Weedmaps Advertising: Pay-to-Play or Scale On Your Own Terms?

[ {Introduction}

joining us give us gonna give it a few minutes here to allow everyone to log in and just so everyone's aware of the zoom interface if you look on the bottom here the chat box you can post your questions in there or through the q a function on the bottom right feel free to ask your questions uh you know during the session i'll be you know be sure to answer them uh as they come through perfect well today we're gonna you know really focus on weed maps um so i want to welcome everyone today to the MediaJel podcast where we cover the latest marketing trends and strategies that are most effective in growing your cannabis store your delivery service or your cannabis brand here at MediaJel we help cannabis companies advertise through seo sem and programmatic display advertising to increase your revenue MediaJel has a compliant ad network of 75 000 plus publishers including mainstream news sites meme sites dating gaming and music streaming apps and they all welcome cannabis ads i'm your host guillermo bravo and today we'll be discussing how to transition your marketing budget away from weed maps and increase your overall revenue through digital marketing so today we're going to share the truth about weed maps and the steps that you need to take to transition off the platform and we have four marketing channels for you today that we'll be using for customer acquisition and retention uh so when you opened up your retail store delivery service you know you assumed that you needed to be on weavemaps to get found you know weed maps is the yelp of cannabis right it's been around since 2008 it was really the first uh platform out there to define wheat online so weed maps you know sounds ideal for a monthly fee you get your business or you know you get your dispensary in front of new customers and then they can order through the weed mead webs website um but let's really take it let's really take a dive deep into what you're actually getting from your partnership with weed maps and other alternatives to to reach that same goal of getting customers so if you want the first fat first spot on weed maps in the key market you're going to be investing a lot of money you know ranging anywhere from 10 to 100 000 per month depending on if you're in like san diego los angeles san francisco chicago or some of the other major markets and think about all like when you're putting all your money in one channel like what else could you be doing with that money and how could you better invest in your brand so that you can own that first party customer data and really build a true business presence on the web that ranks far beyond the pay-to-play model that is with weed maps so what i'm going to do is i'm going to

{Weedmaps Limitations}

actually just take a little share my screen here and just kind of show you on the weed maps front like what you're what you're actually getting here so weed maps is business business model business model is really ensuring uh that you you place your cannabis brand you know delivery service or cannabis store within a local region so if i'm in standard san jose and i have a cannabis store and i'm and i want to list my business you'll be listed here so when you're paying for placement on weed maps you're paying for one of these pins so air filled supply company let's just say they spend ten thousand a month to uh to get this featured listing and that's what you're paying for right so you're paying for this premiere listing to get instant and get into the san jose three's against each other in order there's a lot of retailers if you want to show up on weed maps you have to bid on those top spots and shelter just continue to shell out a lot of money when it comes to the attribution and transparency from weed maps you don't get the full attribution into your return on ad spend and you don't own your customer contact details so those are two big factors that we look at uh when investing in weed maps and just any general marketing platform number one you want to own your customer data you want those you want those customers to be in your crm your point of sale system and you want to be able to communicate and activate uh you know those customers at any time you know weed maps will typically provide you with a customer's name and phone number only they they really don't share the email address with with you because you have to remember that people have to register through weed maps to place an order so weed maps is collecting that last part of information so you're kind of cut off from the communication with the client unless you have their phone number and in that case you you really can't message them unless they opt into marketing messages we'll talk a little bit about crms and email sms and push notifications here later down the line but feel free like i said everyone to ask questions away and i'll be sure to address those as they come along so when you're transitioning away from weed maps you know the goal is to own your revenue channel right you want to see what customers are on your website and then remarketing those customers every time so some of the things that you would give away to weed maps if you're you know working with them and things that you don't own yourself would be you're giving up control of your brand when using weed maps part of this is because you don't own your profile weed maps is collecting money for that pin as i said before and then you know other dispensaries are on there as well so there's no loyalty there you know customer can show up to your business profile let's just say airfield supply they intend from buying from you and maybe they see an ad or they see a deal from another customer and so they'll hop on to another store in san jose so there's some limitations and competition here that you'll be up against because there's a ton of stores in all these markets as you can see and it's really just uh who can outbid the others another thing is if you don't host the menu on your website you do not own the customer experience so if i go to the menu here they'll be shopping through weed maps and they'll be getting normalized to the weed maps platform whereas in you know if you go to a a store that says self-hosted or using like a sub domain or an iframe those let's just look at a menu here order online [Music] people will get more normalized to your to your shopping experience and say this is for mission dispensaries in parliament city they'll get used to your shopping experience instead of shopping on a third-party platform like we maps and that last part you know i want to mention is that you know you are if you're if you're paying for weed mass placement you're giving them your website traffic which will eventually lead to weed maps out ranking your brand uh through google search results which results in lost sales all right so you may have some lost sales i'll just show you example of this let's just type in bar uh who would have a let's do barbary coast cannabis so they're not weed mouth isn't ranking on this one so barbary coast is not investing in weed maps but i'll just show you uh airfield supply san jose so airfield supply is here and you can see that weed maps is just under that so if you don't have a lot of domain authority with google then weed maps could potentially outrank you and then you know take the business away from you and the same thing goes with leafly and yelp you know leafly weave maps are both cannabis specific directories and marketplaces whereas in yelp and foursquare some of these other platforms they're general right

