TARGET AUDIENCES: UNDERSTANDING CANNABIS CONSUMERS
From medical purists to weekend warriors, cannabis consumers span a wide range of behaviors. In this guide, we break down the most common types of pot smokers and how to reach them—whether you're running a dispensary, DTC brand, or delivery service.
What Is a Cannabis Target Market?
Your cannabis target market is the specific group of consumers most likely to buy your product or service based on shared needs, behaviors, and characteristics. Unlike general cannabis users, your target market aligns directly with your brand positioning, product offerings, and goals.
From medical patients to social smokers, cannabis consumers represent diverse motivations and usage patterns. Understanding who you serve—and how to reach them—is the foundation of any successful cannabis marketing strategy.
Just remember, not everyone who uses cannabis is your target market, and treating them like they are can waste ad spend and dilute your message. Without segmentation, your marketing becomes too generic to resonate with any one group. Instead, focus on identifying and reaching the consumers most aligned with your brand’s value, product category, and retail model—that’s how you drive meaningful engagement and long-term growth.
Learn more about cannabis branding > The Psychology Behind Developing Brand Loyalty in Cannabis Marketing with David Paleschuck
How to Segment Cannabis Consumers for Marketing Impact
To effectively connect with cannabis consumers, brands must organize customers into meaningful segments. These are groups defined by shared attributes like:
Demographic Segmentation
Tailor by age, gender, income, and location.
Example: Gen Z prefers vapes and edibles; Boomers lean toward tinctures and CBD.
Behavioral Segmentation:
Analyzing consumer habits, such as preferred product types and average purchase frequency, allows brands to personalize promotions and loyalty rewards.
If your doors aren’t open yet or your eCommerce platform isn’t live, you can still build strong audiences by partnering with a cannabis marketing agency that has access to behavioral data across known cannabis and hemp consumer segments in the cities or states you want to target.
Psychographic Segmentation
Understanding lifestyle choices, interests, and motivations for cannabis use. Are they using cannabis for relaxation, productivity, or creative stimulation? Tailoring marketing messages based on need states (Stress relief, pain management, recreation, sleep) helps build a stronger emotional connection.
Geographic Segmentation
Cannabis laws vary by state, and consumer preferences differ between urban and rural areas. Brands should tailor their marketing approach based on location-specific regulations and consumer trends.
Medical vs. Recreational Segmentation
Patients seeking medical relief may respond better to educational content, while recreational users engage more with experiential branding and influencer partnerships. Just be careful not to make symptom-specific product recommendations.
This type of segmentation enables personalized messaging, more innovative product development, and optimized marketing across channels. It also improves conversion rates and long-term loyalty.
How to Define and Target Your Ideal Cannabis Audience
Start by analyzing your highest-value customers using:
- First-party data (POS, CRM, website analytics)
- Surveys and customer interviews
- Third-party market research
- Work with data providers to build third-party data sets and lookalike audiences
Identify patterns across key traits, then group similar customers into actionable segments—such as Wellness Enthusiasts, Connoisseurs, or First-Time Users.
Once your audience segments are defined, activate them across programmatic advertising, SMS, email, social, and in-store promotions using tailored creative, offers, and messaging that reflect their intent and lifestyle.
Common Cannabis Consumer Segments
Here’s a breakdown of key audience types and how to reach them:
Effectively targeting different types of weed smokers means aligning your creative, product selection, and ad channels with each segment’s intent, language, and lifestyle, ensuring higher engagement, stronger loyalty, and better ROI.
💡Pro Tip: Align creative, landing pages, and ad copy with each persona’s lifestyle and buying intent for better engagement
Activate and Deploy Your Cannabis Audience Segments
Defining cannabis audience segments is just the first step—making them actionable is where most brands fall short. It’s not enough to know your customer personas; you need the infrastructure to build, verify, and deploy those audiences across paid media channels.
Once you’ve grouped similar customers—like wellness seekers, recreational users, or cannabis connoisseurs—you need to translate those segments into real-world audiences. That means tapping into first-party and third-party data, purchase behaviors, and compliant age verification to build usable profiles that meet ad platform and regulatory standards.
Tools like MediaJel’s DemoGraph Audience Builder make this process turnkey. You can create custom, 21+ verified segments and serve targeted messaging across programmatic display, CTV, DOOH, video, email, and more—without risking compliance.
This is where the strategy becomes scalable:
- Align ad creative and product selection with each audience's lifestyle
- Customize messaging based on language, device, and context
- Optimize placements to increase conversions and lifetime value
Working with a cannabis-compliant data and audience provider ensures your campaigns reach the right people at the right time—safely, efficiently, and profitably.
Want to learn more about campaign targeting? Read this > Unlocking Cannabis Consumer Segments: How to Use Data to Launch Hyper-Targeted Programmatic Ad Campaigns
📌 Learn how cannabis advertising laws may shape your audience targeting strategy.
