Tag Archives: feedback

Digital Marketing Tips to Help Grow Your Cannabis Business

By Steven Clayton
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The cannabis industry is quickly growing with the chance of sales tripling to $30 billion by 2023. With many rules and regulations that business owners must follow, marketing your cannabis business can be a challenge. While many may not know where to start with marketing, there are organic and simple tactics that owners can implement that can help drive more traffic to your website, resulting in more leads and sales.

Digital marketing is the most effective way to improve your brand’s online presence, reach your target audiences, rank higher on Google searches and ultimately drive more sales. Today, 81% of people turn to the internet before making a purchasing decision, but determining what digital marketing efforts are most valuable can be a daunting task for business owners. When looking to implement digital marketing strategies, businesses should leverage the 80/20 rule—focusing efforts on the 20% of the digital marketing tactics that yield 80% of the most impactful results. With this in mind, some of the key digital marketing tactics to implement today include:

Keep up with Reputation Management

This dispensary ad appeared on Variety.com

Having positive reviews for your company is key to having customers come back, and for new customers to try your business out. With 72% of customers not making a buying decision until they’ve read reviews, companies should prioritize soliciting for reviews from customers and stay up to date on the reviews that are coming in. Businesses should respond to all reviews, whether good or bad, as this shows to customers that the brand cares and values the customers opinion and feedback and wants to continue creating a positive experience for everyone. Reviews should be shown prominently on the business’s website for customers to clearly read and can also be used in emails or social media posts.

Make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Top of Mind

Focusing on developing a solid SEO strategy ensures that customers can find your company on Google when they are searching. In оrdеr to rank well in search engine results, websites need search engine optimization (SEO), which is a powerful tool and a must if your company wants to be found online by customers. With Google processing 12.18 billion search queries in July 2020 alone and 93% of all online experiences beginning with a search engine, making sure your business can be clearly found and seen online is imperative for your cannabis business’ success. Keeping your website and basic information—such as hours, contact information and prices—up to date will keep your SEO high. 

Incorporate Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

PlugPlay, a California cannabis brand, stays relevant with creative posts like these.

Gathering customer emails is KEY and your business should have a solid plan on how to capture them, whether that’s an incentive for providing an email when they enter the site or one at checkout in the retail shop. Businesses should have the customer’s name, phone and email as a baseline to use to email or text blast out the latest promotions. From there, companies can also create a loyalty program for customers in order to give them an incentive to keep purchasing from your business. By creating targeted and personal messaging to customers with the help of CRM tools, loyalty is created to the brand, which can increase purchasing power and the amount spent.

Embrace Social Media

Social media is a part of almost everyone’s life and it’s the perfect opportunity to give customers an inside view into your company, the products you sell and any promotions or specials going on. Utilizing Facebook, Instagram and Twitter is essential for directly reaching your customer base with visually appealing and timely content. Social media is an opportunity to get personal with your brand and build relationships with your customers for them to see what kind of brand you are. Social pages should remain up to date and should be keeping up with the comments that followers are saying.

As more dispensaries and cannabis businesses pop up across the country, marketing your business may seem like a challenge for business owners, but simple and useful digital marketing tools can be incorporated into the business plan to create more quality leads and sales. Ensuring you have a strong digital presence for customers to find you and learn about your business online is the key to success.

Wellness Watch

Creating a Balanced Menu: Tips for a Better Dispensary Inventory

By Dr. Emily Earlenbaugh, PhD.
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When it comes to running a well functioning dispensary, one of the biggest challenges can be stocking a balanced menu. Cannabis consumers have a wide range of tastes and preferences when it comes to products and the most successful dispensaries have a wide selection to meet this need. When a dispensary can keep a consistent stock of products that a particular consumer likes, they can quickly become the only dispensary that consumer frequents. For those dispensaries looking to fill out their menu with crowd pleasing products, I recommend the following practices.

 

Diverse Strains
Cannabis comes in many varieties, and each strain has a slightly different effect on the user. One of the biggest mistakes I see in new dispensaries is a menu that is weighted heavily toward one type of cannabis. The grower or manager of the collective may prefer Diesel varieties, or Haze, and choose similar strains repeatedly. This can severely limit your potential client pool to only those cannabis users who enjoy that one variety. When stocking your flower and concentrates, look for a range of genetic varieties, and be careful not to have too much bias in one direction or the other. 
 
Consistent but New
Cannabis consumers want a consistent supply of strains that work well for them. But sometimes using one strain all the time can lead to decreased efficacy of that particular strain. Keeping a rotation of similar strains in one category can help keep your client base intrigued with new strains, without sacrificing consistency. If you have patients who really enjoy the strain Grape Ape. Rather than keeping Grape Ape in stock at all times, you can stock it regularly, but rotate it with similar strains like Lavender or Blackberry Kush, or new strains with similar genetics.
 
Consumer Feedback
Successful dispensaries are responsive to their consumers’ purchasing habits. Tracking the strains and products that your consumers buy can be helpful when deciding what to purchase again. However, this type of tracking does not tell you about the consumers you may have lost by not having the right product in the first place. Giving your consumers an avenue to give you feedback on your products and request ones that you do not have can be a great way to find out what your particular client base is looking for.
 
Edible and Topical Options
The fastest growing demographic of cannabis users are baby boomers, and many of them are less interested in smoking cannabis than using an edible or topical product. Having a wide variety of edible and topical products can help to bring in this growing demographic. When choosing edible products, look for both sugary treats that appeal to the sweet tooths out there, and the more medicinal products like capsules and tinctures for those looking for exact dosing and a more clinical experience.
 
When in Doubt, Ask for Help

For those looking for more in depth information on how to create a balanced dispensary menu, seek out help from people with industry experience. My practice, Mindful Cannabis Consulting offers consulting and dispensary staff trainings on just this topic. Whether you are just starting out or looking to optimize your existing dispensary, a little help can go a long way.