{Crafting Strategic Marketing Plans for Dispensaries}

in the setup phase to really ensure that you have let's say google analytics installed or any other third-party analytics programs installed you'll be able to have true revenue or sorry true source information for where your revenues come from coming from so you can make informed decisions about your business and you know further grow sales another thing is you'll pay less for each new customer um so these are all you know key points that you want to consider when you're trying to transition away from weed maps so you really need to know your return on ad spend for all your marketing channels if you to even make a decision like this so as far as the game plan for transitioning away from weed maps i'm going to go through a few items here so the first is going to be creating a marketing plan budget and timeline so i'm going to share my screen here and just going to show you a budget for a budget for a marketing mix isn't it good that we mess helps us more google get more google patients okay so i have a question from the audience before we continue isn't it good that weed maps help us helps us get more google page hits i would say no uh i think we maps is a is a solid channel to use in your marketing mix but let's say that you should focus on getting everyone to your website first so own make sure that you focus on building your website that you have your online menu and then you're collecting customer information through the website as well let's see where is the right screen all right so i'm just sharing my screen here of a little marketing mix here potentially for for a dispensary so putting together your marketing plan and budget and timeline is going to be key this is just a sample template i'm happy to share it with anyone after the call if they if they'd like so first thing is put together your full spend uh so this is just a sample of 84 000 budget for a store let's say a one store location maybe they're doing close to a million or past the million dollars in revenue look at some of the marketing channels that are typically used in cannabis so marketing staff is going to be one right so you need a cmo or a marketing manager to to manage all these campaigns and to digest all the data and then to share that with c-level or c-level executives or the owner depending on the size of the store so marketing staff's going to be one billboards is another is typically used in the cannabis industry right crm so whether you're using like a spring bag or alpine iq happy cabbage all those different platforms are great for customer retention and messaging and reaching out to those to those customers that you have in your database programmatic display ads this is a great replacement for traditional billboards and the reason i say this is you know with the lack of ability to track sales with billboards uh you know but bud tender has to ask the customer where they heard about us and they have to say a billboard i'm just looking at the different questions coming in so billboards yeah yeah the lack of the ability to track sales unless the bud tenders ask and programmatic display advertising is a great way to replace that because you have access to people on all these publications right all these mobile apps all these different places that you would expect to see ads and then when i think about programmatic advertising i you know i'm scrolling through my phone i'm playing games like we're in the on their feelings on your might be we're all competing for the same time and when i think about programmatic advertising i think about uh you know driving down the freeway in los angeles right so you're driving down the freeway and you're seeing all these billboards throughout the city that's essentially what programmatic advertising step in a digital form the only difference is since we're advertising to people directly on a mobile app mobile device we can actually connect that impression so someone's seen that that billboard or that mobile billboard through a programmatic display ad and we can connect that to a transaction on your website and i forgot to bring this up but here's the different funnels as well so marketing staff no funnel there billboards are top of funnel crm is middle of funnel or bottom of funnel programmatic is top of funnel or bottom of funnel next is sem and that is paid ads on search engines so that's going to be um middle of funnel or bottom of funnel because people are searching they have intent to buy right the only thing to keep in mind is that there is some restrictions on advertising copy and how straightforward you can be with your ads they you can't say cannabis in your ads you can't have cannabis on the landing pages so there's some limitations there and these budgets this is a monthly budget for anyone that is asking in the audience here and i'm going to go through the return on ad spend and return on investments for all these channels as well next up i have seo and that's the combination like on-page seo off-page seo link building content so after you finish on page seo most of your time is going to be spent on creating new content and then just getting links from third-party websites so keep that in mind in seo uh is mid funnel and bottom of funnel typically we got social media as well social media your budget's going to be spent on maybe a social media manager maybe a content creator graphic designer all that is going to be part of the social media budget this is top of funnel or sometimes bottom of funnel top of funnel meaning people don't know who you are so they use say instagram to find find out about your cannabis brand and bought a funnel bottom of funnel meaning that they already are loyal cannabis uh loyal to your brand and this is just a great way for you to maintain that relationship with them same thing with billboards it's it's tough to track the sales from social media since it's typically clicks to the website and from all from all the data that we have that typically doesn't lead into a substantial amount of sales so we'll get in a little bit more in that and then marketplaces we map some leafly this is top of funnel middle funnel and bottom of funnel uh you said this the main note between this is you don't own uh you don't own your customers uh there's not really a full transparency of the sales you you don't actually get the order ids and you can't compare that to your point of sale system so they're typically only focused on marketing data and then some other budget here website design graphic design i typically just put that under seo but if you do need some of those resources you can you can budget them here all right let me transition on over here all right so they're just continuing on with some of these other tabs and uh that's gonna take some take some time to to make sense but i just wanted to show you some examples on how we actually prioritize our budget all right so when i'm looking at a cannabis store here i put i put the single store