Who is the Ideal Customer for a Cannabis Brand?
The ideal customer for a cannabis brand depends on the product category and focus of the target market segment. In general, cannabis consumers fall into several groups, each with different motivations for use:
Medical Patients:
Seeking relief from chronic pain, anxiety, insomnia, or other medical conditions. These consumers value lab-tested products, dosage consistency, and educational resources.
Wellness Enthusiasts:
Using cannabis for stress relief, relaxation, or post-workout recovery. They gravitate toward CBD products, functional edibles, and low-dose THC options.
Recreational Users:
Enjoying cannabis for social settings or personal enjoyment. These customers are more influenced by branding, flavors, and high-THC potency.
Cannabis Connoisseurs:
Knowledgeable consumers who appreciate craft cannabis, rare strains, and premium products. They often seek boutique brands and high-quality flower.
First-Time Users:
Consumers new to cannabis, looking for approachable, easy-to-understand product options with clear dosage guidelines.
Learn More Here: The 9 Cannabis Consumer Archetypes You Should Know
Final Thoughts: It’s Not Just About Pot Smokers—It’s About Precision
Not all cannabis consumers are the same—and treating them that way limits your growth. There are many different types of pot smokers, from wellness-minded microdosers to social weekend users and high-THC connoisseurs. The key to scaling your cannabis brand is turning these broad personas into actionable audience segments you can reach across digital, retail, and programmatic channels.
When you use tools like DemoGraph to build verified, data-driven audiences, you're not just advertising—you’re connecting with the right people at the right moment, with the right message.
👉 Ready to activate your most valuable segments? Let’s build your audience strategy today! Contact MediaJel.
Let’s take an in-depth look at each digital marketing channel.
Given the unique position of the cannabis industry, we’re only covering the digital marketing channels that are permitted to use by ancillary businesses, brands, dispensary owners, mobile applications, producers, processors, and websites. There is a legal gray area when marketing cannabis companies, and you should regularly reference the laws within your state before starting any campaign.
FAQs About Cannabis Audiences
They range from daily functional users to infrequent social consumers. Segmenting them by lifestyle, frequency, and product preferences helps tailor your cannabis marketing.
Not at all. Pot smokers come from diverse age groups, motivations, and use cases—from medical to recreational.
Cannabis users span a wide range of demographics, but the typical consumer profile includes adults aged 21–44, with usage relatively balanced across genders. Urban and suburban consumers are more likely to use cannabis than rural populations, and users tend to skew toward middle-income brackets. Education levels vary, though many consumers have some college experience or higher. Usage is common among both recreational and medical users, with differing motivations across segments.
Adults aged 21–34 represent the largest group of cannabis consumers in the U.S., accounting for nearly 50% of legal cannabis sales. This age group is highly engaged in cannabis culture, open to trying new product formats (e.g., edibles, vapes, beverages), and receptive to marketing across digital and social media channels. Consumption also remains strong among adults aged 35–44, with growing adoption among older adults (45–64) for wellness and therapeutic use.
Millennials (born 1981–1996) are the top cannabis-buying generation, making up the majority of legal cannabis purchases. They’re followed closely by Gen Z (born 1997–2012), who are rapidly increasing their share as more turn 21. Gen X and Boomers also participate, especially in the medical market or for wellness-oriented products like tinctures, topicals, and low-dose edibles.
Cannabis users are diverse, but data shows that the average consumer is between 21 and 44 years old, employed full- or part-time, and uses cannabis for relaxation, sleep, pain relief, or recreation. Recreational users tend to favor inhalable formats (flower, vapes, pre-rolls), while medical users lean toward tinctures, topicals, and capsules. Usage is fairly evenly split by gender, with a slight male skew in certain product categories.
Cannabis market segmentation is typically divided by:
- Usage Type: Recreational vs. medical
- Product Preference: Flower, vape, edibles, beverages, concentrates, tinctures, topicals
- Demographics: Age, gender, income, education, location
- Psychographics: Health-conscious users, social consumers, cannabis connoisseurs, wellness seekers
- Behavioral: Frequency of use, brand loyalty, THC vs. CBD preference
These segments help brands tailor their messaging, product development, and retail strategies to meet consumer needs more effectively.
The target market for CBD products skews older and more wellness-focused than THC consumers. Typical segments include:
- Adults aged 35–64 seeking relief from anxiety, pain, or sleep issues
- Women, who make up a majority of wellness and beauty-related CBD purchases
- Health-conscious consumers interested in natural or plant-based remedies
- Athletes and fitness enthusiasts using CBD for recovery and inflammation
- Pet owners looking for calming or pain-relief solutions for animals
CBD marketing often leans into health, self-care, and lifestyle branding rather than counterculture or recreational narratives.
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