Competition in cannabis retail is tight in many places in the United States and dispensary owners need strategic dispensary marketing tips in order to generate ROI. The same will happen in Canada within weeks as cannabis retail stores becomes legal across the country. This articles breaks down 7 savvy dispensary marketing tips to help you grow your cannabis retail business.
Update April 2022: Check out 10 Ways On How To Promote Selling Weed Online.
Running Out Of Dispensary Marketing Tips? Try These.
Cannabis retail store and marijuana dispensary owners are on the hunt for the most effective dispensary marketing tips and ideas to help them maximize their ROI.
Dispensary owners in California and other states where recreational cannabis is legal are redrafting their dispensary marketing plans to include only the most profitable dispensary marketing tactics. The same thing is happening now across Canada as Cannabis retail stores start to open.
Does your dispensary have a comprehensive digital marketing plan? Are you looking for proven dispensary marketing tips that you can easily implement in your dispensary marketing strategy?
This article will explore and explain 7 slick dispensary marketing tips to help you sell more marijuana and CBD products and grow your new business.
1. Identify Your Most Profitable Customer Avatars/Personas
As always, first things first. It’s extremely important for your dispensary marketing plan to start with identifying the different cannabis consumer segments that you’re targeting.
I’m sure you may think it’s everybody that wants to use cannabis, but in order to help your marketing strategy, this dispensary marketing tip requires you to break down your target markets to something like:
- People that want to smoke flower only, nothing else.
- People who don’t want to smoke flower but will vape.
- People who only want edibles.
- People who don’t want edibles but will smoke shatter.
- People who like CBD oil.
- People who like all CBD products including their pets.
- etc…
This way you’re able to use this information to strategically target each market segment with each specific product you sell at your dispensary.
Your dispensary marketing becomes much more effective because you’ll be able to promote products to each segment that they are most interested in purchasing.
This dispensary marketing tip also helps you segment your customer list into relevant categories to effectively send follow up email communications in a targeted email marketing campaign.
We’ll discuss email marketing as an essential dispensary marketing tip next.
For more tips on why dispensaries should focus on their customers first, check out this article: Why Your Dispensary Marketing Plan Must Put Your Target Consumers First.
2. Implement Email Marketing to Retain Customers and Boost Sales
Email marketing for dispensaries can still be a sensible dispensary marketing tip because the Inbox is one of the most highly visited places on the internet next to Instagram and Facebook.
Using email marketing as part if your dispensary marketing strategy helps your business for the following reasons:
- Email marketing helps you keep your dispensary customers informed on your menu and products.
- Email marketing helps you upsell existing customers on accessories and other marijuana products.
- The average click-through rate of an email campaign is around 3% (of total recipients), whereas the average click-through rate from a tweet is around 0.5%.
- 4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media, according to a survey conducted by Monetate.
Another key factor of using email marketing as a dispensary marketing tip is that email marketing is fairly inexpensive, especially when compared to other dispensary marketing tactics.
In fact, email marketing yields an average 3,800% return on investment for businesses and for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $38.
Think of how Amazon runs its email marketing – it’s genius. It can get to be a bit much but I’m not suggesting that you replicate what Amazon does with their frequency of emails.
By using this dispensary marketing tactic you could send a weekly or even monthly newsletter updating your customers and prospects on several items related to your dispensary. For example, your newsletters could include updates on:
- Your current menu.
- Any new budtenders that join your team.
- New blog article content on your website with useful information on cannabis, CBD, and other marijuana products.
- Special coupon for returning customers.
- Special offer to new customers.
- Upsell opportunity for CBD and cannabis accessories.
- Any other related news.
Keep your email marketing consistent, relevant, and packed with useful information and value for your customers and prospects and you’ll get tons of ROI using this dispensary marketing tip.
3. Setup A Loyalty Program to Encourage Repeat Visits
Loyalty programs are nothing new when it comes to retailers. When it comes to 420 customer retention, a cannabis-related loyalty program seems like a necessary dispensary marketing tip to implement into your strategy.
A cannabis retail store needs a competitive advantage in a world where customer loyalty is a rare commodity.
In order to establish your competitive advantage, you need something unique, special, and valuable to offer people, and this is difficult to gain in the world of cannabis product differentiation.
Many of your potential customers still don’t know much about the kind of weed they want, let alone the difference between Indica, Sativa, CBD, THC, etc.
As for existing customers, you want to retain them as long term returning customers but “past customer profitability does not guarantee future profitability. People move and their incomes, needs, and lifestyles change; they like change and variety, and they are susceptible to promotions from the competition.”
Adding a loyalty program to your dispensary marketing mix will help you:
- Retain customers
- Gather relevant customer data and consumer trends
- Maintain effective customer communication
- Make your customers feel appreciated
- Attract new customers
Optimize this dispensary marketing tip by including rewards for purchasing behaviour, convenience, store credits, prizes, and other forms of added value in your loyalty program.
You can grow your loyalty program by including calls to action to join in your email marketing newsletters.
