Free

Webinar

The Proven Method For Getting More From Your Cannabis Dispensary Marketing Budget

Most dispensaries aren't getting the most from their marketing budget because their spend isn't connected to their sales funnel. This webinar walks you through a proven method for aligning your marketing investment with the customer journey, so every dollar drives a measurable outcome.You'll learn how to audit your current spend, understand where your funnel is leaking, and reallocate resources toward the activities that actually grow revenue. If you feel like you're spending money on marketing without clear results, this session gives you a practical framework for fixing that.

Watch Now

Key Insights

Most cannabis dispensaries that feel budget-constrained are not actually budget-constrained - they are allocation-constrained, spending on a mix of channels without clear data on which activities are generating the most revenue per dollar invested.
A reliable cannabis marketing budget methodology starts with customer acquisition cost by channel, not total spend by channel, because the cost to acquire a new customer varies dramatically across paid digital, organic, referral, and retention channels.
Customer lifetime value calculation is the foundational metric for cannabis dispensary budget decisions because it determines how much a dispensary can profitably spend to acquire each new customer type while maintaining positive marketing economics.
Cannabis dispensaries that shift budget from broad awareness toward retention and win-back campaigns consistently see short-term revenue lift because reactivating a former customer costs a fraction of what acquiring a new one does.
Measuring marketing ROI at the campaign level rather than the channel level gives cannabis operators the most actionable insight, because performance varies significantly within channels based on audience, offer, creative, and timing.

Expert Answers

[{How should a cannabis dispensary allocate its marketing budget?}

Cannabis dispensary marketing budget allocation should be guided by customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and revenue attribution data rather than industry benchmarks or percentage-of-revenue formulas that ignore your specific market, competitive set, and customer economics. Start by calculating what it costs to acquire a new customer through each active channel, what the average first-year revenue from that customer is, and what your margin looks like at the channel level. Budget allocation should concentrate spend in the channels with the lowest cost-to-acquire against the highest lifetime value customers, while maintaining enough diversification to protect against channel disruptions.

{What is the most common cannabis dispensary marketing budget mistake?}

The most common cannabis dispensary marketing budget mistake is distributing spend evenly across channels without a performance-based framework for evaluating which channels deserve more investment. Many dispensaries continue funding channels that feel familiar or seem active without measuring whether they are generating new customers or incremental revenue. A close second is underinvesting in retention while heavily funding acquisition, despite the fact that keeping an existing cannabis customer is typically three to five times less expensive than acquiring a new one.

{How do I calculate customer acquisition cost for my dispensary?}

To calculate customer acquisition cost for your dispensary by channel, divide the total marketing spend on that channel over a given period by the number of new customers who made their first purchase that can be attributed to that channel during the same period. For example, if you spent $2,000 on programmatic display advertising in a month and 40 new customers who saw those ads made their first purchase, your CAC for that channel is $50. Use your POS data and loyalty program enrollment to identify first-time purchasers and match them back to campaign exposure data where possible.

{How much should a cannabis dispensary spend on marketing?}

Cannabis dispensary marketing spend as a percentage of revenue varies widely by market maturity, competitive intensity, license type, and growth stage, so there is no single correct number. Early-stage dispensaries in new markets may need to spend 10 to 20 percent of revenue on marketing to build awareness and customer base, while established dispensaries in mature markets may operate efficiently at 5 to 8 percent. The more important question is not what percentage to spend but whether the spend is producing positive marketing economics: is the revenue generated from marketing-acquired customers exceeding the cost to acquire and retain them?]

Webinar Highlights

00:00 - Why Most Dispensary Marketing Budgets Are Underperforming

The session opens with an honest assessment of how dispensary marketing budgets are commonly allocated and why spreading spend evenly across channels without performance data produces predictably mediocre results across all of them.

08:00 - The Customer Economics Framework

This section covers the foundational metrics for cannabis dispensary budget decisions, including how to calculate customer acquisition cost by channel, how to model customer lifetime value by segment, and why these two numbers together determine how much any dispensary can profitably invest in marketing.

18:00 - Auditing Your Current Channel Mix

The webinar walks through how to audit an existing cannabis marketing channel mix, identify which channels have positive marketing economics, which are underperforming against their cost, and which have potential that is being limited by budget, creative, or targeting constraints.

