Being one of the longest-standing marketing service providers in the cannabis industry. We have seen a lot of different digital marketing strategies and tactics get their 15 minutes of fame, only to become background noise within a few months, or sometimes even weeks.
However, with markets maturing and saturation at all-time highs, retail operators and marketing partners have had to continue turning over new stones looking for ways to innovate and keep their partners ahead of the competition.
These competitive environments lead to questions like, “What is the best way to grow my dispensary online?” ” If you had to focus on one thing, what would you do?” etc.
The true answer to that and how to dominate online is to simply be the best dispensary in your area, both in-store and online. There is no hack or shortcut to outperforming your competitors online, but one thing is for certain: If you provide the customer a better experience in all areas of your business relative to your competition. Google and other search engines will reward you.
That’s a boring answer we know, so we will indulge and give you what we think is the single most important digital area to focus on for cannabis operators along with a bunch of data to back it up.
Before we dive in, let’s be clear. We have been preaching this since 2016 when we developed our HyperLocal marketing service, and still to this day, we believe it reigns supreme as the most important digital area for your dispensary.
It’s your Google Business Profile(s). Yep, a free platform offered by Google is most likely responsible for a majority of online cannabis sales in your market.
This is because it is Google’s go to to show users when they are searching to purchase something locally, like cannabis. This means it is a key battleground you share with your competitors. Either customers are finding you when they search, or the dispensary down the street.
Here is some convincing evidence from a multi location operators in the new highest performing cannabis state in the US, Michigan.
What you’re looking at is data directly from Google Analytics 4 which is pulling from this dispensaries website and Dutchie menus. The far left hand column is the source where the traffic is coming from. The two far right hand columns are 1.) transactions attributed from that source and 2.) total revenue attributed from that source.
As you can see, the Google Business Profiles we manage for this partner (six total) are driving a majority of traffic and are responsible for $113K in revenue, or roughly 34.1% over this time period. Here is another look where you can see the break down of each store and it’s portion of the revenue attribution (blurred out specific store names and URLs for obvious privacy reasons).
The other sources to pay attention to are the self-referral and google / organic columns. A self-referral is essentially anytime this partners website is the source that sends someone to their online Dutchie menu.
This is important to understand because you’llk notice the “google / organic” source has no revenue attributed to it. This is because the organic source is driving users to various pages across the website, whether it be location pages, blog posts, brand pages, etc. After these users land on the site, and then are directed to the menu they now fall under the self-referral source. In this instance, roughly 63.6% of all the self-referrals users are landing on the site from Google organic search.
The last note to touch on is that you can see their loyalty app, SMS, and email campaigns cumulatively contributed to roughly $44,060.96 or 13.03% of online revenue over this two month period. In this case, they are using Alpine IQ. While I’m not sure what their cost is associated with AIQ, willing to bet that is a pretty substantial ROI on that spend. Proving loyalty, SMS, and email campaigns are another great area to focus on.
To conclude, we share this data to demonstrate the importance of your Google Business Profile and organic SEO efforts. For this retailer they are responibsle for driving a large chunk of their online traffic and sales. This is not to say to put all your eggs in one basket, as there is only so much to be done with your GBP and its clear there is ROI to be had with other digital strategies as well, but is definitely the rain maker in our opinion.
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