The Secrets for Targeting Tourists with Your Dispensary Ads

Expedia is calling 2022 the year of the GOAT, or the “greatest of all trips.”  It’s predicted that travelers will be flying over 150% more this year. As we slowly find our way back to more “normal” times, how will your dispensary take advantage of increased tourist traffic in your city? Targeting tourists with your dispensary marketing strategy can help you bring in new customers and revenue, without maxing out your budget. So, how can you be sure your ads are reaching tourists?

How to Use Programmatic Advertising to Your Advantage

Programmatic advertising is one of the most effective ways to market to tourists because it allows you to narrow your target demographic to the audiences you want to attract. Securing ads in this way will enable you to get the best prices on compliant ads and secure thousands of impressions to increase brand awareness, foot traffic, and e-commerce sales. 

When you use targeting correctly, your ads can be up to 5x more effective than non-targeted ads. Let’s say I’m a tourist in Vegas. I’m looking to buy cannabis, I’m excited about trying out the legal market, and I’m on the hunt for a dispensary near me. When your ad pops up on my phone at the airport, I’m more likely to purchase from your business than a competitor because you reached me at just the right time with the right message. By targeting well-known hot spots, like the Las Vegas Strip, Fremont Street, Vegas’s McCarran International Airport, and more you can reach tourists the moment they step off the plane and start slathering on their sunscreen. 

Deciding Where and How to Place Ads

But, how do you decide how and where to target tourists?

The three tactics you want to use are proximity targeting, competitor targeting, and landmark targeting. 

Proximity targeting is a marketing and advertising strategy that harnesses the power of mobile location services in order to target customers in real-time when they are in the vicinity of certain areas or points of interest. This is accomplished by establishing a radius around a given point in which ads are placed. 

The virtual “perimeter” you set to advertise within acts as an on-switch. When tourists and other populations you want to target enter a “hot” area that you’re targeting, like the Bellagio Fountains, and they check a website or app, they’ll see your ad, easy as that! All by visiting the areas, you targeted by location. 

Competitor targeting is a powerful tactic that identifies competitors to your cannabis business and then targets their audience and customers. This tactic helps you examine the customers of your competitors and find ways to draw them to your dispensary instead. 

Let’s say that you’re in a high-density area, the Las Vegas Strip, with many competitors close by. Competitor targeting allows you to pin-drop competing retailers to lure customers away from your competition. 

Finally, consider landmark targeting to advertise to tourists at certain locations like the High Roller Ferris Wheel, Neon Museum, and The Mob Museum. Landmark targeting works very similarly to the way that proximity targeting works, but this tactic focuses on the hot-bed areas that tourists target most. If you know that tourists will flock to Vegas to roam the strip in the summertime, you can target the areas you know will be abundant with tourists. 

If you want to start advertising to people the moment they step off the plane, you can set a geofence around McCarran International Airport to catch visitors’ attention even earlier. Looking to capture tourists on the Strip? You can set a geofence there. Draw a geofence around the top hotels, Venetian, Bellagio, Mirage, Cosmopolitan, New York-New York, Caesar’s Palace and The Colosseum, and Mandalay Bay. 

So, what are you waiting for? Tourists will be back and in larger numbers than ever before very soon. Looking for guidance in establishing your tourist targeting strategy? We can help. Contact us today to learn more about programmatic advertising and how it can get working for your cannabis business.