Dispensary Marketing Strategies For Maximizing Cannabis Retail PopUps
Dispensary marketing strategies can be a huge challenge to new cannabis entrepreneurs who are trying to increase foot traffic to their new or existing retail stores.
Most of this challenge comes from the strict advertising restrictions when it comes to marketing your marijuana dispensary.
Essentially, there are at least 2-sides for all your dispensary marketing strategies.
You need to create awareness of your brand, retail location, and competitive advantages. But you also need to incentivize your customers to come into your retail store in order to purchase.
Depending on your place of business and the type of business you’re operating, you may or may not be able to sell your cannabis and CBD products online via your e-commerce website.
Federal, State, or Provincial laws may allow you to only sell cannabis and CBD products from your licensed retail location.
In this case, you have an additional challenge. You need to battle mail-order and cannabis delivery services for attention and potential revenue.
So to remain competitive in this increasingly crowded market, you need to strategically identify different dispensary marketing tactics to get customers into your store and to have your product selection stand out on retail shelves.
In this article, we discuss how to improve your dispensary marketing strategy and increase retail store sales by partnering with your suppliers to implement a weekly series of retail-pop ups in your store.
What is a Retail Pop-Up in a Cannabis Dispensary?
Pop-up retail started in Los Angelas and is now a retail phenomenon that can be found worldwide. In fact, the pop-up industry is now estimated to be a $50 billion industry USD.
A pop-up retail space is a venue – or a venue inside of an existing venue – that is temporary and involves “popping up” one day, then disappearing anywhere from one day to several weeks later.
We work with a few cannabis retail stores in the USA and in Canada that use these small and temporary setups as part of their dispensary marketing to build interest in their partners/suppliers products and seed their product with cultural influencers.
This pop-up retail concept makes it ideal for a cannabis dispensary to create a unique environment that engages their customers and generates a feeling of education, relevance, and interactivity.
The above 3 things are important factors your Gen X target audience and/or your Baby Boomer target audience craves when shopping for cannabis & CBD products.
4 Reasons Why To Include Retail Pop-Ups In Your Dispensary Marketing
There are many reasons your dispensary marketing plan should include regular retail pop-ups but we’re going to focus on the top 4 that will affect your bottom line.
For example, direct contact with your customers helps sell your cannabis & CBD products.
From a high level, setting up weekly pop-ups in your dispensary, in partnership with various suppliers, can give you regular steady traffic into your retail store and will provide both you and your suppliers with an ideal opportunity to introduce new products to consumers.
The beauty with this type of dispensary marketing is that it can be used to drive awareness and foot traffic for all products including THC & CBD edibles, vape pens and vape juices, CBD oils, CBD creams, and cannabis flower.
Below will discuss 4 ways cannabis dispensaries can use retail pop-ups for effective dispensary marketing.
1. Increase Retail Store Sales With Exclusive In-Store Specials & Discounts
Using pop-ups in your dispensary marketing can help you increase retail store sales from certain products if you’re able to secure strategic partnerships and pricing with suppliers.
For example, a pop-up to help you introduce your products to your customers. Having a professional rep in-store to chat with customers and answer their questions in real-time will typically increase store traffic and sales.
Additional benefits include the opportunity for you to build brand loyalty and brand trust with new and existing customers. Which will further lead to positive word-of-mouth and positive online reviews.
How do you make this happen?
How about a series of pop-ups with different brands where your dispensary provides significant value, directly to your potential and current customers, in the form of education, a discount or even a good conversation?
2. Launch New Products With Special Events in Your Dispensary
Most of your customers need education about weed or new school cannabis products like CBD oil, THC edibles, cannabis-infused beverages, etc.
This is especially true with new products which need help with creating awareness and translating features and benefits to potential customers.
Chances are, your in-house retail staff will not know as much about new products. But, your suppliers will!
This is another reason why retail pop-ups should be used when marketing your dispensary.
Your customers can benefit from talking with the brand ambassador who’s representing your supplier at the pop-up, and likely will know much more about his new products than your team.
Your customers will more than likely be curious about the new product’s testing and ingredients, and the representative from your supplier can provide that information accurately, and provide the customer with a coupon to get a discount or to try a sample.
To promote these types of pop-ups with product launches be sure to use email marketing to spread the word among your existing customers/email database.
You should also post about it daily leading up to the event in your news feed and stories. It would also be a good idea to create in-store signage (POP) promoting the event.
3. Pop-Ups Contribute To Educational Opportunities For Your Dispensary Staff
As mentioned above, when it comes to suppliers launching new cannabis and CBD products to sell in your dispensary, not only do your customers need to be educated at launch but even more importantly, your staff needs to know what’s up.
Retail pop-ups with knowledgeable representatives/brand ambassadors can be used to train your dispensary marketing staff about the top features and benefits of their new product.
This allows your team to ask common, anticipated questions, and the ability to provide well informed, accurate, and educational information to customers after the pop-up end.
As I’m sure you’ve already seen in your own retail stores, there’s no better dispensary marketing than having knowledgeable staff provide advice and recommendations to curious & confused customers.
This service has a huge impact on what customers choose to buy while in your dispensary.
4. Capture Valuable Data For Your Dispensary Marketing Strategy
As a digital marketer, I’m obsessed with data and only making data-driven designs when it comes to cannabis and CBD advertising campaigns on Google & Facebook.
Retail pop-ups can provide valuable data that can’t be identified using digital marketing tools like Google Analytics and other user data tools.
This is why I’m super excited about this benefit from pop-ups for your dispensary marketing. Pop-ups allow you to speak directly to your target customers and not only hear their questions, but we also get to ask them questions too.
It’s like a live, interactive, and dynamic focus group happening in your dispensary!
The idea here is to gain valuable information about your customers that you can use in your dispensary marketing strategies in order to sell more products to more people.
Some ideas include:
- Offer a coupon or other piece of “value” from your store in exchange for an email address. Email addresses should be viewed as “warm leads” and used in email marketing campaigns to pull these “leads” through your sales funnel.
- Listen to their questions to understand popular and common questions, concerns, and objections to cannabis & CBD products. This helps you understand their “pain points” and provides your cannabis/CBD marketing agency with content ideas for your website blog and social media channels.
- Create a digital, interactive, user-friendly, short questionnaire or dosage calculator that customers can use on your in-store tablets, or on their phones via your website.
- This short, less than 60-second survey asks the customer a few questions and allows you to provide them with a recommended product, dosage, and special discount in return for their email address – and all the valuable data we collect with the customized questions asked.
The data collected via the tactics above can be used to up-sell existing clients via email marketing or to pull “warm” prospects through your funnel into “hot” customers who are making repeat purchases and referring friends.
It also allows your dispensary marketing agency to create targeted marketing collateral for email marketing, digital advertising or social media that is better targeted to your lucrative customers.
We Can Help You Maximize Your Dispensary Marketing Strategies
If you’re struggling with ideas to market your CBD company or cannabis retail store we can help you!
We offer Local SEO for dispensaries which is incredibly useful for local retail stores. We also offer daily organic social media management.
If you’re looking for a digital advertising strategy for cannabis or CBD products we can help you with Google Ads management services as well as management of native ads, sponsored content, display, and video ads on the Outbrain and Mantis ad networks.
Call us for a free 30-minute consultation or email us to request a quote.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!