28:00 - Shifting Budget Toward Retention and Win-Back

This section covers the ROI case for rebalancing cannabis marketing budgets from pure acquisition toward retention marketing, covering win-back campaign mechanics, reactivation offer strategy, and how to calculate the revenue impact of reducing customer churn.

36:00 - Building a Cannabis Marketing Budget That Adapts

The session closes with a framework for building a cannabis dispensary marketing budget that adjusts dynamically based on performance data, seasonal demand patterns, and competitive market activity rather than locking into fixed allocations that cannot respond to what is actually working.

Frequently Asked Questions

[ {What channels should be included in a cannabis dispensary marketing budget?}

A cannabis dispensary marketing budget should include a mix of channels that cover awareness, consideration, and retention across the customer lifecycle. Core channels typically include programmatic display and mobile advertising for awareness and retargeting, SEO and content for organic search visibility, email and SMS for retention and promotional communication, loyalty program investment for lifetime value, and paid search where compliant platforms allow. The specific channel mix depends on your market, your customer profile, and where your acquisition data shows the most efficient cost-per-customer results.

{How often should a cannabis dispensary review its marketing budget?}

Cannabis dispensaries should review marketing budget performance monthly at the channel level and quarterly at the strategic allocation level. Monthly reviews should examine campaign-level performance metrics, customer acquisition costs, and revenue attribution to identify underperforming spend that should be reallocated. Quarterly reviews should assess whether the overall channel mix is aligned with business goals, whether seasonal demand shifts require budget reweighting, and whether any new channel opportunities have emerged that warrant a test budget.

{What is a good marketing ROI for a cannabis dispensary?}

A good marketing ROI for a cannabis dispensary varies by growth stage and channel mix, but a healthy benchmark is a return of at least three to five dollars in revenue for every one dollar spent on marketing, with some high-performing retention and loyalty campaigns reaching ten to one or better. The more meaningful metric is whether your marketing economics are improving over time: is your customer acquisition cost falling as brand recognition builds, is your customer lifetime value increasing as retention programs mature, and is revenue per marketing dollar improving as your data and targeting sharpen?

{Should cannabis dispensaries invest in brand marketing or performance marketing?}

Cannabis dispensaries benefit from both brand marketing and performance marketing, but the balance should reflect the stage of the business. Early-stage dispensaries with limited budgets typically see faster returns from performance marketing (targeted campaigns designed to produce measurable customer acquisition and revenue) than from broad brand awareness campaigns. As the dispensary grows, brand investment becomes more important for defending market position and reducing long-term customer acquisition costs. A practical approach is to prioritize performance marketing until the business has established a consistent customer base and positive marketing economics, then introduce brand investment alongside ongoing performance campaigns.

{How does loyalty program investment fit into a cannabis marketing budget?}

Loyalty program investment should be treated as a core component of a cannabis dispensary marketing budget rather than a separate operational cost, because loyalty programs are one of the highest-ROI marketing activities available to dispensaries. The cost of running a loyalty program, including technology, rewards, and communication, must be measured against the incremental revenue generated from increased purchase frequency and reduced customer churn among enrolled members. Dispensaries with strong loyalty programs consistently demonstrate lower customer acquisition costs over time because retained customers reduce the volume of new customers needed to hit revenue targets. ]

Webinar Full Transcript

[ {Intro}

all right well let's get started thank you everybody for joining us today uh for the proven method for getting more from your cannabis marketing budget learn how to maximize your budget while generating more sales as of february 20 february 2021 deloitte's annual cmo survey reported that marketing budgets are roughly 11.7 percent of the total company-wide budget gartner's 2020 cmo survey confirms most marketing budgets rest around 11 percent of total company budget

{Overview}

we saw a record high uh marketing budgets over the course of the pandemic as companies really reallocated some budgets towards digital marketing strategies rather than more offline tactics so today we'll be covering how to evaluate your sales funnel and define your operational cost how to determine your marketing investment based on business goals and how to understand the current and future trends and reflect on your growth stage my name is guillermo bravo i'm the chief

{Who am I}

evangelist here at MediaJel formerly foot traffic i have 20 years of experience applying my expertise to marketing teams combining big picture thinking innovation collaboration and creativity to driving marketing campaigns MediaJel MediaJel is the number one ad tech

