Cannabis Programmatic Advertising: Keep Your Business Fresh on Customer Minds
Cannabis programmatic advertising continuously targets and delivers relevant ads to audiences based on their behavior and interests. Programmatic advertising offers many benefits, but ultimately, it helps you be specific about who you target with your geo-targeted display ads, keeps costs low, and ensures the business remains top-of-mind through consistent visibility and engagement.
A little tracking device called a pixel powers this advertising approach. When advertisers want to target potential customers, they embed a pixel onto their web pages. Pixels track user interactions and transmit information back to the advertiser’s servers. This way, advertisers can target people who have previously expressed interest in their business through a website visit or an ad engagement.
Retargeting is the ability to specifically display your ads to users who have previously expressed interest in your dispensary or visited your website using the data gathered through your pixels. So, if you’re looking to keep customers coming back, you can quite literally “follow” them around the web and serve cannabis ads as they browse websites, mobile apps, and even watch TV – ensuring your brand is fresh on their minds no matter where they are. Programmatic advertising and retargeting make your cannabis advertising strategy easier than ever, so you can sit back and focus on business.
Dispensary Geofencing: Keep Your Friends Close… and Your Competition Closer
Another significant advantage of programmatic advertising is geofencing. Geofencing is a location-based technology that creates virtual boundaries around a physical area, enabling businesses to trigger ad delivery when a mobile device enters or exits the specified area. Put simply, geo advertising to customers based on where they are located.
The benefits of geofencing include highly targeted, engaging advertising experiences and improved return on investment by leveraging location-based data based on users’ proximity to your specific locations.
Suppose you want to ensure that your loyal customers aren’t tempted to shop at a competitor’s store. You can set a geofence around competitive dispensaries, allowing you to reach your customers with targeted ads for your business when they get within a certain radius of your competition.
In the same breath, you can advertise to customers based on where they’ve been, using geo-framing. If you know one of your customers visited another dispensary, you can target them with ads to lure them back into your store.
Take Stock of What’s Hot with Cannabis Third-Party Data
Third-party data is information collected and aggregated by third-party entities (not your business). Third party entities, like data brokers or social media platforms, acquire this data and then sell access or insights to companies like yours for various purposes: targeting advertisements, understanding consumer behavior, and keeping tabs on larger market trends.
Keeping a pulse on industry-wide cannabis trends with third-party data is a great way to make sure your business is on the cutting edge. Let’s say that a rival dispensary is offering a new cannabis product that is selling out. You can use data brokerage tools like Headset, New Frontier Data, Flowhub, or Brightfield Group to stay up to date on cannabis market projections and even products and offerings that are getting attention from consumers.
Keeping “in the know” is also a great way to secure exclusive opportunities for your business, like brand deals and more. Keeping tabs on competitors’ product offerings will also give you a sense of what consumers want. Once you understand which hot items your rival stores provide, you can include those products in your store, or better yet, look for product gaps so you can provide a wider variety of brands on your shelf.
Work Smarter, Not Harder with Cannabis Co-Marketing Campaigns
Cannabis brand co-marketing campaigns between brands and retailers benefit both businesses. For cannabis brands, you can increase brand awareness for your product and stoke product sell-through by launching geotargeted display ads to locations around the dispensaries that carry your products. Suppose you have direct-to-consumer distribution channels set up. In that case, you are in an even better position to increase sales by serving ads to nearby cannabis audiences.
For cannabis dispensaries, cannabis co-marketing campaigns are a great way to leverage the power of established brands to your advantage. Many top-performing display ads feature popular and upcoming products consumers want to try. Securing a partnership with a hot and in-demand brand can help boost your popularity with new customers and entice returning customers to come back, keeping your advertising costs low.
For example, if your dispensary is bringing in a unique product, like cannabis drinks, partnering with a cannabis beverage brand can be a great way to expand your horizons and appeal to new customers. Partnerships also allow you to offer exclusive product drops, exclusive co-op events, and vendor days for VIP or loyalty customers- providing even more incentive for customers to visit your store regularly.
Give Em’ the Ol’ Razzle Dazzle with First-Party Data
Knowing your customer base is always to your advantage. Building customer profiles with first-party data can help you provide personalized experiences when shoppers interact with your brand. Collecting and understanding this data yourself can help you decide which offers or product segments will excite customers most when they see your ads.
When you are ready to prospect for new audiences, remember how valuable your first-party data truly is. Working with a data company like MediaJel will allow you to generate cannabis lookalike audiences and target new customers that share behavioral and demographic overlaps with your current customers.
Interested in leveraging first-party data to reach cannabis target audiences? Here are the 9 Cannabis Consumer Archetypes You Should Know.
Enhancing Customer Experience with Loyalty Programs
Dispensary Loyalty Programs are structured marketing strategies designed to incentivize repeat business and customer loyalty by offering participants rewards, discounts, or exclusive perks based on their continued engagement with your dispensary. Loyalty programs help cannabis businesses retain their customers by incentivizing repeat purchases, building a sense of appreciation, increasing customer satisfaction, and creating barriers for customers to switch to competitors.
You can also apply learnings from your loyalty program to your retargeting strategies. As you collect first-party data through your loyalty program – think shopping habits, product preferences, customer lifetime value, and preferred promotions – you can personalize your programmatic messages and cadence, guaranteeing they receive a cohesive experience across all your marketing touchpoints.
To design and implement an effective loyalty program tailored to cannabis customers, use your first-party data to offer personalized rewards based on purchase history and preferences. Make the signup process easy, and remember, loyalty programs are some of the most effective touchpoints cannabis companies have with their customers. Treat all communications with the respect they deserve; don’t over-communicate, but don’t ignore them either. Every message should have a purpose and add value to their day.
Hotline Bling: Reaching Out via Cannabis SMS Text and Email
The average American spends nearly 4 hours a day on their mobile phone. If you aren’t utilizing the power of cannabis text message marketing and email to reach your customers, you could miss out on valuable opportunities to promote your store.
Cannabis loyalty software like Alpine IQ makes it easy for dispensaries to text customers directly with the latest updates about in-store promotions, discounts, and events. But beware, as cannabis is still federally illegal, most phone carriers won’t work with cannabis businesses and those that will continue to have major deliverability issues. While email marketing is certainly not a new idea, it can still be a powerhouse for your business- with content marketers reporting that email marketing is their highest-performing content type.
We’re assuming you have an excellent cannabis SEO strategy in place and are continually producing valuable content to rank for high-traffic keywords on your website. In that case, you can use that content in your email marketing campaigns while building trust and expertise with your audiences. Get creative with your email campaigns and consider implementing a monthly newsletter to keep customers in the loop.
Looking to learn more about how you can target current or latent customers and the cannabis retargeting strategies we use to drive revenue?
Contact us today to learn more about how programmatic advertising and SEO can help you show your returning customers love.
