Marketing for Dispensaries, Retailers and Cannabis Stores

The cannabis retail space and its inherent volatility has the DIY marketer and seasoned agency alike scrambling to implement actionable, bankable, sustainable ROI despite the epic challenges and tight restrictions on advertising of all stripes. At the highest level, marketing strategies must be cohesive, comprehensive and outside-of-the-box all at once. A high level of local search optimization is mandatory, pay-per-click can be precarious but has slam dunk potential and brand ambassadors are the new word of mouth, but the rest of How To Market Your Retail Store 101 goes out the window simply because you sell cannabis. Social media, once the hallmark of a grassroots budget, has now transcended tricky to full-fledged nightmare in almost every iteration for cannabis retailers large and small. As it pertains to search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, the difficulties and unreliability of paid search campaigns make it almost mandatory to have high-level organic search managed by a cannabis SEO.

The tried-and-true startup marketing model for a business entering an immature industry pre-saturation doesn't work so well when it comes to cannabis.  Certain states with no cap on dispensary licenses that have quickly met or exceeded retail saturation (i.e. Colorado, Oregon, Oklahoma) are currently experiencing the undesirable market corrections and inevitable M&A that come when the fifth bagel shop almost puts the first four out of business. 

Normally, any operation with a viable marketing budget can acquire brand awareness, website traffic and a reliable revenue stream from a properly crafted campaign on one or more paid platforms.  PPC and SEM options that are available to nearly every other legal industry are quite often eliminated from the cannabis marketer's arsenal.  Unfortunately, there are micromarkets so competitive that smaller companies without the means for an elaborate organic strategy are doomed to fail.