If you’re an owner or prospective owner of a vape shop or vape juice brand, you’ve got one major issue standing between you and your potential for success: The products that you sell are basically the same as what everyone else is selling. You’re selling the same vaping devices and tanks from the same Chinese manufacturers, and you’re selling the same e-liquids from the same distributors. Even if you make your own e-liquid, you’re flavoring that e-liquid with the same compounds available to every other e-liquid maker.

In short, if you fail to differentiate your brand, you will certainly fail because customers will have no reason to buy from you rather than another company. If you want to find success in the vaping industry, you need to have a definite answer to this one question: Why should people buy from your company?

Here’s how the world’s most successful vaping brands differentiate themselves.

Understanding Your Customer Base

The worldwide population of adult vapers is currently estimated to exceed 41 million people. Within that very large population, there are several distinct segments. You’ve got complete beginners. You’ve got hobbyist vapers who love trying new things. You’ve got people who aspire to win cloud competitions or become vaping celebrities on social media. The first step in differentiating your brand is deciding what your customer base is and figuring out how you’re going to speak to those people. Brands like V2 Cigs, for example, have found great success by walking beginners through the process of switching from smoking to vaping and making that process easy and fun. No one vape shop can appeal to every type of vaper on the planet. Know your target market.

Quality Website Content

If you sell vape gear online, you want your website to attain a prominent status on Google and other search engines – and the first step in getting strong search engine rankings is having quality website content. To build quality website content, you need to focus on two areas. Those areas are product content and non-product content.

When adding new products to your site, do you simply copy the product descriptions from other sites? If you do that, it’s likely that your website has the exact same product text as hundreds of other websites. In that case, Google will have no reason to ever send traffic to your product pages. Take the time to describe products in your own words. Even a short original product description is usually better than a long, detailed description copied from another website.

Product page text is always important, but when you’re new to the vaping industry, you’ll find it very hard to attract search engine traffic to your product pages. It’s much easier to get traffic by publishing non-commercial content because non-commercial search terms have less competition on Google. If your vaping business doesn’t have a blog, start one right away. Set aside time as often as possible to write articles that solve problems or answer questions. As a business owner in the vaping industry, you already answer customers’ questions on a daily basis. A question from a real customer is often one of the best possible topics on which to base a blog post.

Quality Photography and Brand Imagery

Just like using product text copied from other websites, using stock photos for your products is one of the poorest ways to make your brand stand out. If you want to find success in the vaping industry, it’s a good idea to study your competition. Pull up the websites that currently appear on Google’s first page for your target search terms. Do those websites look more professional than yours? Do they have nicer logos? Do their product pages have original photography? Those are the visual elements that set web-based businesses apart. Your vaping company can’t differentiate itself if your website looks the same as everyone else’s.

Creative Product Selection and Flavor Development

You may get your products from the same suppliers and distributors as all the other vape shops, but that doesn’t mean you need to sell the same products as them. Of course, it’s always a good idea to carry the latest tanks and coils from the big names like SMOK – after all, that’s what many of your customers are looking for – but it can also pay to unearth unusual products. If you can manage to find and carry something like a regional e-liquid brand with poor distribution or a new vaping device with a unique and unusual feature, you could end up with an unexpected hit on your hands if you promote the product well. Since you’ll also be one of the only sources from which that product is available, you’ll also be the one reaping the rewards from your promotional efforts.

If you make your own e-liquids, you have a special challenge because, as mentioned above, every other e-liquid brand has access to the same flavoring compounds as you. You’ll need to be creative in your flavor development if you want to build an e-liquid brand that really stands out; it’s really difficult to market a single-flavor e-liquid. Remember, though, that how vape juice tastes isn’t nearly as important as how it sounds like it tastes. Take the time to hone your flavor descriptions to absolute perfection.

Solid Promotional and Relationship Building Skills

Coca-Cola doesn’t necessarily sell the world’s best soda, but they’re the world’s top soft drink brand anyway due in part to their unrelenting promotional efforts. With a yearly advertising budget of $5.8 billion as of 2018, no one works harder than Coca-Cola at cultivating awareness, relevance and a positive brand image. As with so many other consumer products, the actual taste of the soda isn’t nearly as important as the way one feels while drinking it. That principle also applies to vaping companies. If you have solid promotional skills and can build the right brand image, it won’t matter that you’re essentially selling the same products as every other vape shop.