Dispensary Marketing

Marketing for Dispensaries, Retailers and Cannabis Stores


The cannabis retail space and its inherent volatility has the DIY marketer and seasoned agency alike scrambling to implement actionable, bankable, sustainable ROI despite the epic challenges and tight restrictions on advertising of all stripes. At the highest level, marketing strategies must be cohesive, comprehensive and outside-of-the-box all at once. A high level of local search optimization is mandatory, pay-per-click can be precarious but has slam dunk potential and brand ambassadors are the new word of mouth, but the rest of How To Market Your Retail Store 101 goes out the window simply because you sell cannabis. Social media, once the hallmark of a grassroots budget, has now transcended tricky to full-fledged nightmare in almost every iteration for cannabis retailers large and small. As it pertains to search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, the difficulties and unreliability of paid search campaigns make it almost mandatory to have high-level organic search managed by a cannabis SEO.

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Margins in recreational adult-use states in America are unprecedentedly low for non-hospitality related businesses and bigger budgets are some operators' only hope.  Canadian dispensaries and medical cannabis clinics in the US often face an entirely different problem because of supply issues.  Being the only compassion center in your county may be creating demand that you cannot meet because of delayed testing or inadequate local cultivation capacities.  It can seem impossible to know exactly how to market your dispensary when you face nascent or regulatory challenges that mainstream industries have long since overcome.  


The truth is that dispensaries are generally not spaced out optimally to benefit both the patient and the operator, often resulting in oversaturated micromarkets (think Baltimore, Maryland) versus legal cannabis deserts in place like northern California or rural British Columbia.

 

The tried-and-true startup marketing model for a business entering an immature industry pre-saturation doesn't work so well when it comes to cannabis.  Certain states with no cap on dispensary licenses that have quickly met or exceeded retail saturation (i.e. Colorado, Oregon, Oklahoma) are currently experiencing the undesirable market corrections and inevitable M&A that come when the fifth bagel shop almost puts the first four out of business. 

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Added to that mix is state specific advertising restrictions that encompass branding from packaging to nomenclature to signage. Marketing medical cannabis becomes a lot more difficult when you have to tell Google it is an Alternative Therapy or Compassion Center.  The nail in the coffin is when the "failsafe" paid advertising channels are unavailable (or at best uncertain) for cannabis brands because of federal scheduling regional tolerance.


Normally, any operation with a viable marketing budget can acquire brand awareness, website traffic and a reliable revenue stream from a properly crafted campaign on one or more paid platforms.  PPC and SEM options that are available to nearly every other legal industry are quite often eliminated from the cannabis marketer's arsenal.  Unfortunately, there are micromarkets so competitive that smaller companies without the means for an elaborate organic strategy are doomed to fail. 

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Whether you are a vertically-integrated operation or primarily a retail medical or adult-use  cannabis store with one or more brick and mortar locations, following data driven best dispensary marketing practices can increase your market share sustainably as the industry matures.


Dispensary marketing strategies going into 2023 must encompass every available advertising channel from spot-on branding decisions to website visibility to social integration to hyperlocal marketing via Maps optimization. The future of cannabis retail is going to involve a comprehensive marketing plan that addresses every possible pillar of advertising. Brick and mortar dispensaries that have dialed-in their online menu to including specials, daily deals and other promotions in real-time and dispensaries that offer same-day cannabis delivery will be the norm instead of the exception. 


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For more information about greenco's digital marketing services for dispensaries, set up a short phone consultation now

call Jamie today
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