, so they try to display the best, most relevant results first when a user inputs their search query. When determining where to place your site on their results pages, they take into consideration virtually every single factor that could impact the overall experience.
Your vape SEO company will develop a unified approach to perfecting your site, making it more Google-friendly, and boosting your organic traffic.
- Vape backlinks
Link building for vape companies is a critical process that will help you establish yourself as an authority in your niche. It’s the process of getting hyperlinks that lead from other websites to your own. It makes it easier for users to navigate between sites and pages with a single click, and it allows them to find more relevant search results. With the help of a vape backlinks agency, you can boost your visibility with search engines and prospective clients.
Vape backlinks are an important ranking factor for search engines as they provide more information on what your site is all about.
When you have external sites that link back to your company’s site, they’re essentially giving their visitors a recommendation to visit one of your pages. This recommendation is critical for instilling trust in website visitors and web crawlers. You can think of it as word of mouth marketing. The more external sites link back to your own, aka the more others recommend your business, the more trustworthy you appear.
But keep in mind that there’s a significant difference between low- and high-quality vape backlinks. If you’re getting “recommendations” from spammy sites or if you’re buying links, it can hurt your reputation and your ranking.
With link building for vape companies, it’s critical to get backlinks from high-authority websites that enjoy an excellent reputation among their visitors and web crawlers. Your vape backlinks agency needs to ensure only reputable sites will link back to your own.
- Vape content marketing
If you want to attract audiences, boost website traffic, enhance internal linking, boost conversions, and improve your SERP ranking, vape content marketing is the way to go. It involves the creation of high-quality content that offers value to your audiences and establishes you as an authority in your niche.
Relevant content in the form of educational articles or informative blog posts allows your website visitors to learn more about your brand in an engaging way. You’ll be showing your audiences that you’re not solely interested in boosting your sales but also in establishing valuable relationships with your customers. You’ll share your knowledge and expertise, prove that you know your business inside and out, and instill trust in all website visitors.
Not to mention that you’ll improve your SERP ranking by using relevant keywords and synonyms and providing useful information.
Content marketing can be a challenging process as it’s very nuanced and requires extensive experience. It’s better left to your vape SEO company since they’ll have the expertise necessary to create informative content and naturally include links and vape keywords. Not to mention that they’ll have access to the latest vape marketing news that allow them to provide the best content.
- Vape influencer marketing
Influencer marketing has been on the rise in the past few years, providing businesses with opportunities to connect with their target audiences with relative ease. It’s expected that in future, brand spending on influencer marketing will increase to $15 billion, showcasing just how valuable the strategy is.
Vape influencer marketing is most popular on platforms like Instagram and YouTube, where loyal followers can communicate directly with their favorite influencers. This direct communication allows influencers and their followers to establish trustworthy relationships, which is why over 92% of consumers would sooner trust influencer recommendations than those of traditional celebrities or advertisements.
When looking into vape influencer marketing, you must find an influencer who makes sense for your niche and who has a loyal following with enough consumers who fit your target audience. Find an influencer whose content and personality fit in with your brand so that you can have a unified approach that inspires consumer trust and confidence.
- Vape email marketing
Vape email marketing is still one of the easiest ways to generate leads and boost your conversion rates. But to get started, you first need to build your mailing list. You can do so by combining several vape marketing strategies we’ve already mentioned.
Through vape backlinks, content, and influencer marketing, you can give your audience a taste of all the valuable content, products, and services you have to offer. Once you’ve piqued their interest, you can offer them more or higher quality content in exchange for an email address. You can provide valuable subscriptions, discounts, or rewards, then build your mailing list, and start taking advantage of vape email marketing.
- Review sites for the vape niche
Appearing on vape review sites can bring countless benefits, as long as you’re providing high-quality products and services, that is. You can boost your vape backlinks, appear on high-authority websites, and get a valuable recommendation that can improve your website traffic and enhance your lead generation.
An alternative to this would be leaving a prominent space on your website for user reviews and testimonials. Honest reviews will serve as social proof that your products are reliable, and they can even improve your relevant keyword usage in a natural, unobtrusive way.
- Magazines and newsletters
Although vape digital marketing has completely revolutionized the industry, you can still rely on good, old-fashioned marketing strategies to spread brand awareness and boost your sales by contributing to your niche’s magazines and newsletters.
You can increase your client base by reaching out to audiences who might not be as tech-savvy as your average consumer and who still pay attention to paper-based advertising.
Of course, the same rules apply to this strategy as to any digital strategy. You need to provide high-quality content, have a unified brand message, and stick to the same tone and approach as in your online campaigns.
- Guest blogging on relevant sites
Guest blogging is another valuable method for spreading the word about your brand and your expertise. The strategy is often used alongside link building for vape companies as it provides you with an opportunity to link back to any of the pages that you choose.
When guest blogging, you’re in charge of creating the content for publishing. You can fully optimize it for your relevant keywords and key phrases, include links to any of your pages (as opposed to the commonly used homepage links that most sites will include), perfect the anchor text, and use your own style and tone of voice.
The most important thing to consider while guest blogging is the site to which you intend to post your content. It needs to make sense for your business and niche, and it needs to have high authority among consumers and web crawlers.
- Valuable vape rewards program
Everyone loves a good rewards program, whether that’s getting free stuff, a valuable discount, or just a chance to win something for free. You can use that for your vape marketing and boosting lead generation.
You don’t have to give free gifts to every website visitor you get. You can make it a contest that you’ll promote on your social media pages – “the first 50 subscribers will get 15% off on their next order, hurry up!”, “complete this vaping quiz for a chance to win the new vaporizer.” Your options are endless.
Rewards programs work wonders for attracting new audiences but also for keeping your existing customers loyal. You’ll be showing your appreciation for your customers while improving your brand awareness and building up your reputation.
- Vape social media marketing
Finally, you can make use of vape social media marketing to improve your bottom line. However, you’ll first need to do a thorough vape marketing research to understand what you can and can’t do on social media.
As mentioned, platforms like Facebook and Instagram have serious limitations for businesses in the vape industry, so you have to be careful.
Use your company accounts to promote your blog posts and content, share review sites that mentioned your products, or provide updates on your business. Stay active in the comments and keep replying to messages to keep your audiences engaged.
Most importantly, stay active. Inactivity on social media can harm your reputation and give the impression that you’re not committed to your followers. If you don’t use your social media accounts, delete them. If you want to take advantage of social media marketing, stay active.
What Advertisers Need to Do Next
Once you’ve consulted your vape marketing manager and developed a strategy for success, you need to have some patience. Organic marketing doesn’t offer immediate results. It’s a work in progress, and you’ll notice a real difference with time.
Perform vape marketing analytics to check your progress and gain insight into your website traffic and customer conversions prior to launching your campaign and several months after. Within a few months, you’ll notice the effect of your strategy and see what an impact it can make.
Keep tracking the performance of your strategies to adapt and improve them. Commit to nurturing the relationship with your new leads and stay updated on all the relevant vape marketing news.
Conclusion
There isn’t a single strategy for success. You need to combine several different techniques and methods as they all work off of one another to ensure a comprehensive approach that drives results.
While vape marketing comes with a few challenges and obstacles, they’re easily overcome when you have a vape SEO company as your loyal partner.