4. Offer Deals, Specials, and Bundles
Who doesn’t like a retail store that offers special deals and customized bundles on their favourite products? Especially when it comes to legal weed!
Our friends at Leafly suggest the following dispensary marketing tip:
“Offer a Buy-One-Get-One, a Build-Your-Own-Preroll-Pack, assemble grab bags full of goodies (such as a preroll, a gram, an edible, and some stickers) available for a set price — play around with your options and create something fun and alluring” that will excite returning and potential customers and drive them to your e-store or retail dispensary.”
For example, combine this dispensary marketing tip with multi-buy promotions (i.e., “2 for the price of 1”) on your website or retail store. This works as a win-win especially if you’re looking to clear come inventory.
If you combine the right products together in enticing, discounted bundles, that are targeted to the specific customer avatars/marketing personas we mentioned in dispensary marketing tip 1, above, you can be super successful in moving product and increasing sales.
Another option where you can use deals and specials as a dispensary marketing tip is to use conditional promotions in store and online.
These types of dispensary promotions will encourage customers to buy, increase your sales but will keep your revenue and margins in a good place.
5. Optimize & Manage Directory and Review Sites
This is a dispensary marketing tip that also works as a dispensary SEO tip. We typically offer this service when managing client’s Local SEO dispensary marketing.
The beauty of being able to optimize and manage your business on local directories and review websites is that all of this is free!
The following platforms not only offer customer reviews for cannabis businesses, but also a profile page that you can manage, as well as links that drive highly qualified traffic back to your dispensary website.
- Google My Business
- Google Maps
- Bing Places For Business
- Leafly
- Weedmaps
- Trip Advisor
- Yelp
These websites will show up in search results when people use generic terms (as opposed to branded terms) to buy weed online or near them.
Therefore, you’ll want to make sure you claim your business on these sites, and other relevant online directories and optimize your profile with updated and relevant information on your products and locations.
Don’t forget about the fact that getting positive reviews for your dispensary, on Google in particular, on a regular basis is super important to grow and maintain your dispensary’s online credibility and word-of-mouth chatter.
The benefits of using this dispensary marketing tip as part of your strategy are:
- Reviews can be used as client testimonials in social media content and your website
- Provide insight into your products, services, and customer experience
- Allows for clear communication with customers to resolve some issues
- Improved online visibility and links to your site from organic search results
- Free Advertising
6. Optimization For a Mobile World
I think you’d agree that many of your potential customers will likely be introduced to your brand and your website from links found on Google, Bing, Weedmaps, Leafly, or a local directory.
Did you know that in 2018, 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones, up from 50.3 percent in the previous year? Mobile currently accounts for half of all global web pages served.
So, you need to make sure your website is found in Google’s mobile search index, is mobile responsive (optimized for large screens, laptops, tablets, and smartphones).
Some simple, actionable dispensary website optimization tips that you can implement yourself include:
- Have a mobile responsive website
- Use AMP pages for product pages and blog article content
- Make sure your phone number is clickable on mobile on the home page, header, footer, and contact page
- Add a Google maps embed/link to your footer or contact page
If you need help optimizing your website (SEO), or if you need a mobile responsive website designed and developed for your dispensary, please contact us today for a free consultation.
7. Showcase Your Menu With Large High-Quality Visuals
Don’t you hate when you go to a restaurant website and click to look at their menu and it downloads as a pdf? On your phone? Ugh. Same goes for a dispensary’s menu on their website.
Or, what about if you click to view the menu and the photos are small or low quality or both?
That’s not the way a restaurant or a marijuana dispensary should present their products.
To understand the value of this dispensary marketing tip, you need to understand why high-quality images are important for your website content and your social media content.
Some benefits of using large, high-quality visuals include:
- High-quality images of your marijuana products will attract more cannabis consumers to your site by increasing your site’s SEO value and decreasing your bounce rate.
- User engagement on your website can increase by having useful and relevant images on your site.
- This results in longer visit times for potential customers which provides you more opportunity to sell your products.
Your goal is to sell marijuana products via your dispensary website, so you’ll want users to hang out there long enough to find what they want and potentially make a purchase then or very soon after.
Your images help to tell the story of your dispensary and showcase the products your business offers by providing information that is easy to scan, especially on mobile phones.
Using high-quality images as a dispensary marketing tip will help you convert customers by:
- Garnering more views to your site, which means more chances to convert.
- Increasing user engagement, which means users spend more time on your site.
- Decreasing bounce rate, which means more traffic and higher rankings.
- Forming a link between customer and dispensary, which means users are more likely to choose your locations.
We Can Implement These Dispensary Marketing Tips For Your Business. Just Ask!
If you’re focused on running your dispensary business and would rather have a cannabis marketing professional or dispensary marketing agency manage all of this for you, we can help!
We’re Google certified search marketing experts who offer website development, SEO, content marketing, and paid advertising managed services for marijuana dispensaries.
If you’d like to discuss your project and how we can help take it to the next level with experienced and proven dispensary marketing strategy, please reach out using the form below, or contact us here today.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!
