It's fair to say that the legal cannabis industry here in the U.S. has exploded over the past two decades. The industry's evolution from a once-underground and illicit black market drug trade to a legal multi-billion cash cow has been relatively swift. It is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. As a result, legal cannabis dispensaries, both medical and recreational, have been popping up all over the nation like weeds (pun intended).

For the upstart cannabis dispensaries owners and entrepreneurs out there, competing for customer attention and carving out a space of your own is far easier said than actually done. That's why good dispensary promoting and sorting out how to market your dispensary is essential. After all, if marketing a dispensary and running a successful cannabis business was a simple task, everyone would do it. That's where we here at Where's Weed come in!

We're here to help upstart dispensary owners and managers get your cannabis dispensary marketing on point, deploy successful cannabis strategies for dispensaries, optimize dispensary deals, and reach customers to purchase products.

So with that in mind, we wanted to create on one-stop resource for anything and everything cannabis dispensary marketing, giving you five studied and proven ways of getting customers through the doors of your dispensary.

So without too much further ado, let's break down those strategies and why they're crucial for getting and keeping your customers!

Understanding Your Buyers

Before implementing any specific strategies to get paying customers through the doors of your dispensary, you'll first need to figure out who you're catering to in the first place.

If your dispensary, for example, is located in a place or part of town frequented by tourists, you should go out of your way to offer discounts to those who can prove they're traveling. If your customer base is a bunch of loyal, local cannabis lovers, you can offer loyalty discounts and make sure you keep top-notch strains in stock. No matter who ends up being the group to pay the most as consistently as possible, that should be the group you cater to most. Whether it's veterans, senior citizens, college students, or working professionals, you need to figure out your customer base before applying any of the following tips to take your cannabis dispensary marketing to the next level!

Develop and Own Your Brand

Whether we like it or not, humans will almost always pick the flashy, eye-catching thing over the clunky, seemingly un-cool thing. A great example of this in action is the success of the iPhone against the Android smartphone. Despite Androids often having better features, functionality, and internal processing power, many opt for iPhone because they're sleeker and seen as the cooler, hipper brand. The same rules apply to your dispensary.

People like modern, well-designed brand presentations. Make sure your brick-and-mortar store is well-designed, customer-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing.

People are buying their weed legally because it's a modern, legal outlet that doesn't have the apparent downsides of getting their weed from a sketchy high-school dropout selling dime bags full of stems and seeds. So give them an experience that matches that vibe.

Don't Neglect Your Online Presence

As important as a modern, sleek storefront presence and marketing of your brand needs to be, the online component is often even more essential. These days, customers who can't find you online might as well not even know you exist.

Potential customers are constantly checking online for customer reviews of your dispensary, looking at menus to determine if you have what they're looking for in the first place, and even just to see if you're offering any good discounts. If you're one of the five dispensaries within a five-block radius, they need a reason to pick you. Having an excellent online presence and good SEO will give you the edge in that regard. Converting that online attention into actual dollars customers spend in your dispensary is essential to successful dispensary marketing.

Offer a Diverse Range of Products

There's a whole bunch of innovation in the world of legal cannabis. In just two decades of widespread cannabis legality, we've seen the rise of vapes, new and tasty varieties of edibles, liquid cannabis like infused beverages and soft drinks, tinctures, RSO, and concentrates, just to name a few. Gone are the days when the only forms of cannabis you could get was a joint or blunt stuffed to the brim with cannabis flower.

To keep up with those modern times and diverse customer needs, your dispensary needs not only to carry a massive array of products, but they need to know how to market them as well.

For example, if your customers don't know that you offer a wide range of concentrates, vapes, and other forms of cannabis aside from flower, they'll just go somewhere to get the concentrates they know have them. Humans are creatures of habit, so being able to sell yourself as a one-stop shop for everything cannabis-related that they could ever want will go a long way to getting you loyal customers in the long term!

Be Creative and Try Stuff

As much as there is a science to getting customers through the door, it's not entirely nailed down as an exact science. There's a lot of trial and error involved, so you need to be comfortable trying stuff that might not work. It's your business, so don't be afraid to make some bold decisions and try some new and exciting stuff. Don't go too overboard and throw all caution to the wind to try something new and unique instead.

Sorting out that balance will be essential to getting paying customers into your business in the long term!

Wellness Connection of Maine - Gardiner

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