Serial entrepreneurs are always attracted to the industries with the highest potential profit margins, and the e-liquid industry certainly qualifies for that description.
In every nation with a large population of people who vape, there are laboratories that will happily produce e-liquid to your specifications at a reasonable rate.
If you can manage to find an audience for your vape juice, you can sell it for many times the production cost.
Finding an audience, though, is the hard part. In every major vaping market, there are already dozens of established e-liquid brands and dozens of other brands struggling for attention.
Just having an e-liquid company will not be enough to get people to flock to your website. Marketing an e-liquid brand like Pure E-Liquids in 2020 requires a significant budget and significant effort. Here’s how to do it.
Project the Right Image With Your Packaging
Creating the right image for an e-liquid brand begins with the packaging. You want a package that will stand out on store shelves, but you want to accomplish that goal while keeping your product’s box or label classy and understated.
Try to imagine the persona of your ideal customer, and then create a package likely to appeal to that target persona. It’s worthwhile to put a package through focus testing before you begin producing it.
Don’t attempt to create a logo that mimics the visual styling of a tobacco brand. You won’t get the desired reaction from vapers if you do that; many people who vape consciously avoid anything that makes them think of tobacco products.
Likewise, you should also avoid copying the styling of a candy or snack brand. If you infringe on another company’s trademark, that company will notice. Vaping is big business now; there’s no way to fly under the radar anymore.
Give Your Website’s Text the Effort It Deserves
If you’re going to start an e-liquid brand, it’ll be very helpful if you vape yourself. You can’t understand your competition, after all, if you’ve never tried any of your competitors’ products.
When you do try those products, you’ll realise that they aren’t really that different from one another. An e-liquid with notes of strawberry and cream, for instance, can be presented as a “strawberry milkshake” flavour, a “strawberry custard” flavour, or any of several other flavour profiles.
The flavour of your e-liquid does matter, but it isn’t what will differentiate your brand from the competition. The flavour of your e-liquid doesn’t matter nearly as much as the way you describe it.
Unless you’re using proprietary flavouring agents, what you’re selling is fundamentally the same as what everyone else is selling. It’s the descriptive text that will set your brand apart.
You should spend at least as much time crafting perfect product descriptions as you do on any other aspect of marketing your e-liquid brand.
Your customers aren’t looking for another strawberries-and-cream e-liquid – not even if it’s the best e-liquid of its type in the world. You’ll never be able to get the vaping community to agree that your flavours are the best anyway because the taste is subjective.
What your potential customers are interested in is an e-liquid brand that feels special and exclusive – and the way to get those feelings across is with text.
Before your e-liquid brand launches, you should already be working on your marketing language and product descriptions. Don’t stop revising the text until it’s perfect.
Build a Website Highlighting Your Distinctiveness and Professionalism
If you spend some time looking at the websites of other e-liquid brands, you’ll notice that many of those sites simply aren’t very good. As mature as the vaping industry has become, there are still many e-liquid brands that haven’t invested greatly in the development of their websites.
That creates a potential opening for you. If your website presents a combination of perfect text and the ideal imagery to attract your target market, you’ll have no trouble standing apart from the competition.
When you’re developing your website’s design, imagery and product photography, look at competing e-liquid brands with a critical eye. You’ll find that many of those sites are essentially generic e-commerce sites running on Shopify and similar platforms. Most of them look nearly the same, don’t they?
Now, look at lifestyle brands in other industries. The liquor industry is a good place to begin. Think about the price difference between a premium liquor brand and a bottom-shelf brand. Does the product itself really justify the higher price for a premium brand on its own?
No; the product is only part of the package. The rest of the package is the lifestyle image that the brand projects. Try to find a way to project the lifestyle image that your target audience wants to see.
Get the Word Out About Your E-Liquid Brand
Now that you’ve constructed the perfect image for your e-liquid brand, the only thing left to do is let people know that you exist. To do that, you need a three-pronged strategy.
- You need to get your product added to the stores where people already buy their e-liquid. Contact distributors and talk to the managers of local vape shops. Offer them discounts if they’ll begin carrying your products.
- Add as much content to your website as possible. When your site is still new, your commercial content – the e-commerce side of your site – may not receive a lot of traffic due to the high level of competition. You have a much better chance to get traffic by publishing informational content. Write about how people can have a better experience with vaping. Explain how to solve common problems with vaping products. Content of that type is much more likely to rank well.
- Earn as many links to your website as possible. The more inbound links you have, the more likely your site will be to rank well for competitive search terms. One way to start is by sending your products to people who review e-liquids. If your product is good, you can potentially generate a great deal of attention that way.