{How Much Should Dispensaries Spend on Marketing?}

single store location under three tiers so let's say your monthly recurring revenue or your monthly revenue is 250 000 per month for one store 500k or a million and this is really to identify like how much you how much you should really be spending on marketing for your business and i know there's some other factors which we're going to get into like 280 and high taxes obviously but i want to at least start with the foundations like how do you set your marketing budget 250 000 store per month that uh that's about a three three million dollars per year a lot of stores are in that in that tier so if we were to invest three percent of our monthly revenue in marketing that would be seventy five hundred if it was five percent we would be twelve thousand five hundred and if it was ten percent we would have 25 000 in marketing and this same train of thought goes for tier 2 and tier 3 so someone generating 500 000 in revenue for their cannabis store or delivery service these are the different marketing budgets based on percentage of revenue and the same thing for a million dollar store and for the sake of this exercise you know i'm using more of the tier one budget for for what i just showed you here because we're close to 84 000 in in monthly marketing spent for that and then some of the other factors like i said 280e high taxes and then low margins these are other factors that take in consideration and then also for your marketing mix like what are your goals right so do you want to focus on search engines on google specifically to rank do you want to focus on brand awareness are you a new store do you want to to ensure that people know who you are in your in your local area are you focused on bottom of funnel you have you already really penetrated a lot of the market and you're just looking to to maximize that are you just focused on sales are you focusing on synapse like there's a lot of different goals here and i'm reading your your questions here so you almost asked me 100k in marketing yeah so one note from the audience here that's good to know for all most dispensaries will not be bringing in 12 million dollars a year yep exactly it ranges and you know even msos like we work with some some msos and they range all the way from their range all the way from like a 100 000 a month store at the lowest all the way up to a two million dollar store uh per month so just keep that in mind when you are prioritizing your budgets here all right so pat pat you have a question so any suggestions for a single shot that is only making 150 000 a month gross