{About MediaJel}

platform built for regulated cannabis cbd alcohol brands and more we provide programmatic advertising organic search seo paid search sem and website services now as a reminder foot traffic is now MediaJel we joined forces in july 2021 to offer the most advanced advertising platform for regulated industries we're trusted by over a thousand cannabis retailers brands and companies globally and growing fast every day

{Turn off your phone}

before we kick it off please do us a favor and turn off your cell phone or put it face down just so you're present for the webinar and also please familiarize yourself with zoom the q a button is at the bottom of the zoom interface feel free to ask questions throughout the webinar and i'll answer your questions at the end

{Your sales funnel}

it all starts with your sales funnel so building effective marketing budget requires a deep dive into your sales funnel where you'll track results through throughout the revenue cycle from prospect to customer harvesting this data from your marketing automation software or your crm or your point of sale system makes this relatively simple so here's a few questions that we can ask ourselves how many visits do you have to your website per month currently how many leads are you generating per month how many of these new website visitors are generating revenue for you per month how many of these new website visitors convert to actual e-commerce sales or in-store visits and what's the cost of these new website visitors whether it's from your website or sem or programmatic advertising campaigns like how much time is spent on marketing sales to really get these visitors to convert to a customer then once they're a customer you know how many of these customers actually opt into your loyalty program whether it's uh an email list or sms list like what what is conversion rate on those and then what is the lifetime value of a customer to you you know from our numbers over the course of a couple years you know that could be upwards of 1500 all all the way up to five grand as far as a lifetime value of a customer so keep that in mind when really looking at your sales funnel

{Your target market}

you gotta research your audience you know your target market refers to a group of potential customers that your dispensary will sell to and where you will direct your marketing branding efforts towards the idea is that you can't target everyone you want to identify specific group of people with similar characteristics like geography demographics buying power and income this is all known as identifying a buyer persona think of a character that represents your ideal customer what do they need what do they like how can you provide them with an experience that will keep them coming back time and time again some examples of customer personas that are common to most dispensaries include medical cannabis consumers younger consumers seniors older adults health conscious cannabis consumers segmenting your customers into categories will make targeting and personal marketing so much easier so those are some broad overviews however you want to die you'll want to delve in a bit deeper into what makes your ideal customer tick you'll need you'll note that i say ideal customers plural because you'll likely have multiple customer segments that you'll want to target so many some maybe one of them is mary who is in her late 30s has a professional job and wants to use cannabis for wellness to get better better sleep focus more and relax then there's joe who's just out of college he likes learning about what he puts in his body and he's environmentally conscious but he's also on a bit of a budget he wants the high-end experience without the high-end prices so these are little stories essentially that help us envision who will be walking through the doors these personas are who you'll be trying to reach and market to once you understand your customers you can get a better idea of what motivates them to spend what they'll likely purchase and how to best communicate your marketing messages to them and people like them

{Operational costs}

operational costs next we need to understand your operational costs how much would it cost in time and labor to deliver on your marketing campaigns does your internal staff have the bandwidth required to complete this work or will you require additional head count along with related employee benefit costs how much would it cost you if you hired an agency of record what are the potential costs of your inaction the marketing plan budget is one of the most important items of your business and why because you'll be using this marketing budget to secure financing from your executives and c levels so the numbers are key this is the section where you don't want to be vague or over promise on what you can deliver to your investors include information regarding profitability what type of timelines and metrics will you use to gauge the success of your marketing plan and the budget set start and finish dates and targets for specific milestones for before and after the launch of your campaigns try to set achievable milestones that emphasize growth and establish metrics to check the health of your company consider every aspect of what it will take to run your business so that the numbers are as accurate as possible you have to take a look at the

{Competition}

competition in order to create a successful marketing strategy you need to know what others are doing you may be competing for the same market share so you need to identify what the competition is doing who they're targeting and how they may affect or impact your potential business you should have a list of all your competitors and what makes them competitive so getting this out of the way in the beginning and allowing you and allowing yourself to help shape your business and your marketing strategy can make this process more smoothly consider how your dispensary differs from the competition and how you will succeed in the face of potential saturated market what makes you stand out why will your target market choose you over the rest these are all good questions to ask yourself before you know moving forward with the marketing budget

