The Challenges Of Marketing In The Gun Industry

Introduction – Challenges Can Be Opportunities

I just wanted to get this started with identifying who this content is marketed at and why I’m doing it to begin with. In the simplest way possible I want to work with more brands within the firearms industry. In order to do that and show value from my skills and experience I decided to create this blog to be a resource for those who don’t have the startup capital to hire someone like me internally or hire a third party vendor to market on their behalf. My goal is to provide as much information and implementation strategy as possible so businesses feel confident to be more aggressive with their online marketing efforts.

Who might this content be targeted towards? Well if you work in any of the following areas, this content is written for you:

• Firearms Manufacturing
• Holster Making
• Tactical Training
• Gun Accessory Market
• Ammunition Sales
• Reloading Equipment
• Knife Making
• Outdoor Sporting
• Gun & Outdoor Conventions
• Exploding Targets (aka. Tannerite)

The challenges presented if you are in this industry are quite frankly a bit of a pain in the ass because even though what we do is perfectly legal and constitutional, the powers that be have made it incredibly difficult to conduct commerce online. Google regulates advertising for gun sales as well as most other ad networks and social media platforms. If you make hand-guards for AR15s and you want to sell them online and drive traffic to your page, it is going to be very difficult because even though you aren’t selling “guns” they are still considered evil and dangerous arbitrarily and therefore you fall under this umbrella of “gun sales” and your ads will not be approved.

So what does Google consider to be a weapon? Well if you look at their policies and Ad Words guidelines pretty much anything “scary”.

From that statement above you can see that they pretty much blanket anything to do with firearms, ammunition and explosives is out as far as running ads go.

Content Marketing Within The Gun Industry

All Content Marketing is when you boil it down is creating and publishing content that engages an audience with the desire to convert them. That’s not an official definition but it’s how I would define it. This is what will set one brand apart from another. There are several brands that are doing this well, and there are even more that don’t have a clue. My goal is to clue in those people that don’t have any idea where to begin. Content marketing will be the primary topic discussed and how to create and distribute content with the purpose of creating awareness for the brand, educating potential customers and ultimately selling more products or services while increasing retention and reach through your customer base.

There are many challenges when it comes to marketing and the gun industry as a whole. But we will be leveraging that to our advantage because the one thing it does is level the playing field. If you don’t have a big budget to buy ads from the NRA and Recoil magazine you can still compete with the brands that do because when it comes to the “online marketing” game, everyone has to play by the same rules.