{Tips for Allocating your Marketing Budget Allocation}

all right well let's just plug those into this formula here and at least get a starting budget so depending on your budget i'll say 150 000 10 percent is the standard for just business 101 is you should be spending 10 of your revenue on marketing so that's the first thing pat is i would focus more on the higher end because you're in the customer acquisition phase you're doing 150 000 in sales uh pat what would be your ideal what would be your ideal monthly revenue that you'd like to achieve let's say by the end of the year if you don't mind posting that me in the q a and in the meantime what i'm going to do is i'm going to put together a little marketing strategy for a or a 150 000 store so let me just do that right now and i'll just walk you through the process 220 000 ideally okay so 220 000 ideally let's um let's see we have fifteen thousand dollars to spend so i'm just going to do this for a quarter give me one second here so fifteen hundred dollars per sorry that's fifteen thousand dollars per month for forty for three months let's just say forty five thousand dollars the budget so fifteen thousand per month actually this is uh probably a good start let me look at this one all right so we have 15 000 to spend per month so number one these return on ad spends are are fairly accurate this is across i think about 400 locations what we've seen so you know seo is by far the best return on investment uh so seo it has by far the best roi for your business to get new customers and then the crm so like a spring big alpine iq those are really high as well those are close to like a 30 to 50 return on that investment as well you know people are spending anywhere from like a thousand to all the way up to ten thousand dollars a month just on text messaging so if i were to build out a marketing budget for fifteen thousand per month let me just sort this by date let me add crm in here let me remove some of these budgets so fifteen thousand per month fifteen thousand per month is going to let's say fifty minutes per month and that is 220 000 sales is where you'd like to get to so you like to grow about 70 000. so currently currently we're at 150 goal is 220. all right let's look at look at july as a starting point crm trying to think of how many customers you probably have in that so customers for 150 000 per month let's just say 15 000 customers as a guest to measure those people on a regular basis let's say four messages per month it's going to be 60 000 messages um i'm just going to take a make an estimate but probably around 2 000 you're going to be spending on your crm per month and that's going to be on the high return on ad spend because these are people that are already your customers and pat yeah so you're spending 450 a month for spring big awesome so i'm going to update that here revenue from this is probably close to yeah 10 30 times that so 13.5 let's look at seo so seo is by far the number one marketing channel let's say for any cannabis business especially on the retail side and delivery service side brands it's a little tough it's it's it's not as uh it's not as impactful for your business to to do seo for your brand unless you're just trying to arrange for some of your product category terms so i'd probably put uh 4 500 directly on seo and the goal of that would be to rank pat what city what city is your cannabis store in just so i can just do a search for for uh what's available in your area so the goal of b2 let's just say sacramento marijuana store so pat is in [Music] he hasn't answered yet so let's just look at sacramento so the goal for seo would be to rank here in the top three results which is called the local pack or in the organic search results here and also the google maps which is an extension of that so google my business is going to be a major major driver for your business we had a partner of ours that was doing some uh malicious activities on their google my business and they were shut down for three months and they told me that they were losing ten thousand dollars a day by not having to google my business profile so definitely uh focused on google my business for seo and i'll get into some real-life data in analytics here in a second uh return on ad spend for sem so tip pretty much like google ads with maybe 25 of that going to bing ads let's put in uh four thousand dollars from that as well and then programmatic let's do four thousand dollars on that as well crm so these are customer acquisition channels right this is customer retention i would probably increase your crm cost to about a thousand dollars per month just to be safe because as you increase your customer base you really want to maximize how much your existing customers are spending so you're gonna increase this to 1500 or sorry a thousand maybe fifteen hundred dollars over the course of three months so that is 15 grand right there and if i were to invest at 15 grand i'm just going to do the sum of this for one month we invest i'm sorry 14 000 generate wow if we if this if we can actually maintain this from the seo front we can generate 248 000 in revenue uh one thing i want to make sure i clarify is that seo is not going to happen right away this is more of a long term play so it's going to take three months to to really scale to that level i would say even six months programmatic and and sem are paid advertising meaning you just you pay for ads you can turn them off and on any time crm is really focused on customer retention get them in the door get their phone number email and uh you know the ability to segment their their customer information and then get those messages out through spring big and make sure that they're really specific i have a few questions here and i'll answer them in a little bit here so what i want to do is actually look at