{Business Goals}

so when creating the marketing budget we really need to determine your business goals by asking yourself a few questions what are your business objectives for the quarter for the year for the next three years for the next five years how many how many of the leads that come into your website or website visitors turn into actual sales like what's their close rate what impact will revenue have on achieving the goals whether it's for the company for the investors or you know other parties it's common for small businesses with revenues less than 5 million to allocate 6 to 11 percent of their revenues to marketing splitting between that brand development such as websites blogs sales collateral promotional costs as well as campaigns advertising and events never base your marketing budget simply on what's left over after covering all expenses it's an invested more than off more often than not marketing budgets descend from the top of the organization where marketing teams are considered cost centers and the marketing budget is perceived to be an expense by thinking this way organizations will take a look at last year's marketing expenditures and make a decision about where they want to spend more or less instead your marketing budget should be treated as an investment something that will bring quantifiable and ascertainable return on investment over time the common phrase i hear from dispensary owners is build and they will come this is so far from the truth cannabis is a specialty crop and you will need to market cannabis the same way as any other retail brick and mortar company it's no different consider your growth stage

{Growth or Planning}

setting your market budget will also be influenced by whether your organization is in growth or planning mode for example growth mode you'll need to generate top-line revenue at a fast rate you might want to consider take a internal approach in further developing your website so your website can become a central marking hub rather than an online brochure development maintenance can consume a significant part of your budget but the rewards are well worth it if you're in the planning mode where steady growth is more welcome than spikes in revenue you'll want to consider a long-term marketing play through earned media this includes generating and publishing great inbound content and eventually earning new business over time this is organic search or seo and from our numbers upwards of 70 percent of all e-commerce sales completed through the website are from organic search so i'll let that sink in 70 of your online sales are coming from seo so don't don't neglect this and don't puts this to the wayside because sdo is going to have a massive impact on your business an understanding of current and future marketing trends can also help you navigate the budgeting process when setting a marketing budget it's important for marketers to adopt and apply different technologies to their marketing stack to keep up with the pace of industry changes if you're for example using email marketing in your strategy take advantage of features such as contact insights email tracking scheduling and attribution many times companies react to the latest marketing idea without validation and research that that they will successfully reach their target market a great example of this is social media social media is the talk of the town all the time cannabis companies you know think that's all they can do to market themselves but in reality is social media is just for brand awareness it's not going to grow your revenue it's not going to get you sales it's going to it's gonna reach those customers at the top of the funnel you know there's other pla there's other marketing channels that are more effective in driving revenue yeah so focus you know focus on your audience you know what form of communication are they likely to respond to you and what should your message to them be so really think about the personas that we're talking about before as they will have a major impact on how you write and strategize your marketing strategy how you speak to them uh you know the the creative that'll be used for let's say a programmatic dad the subject line for email header you know may be different depending on the audience when you're writing a google ads copy you know some some say if you're reaching a medical consumer you want to be more professional in your tone but if you're looking to reach more of the younger younger audience within the cannabis community you can use some slang words so just really be open-minded and creative with how you approach speaking to your customers because you know if you don't communicate with them in the right way they won't respond and they'll just go to your competitors

