In addition to guest posting on the UpCity blog, Pisgah Peaks Ventures is featured as one of our Top Digital Marketing Agencies in the United States. Check out their profile here.
If you work in the cannabis industry, odds are you already know how tricky it can be to navigate through legal roadblocks and detours as you promote your business. At Pisgah Peaks Ventures, we’ve encountered these roadblocks, bypassed the detours, and created a new digital marketing path for cannabis businesses. Your cannabis dispensary can profit by advertising online – and we’ve got proof!
Digital Marketing Best Practices Don’t Change Across Verticals
Just because it’s cannabis marketing and there may be more obstacles to overcome, it doesn’t mean the marketing best practices are different. The main goals of a marketing campaign remain the same:
Targeted Audiences
The right PEOPLE should see your ads. One of the most important things a marketer can do is pinpoint buyer personas. Once you know who your customer is, their age range, interests, careers, etc., then you can strategically create the ad to target your buyers’ specific demographics.
Quality Publishers
It’s imperative to focus on brand-safe inventory with great content and reach. Take the time to focus on the outlets you will be advertising with and make sure they align with your company’s mission.
Measurable Events & Goals
Click metrics are not the only way to evaluate a working strategy. Your marketing should also drive sales, email captures, phone calls, or in-store visits. These analytics will help you improve upon your marketing strategy as you begin to learn more about your customers.
Insights
Cannabis consumption varies from consumer to consumer. Learning why certain people buy certain products helps you sell more to them. Connecting with your customers is the best way to understand their needs and wants. Are they athletes? Do they have a sedentary job? These are demographics of your customer base that will provide you with the information you need to successfully get your product in front of your target audience.
Compliant and ROI Positive Dispensary Programmatic Marketing
An eCommerce site needs to not only showcase the products you sell, it needs to provide business leaders with the analytics to improve upon their marketing strategy. How? By increasing online sales with a “Digital Budtender” A.K.A. an online menu. This digital menu is a staple for any dispensary as it highlights all of your company’s products and retail items, available for purchase online.
Your digital menu should show you:
- Where on the menu your ad engagers visited
- What products on the menu your ad engagers looked at
- Total trips to the cart
- Total sales
These tools offer immense insight into what your best sellers are, why people may abandon their carts, and more. With all this data, you’ll be prepared to create and manage effective digital advertisements.
Take a look at one of our client’s eCommerce sites here.
So now that you’ve got the eCommerce site set up and optimized, it’s time to move on to paid advertising campaigns. Paid advertising allows you to reach new customers while also retargeting previous customers or potential customers that have visited your website. Let’s kick paid advertising campaigns up a notch with advanced eCommerce and marketing analytics.
Below are the top 4 takeaways you should gain from a paid advertising campaign:
- Gross revenue from your ad campaign
- List of order IDs from sales generated by your campaign
- Customer profiles from shoppers who view your menu items
- Customer profiles from shoppers who engage with specific brands on your menu
Case Study: California Recreational Dispensary
A California Recreational Dispensary made 98 sales with a 72% ROI on a 30-day local-market digital marketing campaign. The Dispensary wanted to safely reach adults in their local-market online driving them to their online menu powered by dutchie. The Dispensary needed to ensure a clear and easy process to validate engagement, traffic, and sales.
The best digital businesses leverage multiple strategies that help each individual strategy perform better. dutchie analytics measured a 371% increase in online orders during the California Dispensary’s campaign.
With our creative strategy, execution, and collaboration with dutchie, we ensured tracking could deliver transparent result analytics. The dispensary used consumer analytics tools to understand more about the geography, demographics, and non-cannabis behaviors of their online customers. This helped to identify the most relevant prospects in their market. PPV and dutchie conversion tracking enabled a data-driven shift in media delivery. The media dollars were focused on reaching users more likely to complete the desired KPI.
The Key Performance Indicator for the California Dispensary Ad Campaign
Sell Smarter
Optimization and campaign insights aren’t just upselling techniques from your digital partner. The goal for digital marketing is to “learn” which strategies work in driving cost-effective results, then utilizing those strategies at scale. When you go to plan your next marketing campaign, ask yourself and your team these questions:
- What messages resonate with certain audiences?
- What ad sizes and device types generate the best engagement?
- What days of the week drive the best new user engagement?
- What times of the day drive the best recurring user engagement?
- What are the differences between your low dollar vs high dollar buyers?
If you don’t know the answer to any or all of these questions, you undoubtedly need ad campaign analytics. Analytics allow you to gain insight into what your current and potential customers respond to. These results help you better structure your ads moving forward: which demographics to use, what is the most active time of day, and even which content pulls in the most leads.
CRM Digital Marketing & Inactive Customer Activation
Digital advertising should be viewed as a sales tool and an analytics tool – working together to drive more sales. The more data you are capturing during the transaction process, the easier it is to understand and engage with your shoppers. Do you have inactive customers in your CRM? You can use your own data to bring those customers back into your online store.
How?
Every dispensary should have an SMS and email program for loyalty marketing to stay engaged with your best shoppers. What about customers that buy once, and don’t return? How do you invite them back if they don’t respond to email or SMS? Through CRM onboarding and analyzing your POS reporting, you can match online identifiers to offline records, reaching that exact user across their digital devices.
Digital marketing can be daunting at times with every “do” and “don’t.” But once you begin utilizing data analytics to improve upon your marketing efforts, you will doubtlessly increase your revenue and customership. Keep in mind, these analytics can also help you decide which products to continue selling, which to discontinue, and which new additions you’d like to bring into your digital store. There’s an old saying, “measure twice, cut once.” This applies directly to your business, and especially when it comes to marketing your business to ensure growth, expansion, and success.