{Analyzing Dispensary Website Traffic}

some live data here so this is for a partner uh that i anonymized and this is a great example because they are using spring big as well so this is for a retailer um and they have about let's say 10 stores i'm not sure exactly how many stores but this is a look at their google analytics so if you if you do have the ability to get your analytics set up correctly and by correctly i mean allowing the ability to track your ecommerce conversion rate your transactions and your revenue then that's the first phase so you want to make sure that you have google analytics installed whether it's through you know dutchy jane timber dispense shopify like all the ecommerce platforms offer this so make sure that you integrate your ecommerce platform with google analytics that's the first phase second let's just take a look at where this revenue is coming from and this is a great way for us to prioritize where we're spending our money so direct traffic that's people who already know the store they already know the company and they're just going directly to the website or they have a bookmark so 45 of their traffic is coming from direct traffic so those are all existing customers most likely and then next if we go down the list google organic this is people who search for cannabis store [Music] and then click on one of these results so they click on one of these results and then they go they go to your cannabis website so that would be an organic click let's just look at gmb so that's uh we added utms for this partner so that we can track uh google my business separate from that of organic traffic so we type in san francisco dispensary instead of clicking here people are clicking to the actual google my business listing and then coming to the website so that's the actual experience of someone uh coming from google my business and then go into your to your website then from there they can proceed to the shopping cart and then spring big is right here so pat great point on the on the crm and glad that you're you're using a great partner like spring big um you can see that just under nine percent of your traffic is coming from spring big and this is typically called something else i'm trying to remember what the name of it is um but if you add a utm to your your link url on springvig you can actually track this a little better and we definitely recommend that so eight percent of the traffic's coming from spring big eight percent of the traffic conversion rate is really high 10 transactions in revenue so they're spring big supports about 5 of the revenue so 296 000 for this partner of the 5.5 million so just looking across the line these are the top 10 sources you can see that direct traffic existing customers you know 45 is coming from that channel google organic versus google gmb so gmb has one two three four five of the top 10 results and we have google my business profiles set up for each city and then this is actually spring big as well so my wallet deals that's a that's your loyalty wallet so it's actually a little bit more than [Music] uh if we combine these two a little bit more is coming from spring bake and the last one is going to be sem so this is google ads or google cpc so this is one little over one percent of the of the traffic to the website with a 8.5 conversion rate and 31 000 in revenue so just looking at the top channels for this partner and this is pretty common across dispensaries that we work with is seo is going to be your number one traffic source this after direct traffic and then spring big is going to be the spring big or any of the other crms are going to be another a great way for you to get people back to the website and getting them to buy so this is a just a great overview of where your money's going to go and what you should expect from that so then just taking a step back uh we have a few questions here so how do you prevent fraudulent reviews and rankings and ratings uh rankings from tanking

{Managing Online Reviews and Boosting Google Ratings}

your google ratings so number one uh you're always going to get fraudulent reviews so you want to make sure that you document these and that you provide those to google and report them so that would be the first thing is report into google second thing is if you if they have like a a personal name like if they say someone's name like a bud tender or the owner or something like that you can actually just have that removed fairly easily because they're not allowed uh to call people out by name on that front especially in a negative manner if it's if they're you know saying negative things about someone on the team they can get that removed um our recommendation would be sure be sure to manage a 4.7 or higher google rating uh be sure to respond to all those reviews and do your best to if possible have people revise their reviews so that you can you know maintain that 4.7 rating we have another question for brands here

{Recommended Advertising Channels for Cannabis Brands}

so what's the best roi for brands so that's a tough one so brands you know historically don't have not had many advertising channels to leverage for uh for advertising so right now what we're seeing is uh from my conversation with joe hodus to you from wanna brands events is a big one uh swag is another great way to really get your brand out there and and gain an awareness pr is another um and then once you want to you know do real like digital advertising then programmatic is a great way to do that partner maybe with one of your retailers so you can drive in-store sales there if you have the ability to do direct to consumer then you can you know send people directly to your website and then maybe they can go to the stockist if they need to buy in a retail store or if they um if they can just buy directly through you then that's another option let me actually just pull up a few examples of that [Music] [Music] all right let's just look at buddy's brand so if i were bro if i were buddies and i wanted to promote my brand uh you know they do have a ddc model here so if you go to shop now for the brand it looks like they're using timber for their menu uh so as a as a brand let's say they're in los angeles yeah maywood let's say we're in maywood and we want to promote our brand and really drive sales in store or d2c this is a great way to do it right you the conversation we had earlier about owning your data owning that first part of data this is another another method for owning that data right have your own shopping cart and they have the ability to capture that customer information for your brand and matthew yes i'll answer your question here in a second so give me some examples of driving direct sales so programmatic would be one if i were let's say in los angeles and i wanted to drive vape pen sales what i can do is i can just do like a los angeles vape weed vapes and i would i'd want to do seo so seo for my product so that we can rank in this area so when people are searching for vape pens they get directed to this vape pens category so seo is going to help i don't think it's going to for brands it's not going to drive as much growth as a retailer or delivery service so just keep that in mind uh brand co-op coma co-marketing campaigns are are great great method too let me pull one up here for you all right all right let's just look at this brand in los angeles uh so they did they did uh launch a programmatic campaign with us uh and the goal was to drive in-store sales at a retail partner so they spent i believe it was 4 500 but let me just double check on this over 30 or 90 days give me one second let's look at the impressions here questions

{To Get Local Newspaper PR, Pitch a Compelling Story}

{High-Value Marketing Channels for Customer Acquisition}

{Top Three Strategies for Boosting Cannabis Brand Sales Online}

]