{Revenue Attribution}

tracking so it's part as part of our goal to consistently deliver great results we recommend setting up revenue attribution for all your campaigns this allows dispensaries to see which marketing campaigns are bringing in the most revenue by directly timed sales to a specific marketing channel our clients can see their return on advertising spend on every campaign as well as their customer acquisition cost so think about it you know if we're we have a million dollars to spend on advertising in 2022. there's a lot of advertising channels that you can track you know like organic search paid search social media email marketing sms marketing programmatic advertising like a lot of the digital advertising techniques can be tracked but you know you run a billboard you really have no idea how many clients are coming in there unless you ask when they come in the store nothing against traditional media as far as like billboards print and radio but it's old school you know it's uh you know you don't have the ability to track as effectively and there's just so much more advanced tools nowadays that allow you to target your audience versus targeting everyone so keep that in mind uh and then also compliance like when you start to do a lot of these out of home advertising campaigns you've got to make sure that you're within the parameters of the state and that can be quite challenging when you're doing a traditional campaign that's easily considered when running a digital marketing campaign you know simply by the fact that you can choose an age demographic when launching those uh as far as print you know there's there's definitely a way to merge uh traditional media with new technology you know i'd always recommend adding a qr code to any out of home advertising campaigns that you run so that you can track those campaigns through digital so really bridging the gap between let's say a digital advertisement at a gas station or on the free billboards don't recommend qr codes it's uh it's not a good not a good move just based on safety but if you are sending out direct mailers or flyers through guerilla marketing then definitely add a qr code to those so when you're investing money in different channels you need to know what's working and how much revenue it's driving for you and most advertising companies in our industry don't do this but we've made it standard not only do our clients appreciate it but they often end up increasing their advertising budgets when they see how well their different campaigns are working revenue attribution also helps highlighting challenges and opportunities our team has been working hard to help dispensaries grow and sell more online for years so when we're faced with with the results of our campaigns we can easily spot areas of opportunity and address any challenges so we can deliver even better results so really spend some time uh reflecting on your technology stack your your e-commerce your point of sale system and everything that you need to really track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns you know a crm is fundamental in that point of sale is is as well and then choosing a an effective ecommerce solution you know like a dutchy or jane and there's there's several others that are really effective in making this attribution seamless i just really keep that in mind because you you need to track this data because once this campaign is run and when you're having your board meetings every quarter you need to have these concrete numbers ready for all the shareholders and all the investors and by doing this and showing showing how organized you are as far as the numbers and you know being able to explain the numbers you'll be able to secure more money down the line so just keep that in mind when you're creating these budgets and really focus on tracking because in the end that's that's all that matters you need to see long-term growth we need to see new customers in the website in store we need new e-commerce sales and we need to be really proactive in getting these customers from our competitors

{Recap}

all right so just to recap you know MediaJel is committed to constant improvement you know as a company we strive to do things better every day and that shows in the results that we achieve for our clients you know we're very forward-looking company and we focus on implementing long-term solutions that our clients can use to reach their goals you know as a digital advertising software company focused on the cannabis industry we have tried to get started with these types of campaigns fast and easy we handle every part of the process for our clients they can focus on growing their business and providing exceptional customer service our goal is to make working with us so easy that you can focus on the heavy lifting of running your business so i'll leave the floor open for everyone if anyone has any questions for startups we got jesus contreras for startups who haven't been in the business yet how could one plan for a marketing budget that's a great question and it all starts with your goals so like when you're creating your business plan uh you're gonna have revenue goals in there and you can reverse engineer how much money you need to spend to actually acquire those customers to reach your goals so for example if we need to get a thousand new customers into our store every month let's just say that it's a 50 cost per acquisition per customer so a thousand times 50 that's 50 000 that you'll need to spend to get a thousand new customers in that month so that's uh you know 600 000 a year for that type of campaign and that will yield 12 000 new customers at a lifetime value of a thousand dollars that's 12 million dollars in lifetime sales from that 600 000 investment so just to put things into perspective uh you really have to do your homework you really need to plan for long term and you need to be realistic about the numbers you know 50 is a fair cost per acquisition uh at least for us if you can uh if you can uh you know get to 25 or 20 dollars even better but that's going to take some some work and some customization how much does dispensary spend on marketing as percentage of their budget so unfortunately right now i would say between one and five percent uh you know dispensaries always use the excuse of 280e as the reason that they don't uh invest a lot in marketing but that's you know that's uh negligent right so you know the dispensaries that i know that we work with are spending 10 percent of their budget plus on marketing and they're in the growth stage you know they have goals that they need to reach for investors and there's no excuses that they can make and most of them have pulled a lot of the at home at home advertising and put it in digital because the roi is so much higher sam gill we have can you talk about how to get the most of social media cannabis content maybe tell us how you can work away around social media post boosting or making facebook ads so like i mentioned before social media is for brand awareness it's not for generating revenue so just be clear in that also you do not own any of your accounts so you can build all you want but if zuckerberg decides one day he doesn't like your content then boom you're down so i wouldn't necessarily work around social media boosting i'm i would only create organic content and then leverage influencer marketing and engagement uh to really grow the accounts but just keep in mind it's for brand awareness only you cannot promote the sale or use of a prohibited federal illegal product on these platforms you can't link to your menu you can't post a deal you can't say there's a sale you can't do anything you need to make it lifestyle focused only and that's why you need to leverage something like MediaJel right we have an ad platform where we can reach the same audience as social media known cannabis consumers without uh the red tape of using social media and getting you know putting your accounts at risk you know we have written approval from all these publications and gaming apps and tv shows to actually show cannabis products in the ads and promote aggressively the sale of cannabis through those ads so it's quite a different landscape when you don't have all the limitations where you need to kind of fall within facebook or instagram's guidelines i mean i've found i've found that linkedin has been the most effective for at least b2b and reaching customers they don't [Music] they don't restrict your content like any of the others and then sam you had another question

