If you think that the vape industry is cutthroat, just wait until you try marketing a new disposable vape brand.

It’s hard enough if you’re a vape shop selling brands that everyone is already searching for. If you’re trying to market a new disposable vape brand, though, it’s twice as difficult to gain traction. No one has heard of your brand, so you’re invisible.

The long-term rewards of owning your own brand can be pretty incredible.

Before you can get there, though, you need an actionable strategy for getting your brand seen, searched and stocked.

Here’s a roadmap explaining exactly how to do it.

The Challenge for Unknown Vape Brands

One of the big SEO benefits of running your own vape brand is that when people search for you, your site should always be the first result. That means you’ll be shown before the vape shops that carry your brand – but no one carries your brand yet.

You need to generate brand awareness to get that traffic.

Until then, your only chance to generate organic traffic will come from more general keywords like “disposable vapes.” Unfortunately, though, major vape sellers dominate those keywords.

For a new disposable vape brand, successful early-stage marketing centers around achieving four main goals.

• Build brand awareness so people search for you by name.
• Optimize your website for a professional look and a frictionless ordering process.
• Create on-site content targeting low-competition keywords with buying intent.
• Earn backlinks from credible, relevant sites to rank higher for competitive searches.

Tactics to Build Brand Awareness and Demand

In order to get people to start searching online for your disposable vape brand, they need to know that it exists. For that to happen, you need to put your products where your potential customers are. Here are two viable strategies for doing that.

Partner with Vape Content Creators

Advertising opportunities aren’t easy for vape brands to find, but they do exist. To get some publicity, you need to go directly to content creators in the vape niche. These may include:

• Vape websites
• Video reviewers on YouTube
• Influencers on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram

 

How and Why It Works

The idea behind working with a creator or influencer to build brand awareness is simple. You’ll send a sampling of your products, and the creator will write or record content about them. If the audience is engaged with the content and interested in new vaping products, they’ll want to know more about your brand.

Choose the Right Creators

Partnering with content creators can be a great way to generate brand awareness, but it’s important to choose the right ones. Creators want to be compensated, and you want to earn a return on your investment.

We’ve seen vape brands waste thousands on partnerships with influencers who don’t even vape. Don’t let that happen to you. Make sure the audience actually wants what you’re offering.

Before working with any content creator, you need to be sure that they have dedicated followers checking to see what’s new. A “(Brand Name) Review” post on a website that doesn’t have people going to their home page to view the latest content won’t get any traffic at all because people aren’t searching for your brand yet.

Remember the compliance requirements. If you want to partner with an influencer or video creator, remember that paid vape placements on social media platforms usually need to be marked as advertisements and restricted to audiences aged 18/21 or older.

Encourage Action with a Coupon

To increase the effectiveness of the promotion, you might also want to consider offering a temporary coupon that allows viewers or readers to buy your vapes at a discount. If you don’t sell directly to consumers, you can skip this step.

Even if you only sell vapes to businesses on a wholesale basis, influencer partnerships can still be extremely valuable. Major disposable vape brands like Geek Bar and Lost Mary partner with content creators in a regular basis even though they don’t sell direct to the public.

Reach Vape Shops Directly

The other way to get your products in front of potential customers is by putting them in vape shops where people can buy them immediately.

Right now, though, vape shops don’t know that your brand exists because you’re not carried by any distributors. That means you’ll need to reach them directly.

Vape Shops Ignore Bulk Email

Many new disposable vape brands attempt to use mass email to reach vape shops. That might be worth trying since it costs almost nothing, but the problem is that vape shop owners are already flooded with unsolicited email every day. You’ll likely receive few responses or none at all.

Use Postal Mail to Get Attention and Orders

If you really want to get some attention from vape shops, skip the email and use postal mail instead; it’ll have a much higher open rate.

• Print a glossy brochure with high-quality photography that showcases your products’ designs.
• Clearly explain what makes your vapes different from what the vape shops already carry.
• Outline your wholesale prices, ordering process and minimum order quantities.
• Consider a special introductory offer for first-time wholesale buyers.
• It might be worthwhile to include a product sample as well.

If your brochure looks nice – and your introductory offer is good enough – it’s highly likely that some vape shops will place orders because their customers are always interested in trying new things.

Even if a vape shop places a single order and never buys from you again, it’s still worth it for you because nothing is more important than exposing your brand to as many vapers as possible.

How to Build Your On-Site Content

While you work to build brand awareness, you should also develop your website in a way that targets the lower-competition keywords that are realistically achievable for you as a new brand. Many new disposable vape brands try to take the easy way out by flooding their sites with low-value AI content and end up getting no traffic at all. It’s much better to have just a few pages of high-value human-written content than it is to flood your site with dozens of articles that no one will ever see.

Your ultimate goal as a disposable vape brand is to rank for short-tail terms like “best vapes,” “disposable vapes” and “wholesale vapes.” In the long run, getting people to search for your brand will help you rank for those competitive terms because it’ll show Google that people want to see content from your site. For now, though, you need to focus on keywords with lower competition.

Here are some examples of lower-competition keywords that might be worthwhile to target.

• High-volume searches like “disposable vapes” are out of reach right now, but you have a chance to appear for searches including specific flavors like “watermelon ice vapes.”
• You might not be able to rank for “wholesale vapes,” but keywords like “wholesale vapes with free shipping” are realistic goals.

Think about long-tail keywords as you build your site’s content. Make sure that your site looks professional and sends strong trust signals like prominent contact information and clear shipping and delivery policies. When an interested customer does land on your site, you need to make sure that the ordering process is as frictionless as possible.

Planning Your Link Building Strategy

Increasing the number of people who search directly for your brand will help you rank for more competitive search terms over time because it shows Google that your content deserves to be surfaced. That’s how you build credibility and authority.

It’s also a big part of why major websites like Reddit and Wikipedia rank so well for so many keywords. When people add “reddit” and “wiki” to their searches, they’re telling Google who they trust.

Increasing branded searches, however, is only one part of building authority. It’s also crucial for your site to have high-quality inbound links if you want to rank for tough keywords.

• Start by securing backlinks from as many vape-specific websites as possible because the topical relevance will increase the value of those links.
• Once you’ve done that, move on to publishers outside the vaping niche. Focus on publishers that receive organic human traffic.

If a website has high domain authority but receives no organic traffic, Google has most likely identified that site as a link farm. A backlink from that site will probably have no value.

The Long-Term Plan for Marketing a Disposable Vape Brand

Vape marketing is tricky, and it’s especially difficult for a new brand with no visibility. There are dozens or possibly even hundreds of disposable vape brands in the world today that you’ve never heard of because they haven’t set themselves up for brand awareness and long-term success.

• Generating visibility online and in vape shops leads to people searching for your brand online.
• Direct outreach to vape shops helps to get your products in stores, further increasing visibility and awareness.
• Targeting low-competition keywords with high-value content on your website helps to generate organic traffic when people aren’t searching specifically for your brand yet.
• Over time, a solid brand awareness strategy combined with link building will help your site get ranked for more competitive keywords.

By following this strategy, even a new disposable vape brand can compete on the global stage with established brands.

Is this too much for you to handle on your own? We’ve got your back. We’ve helped some of the world’s biggest vape brands get to the top, and we can do the same for you. Ready to get started? Let’s talk.