{Best Practices For Cannabis SEO}

what are the best practices for cannabis sensories seo wise that's a great question so the it's uh there's a few pillars so the first is foundation so you need to create a website that is built for search engines mobile devices and for conversions so the site needs to load fast it needs to be mobile first not desktop mobile first 70 of your customers are going to be on cell phones so make sure that it's built for cell phones first and then uh you need to invest in your content so you need to invest in your content for your blog for your landing pages whether it's a product strain or you know what are the four of the best hikes in los angeles you know there's different things that you can do on a local level and you need to make it relevant the content has to be related to your regional area so that the search ends search engines can associate your business with the region and cannabis and specifically for google cannabis store as a category

{Backlinks}

and then once you do that you need to build authority and trust with the search engines through backlinks and backlinks are links from third-party websites point to yours so you need to really invest in that and this is where a lot of dispensaries and companies overall drop the ball you know they you really need to invest in a link building strategy because it's there's no other way to really uh gain traction and trust you know you need to build your authority you need to build your trust in by doing uh investing in backlinks and content are great ways to do that another effective way for seo is creating a google my business listing for your dispensary optimizing the listing and then getting as many reviews as possible as fast as possible so i recommend setting some goals you know the first would be 100 reviews second would be 300 reviews third would be 500 reviews and then once you're ready for big time and shoot for a thousand and this is going to help you surpass all your competition in local markets and my recommendation is a benchmark would be to shoot for a 4.7 average rating or higher so you really need to provide a great customer experience you need to have a great product catalog uh and just make sure that everything from the website to your retail store to your parking to the way that bud tenders greet customers is all uniform and positive and customers will you know they will leave you a positive review and

{Reviews}

don't wait for people to leave review like request reviews when people are checking out at the um at the register you know have the bud tenders you know ask them how their experience went and have them leave a review also have a qr code with the that links to the review section of google my business listing right there at the checkout and then when people leave the store send them a text message on how was your experience and get them to leave a review there through google so there's a lot of ways that you can increase your reviews but i would say it's a good mix of content and on-page optimization backlinks and reputation so i hope that was helpful sam any other questions anybody uh google ads for promoting cannabis

{Google Ads}

yeah i mean there it's kind of it's a bit longer conversation sam i would recommend putting something on my calendar and we can talk about that uh but we you know we have a proven track record of managing google ads on your behalf you know we're we're spending about half a million dollars a month in google ads for our clients uh so you know that's uh there's a lot that goes into that you know building landing pages creating compliant content going managing the disapproval process there's so many things to consider when it's when it comes to google ads and it's just getting harder by the way like google has implemented a three strike policy so uh it's even harder for cannabis companies to advertise through google ads you know but at MediaJel we we have this locked down we have you know full full full list of google ads engineers that are certified and you know we have a relationship with google as well so you know there's some advantages to working with an agency like us any other questions well thank you everybody for joining and

{Outro}

um you know engaging with us today you know it's been uh it's been a wonderful journey here getting to to where we are um you know just a reminder you know MediaJel we are a integrated advertising platform we have our own programmatic ad network we can we can show ads to cannabis consumers when they're reading the news when they're watching streaming tv when they're playing games on their phone and we can track every step of that customer journey so there's a lot of capabilities that we offer and you know organic search and google ads as you mentioned sam we have this formula down and we're doing it time and time again with our thousand plus partners so if you're looking to grow your revenue fast you want to reach your goals like we're here as a partner we're here to uh to support in any way so just reach out to us whether it's through here i'll post my calendly here you can schedule a time with me or you can just go to MediaJel.com go to the contact form and fill that out and yeah wishing everybody uh happy holidays and a uh an enjoyable time with family and friends and uh have a wonderful twenty two and end to 2021 and looking forward to seeing everyone in 2022 have a wonderful time take care ]