How to Activate a Successful Marketing Campaign on 420
Use Consumer Data to Activate Smart Marketing that Drives 4/20 Sales
Every year on 4/20, tens of thousands of people across the U.S. celebrate the benefits of cannabis, the impact of cannabis culture, and the pleasure that comes from being together with other cannabis lovers. April 20th has grown to become the most significant day in the cannabis world, but also to express the international importance of progressive counterculture thought.
For cannabis brands and retail dispensaries, 4/20 is one of the biggest sales drivers of the year. The week of 4/20 traditionally ranks in the top 10 sales weeks annually and has consistently grown year-over-year, becoming the #1 week in sales for 2021 - despite the ongoing concerns of the COVID pandemic. Looking at data in 4 states (CA, CO, NV, and WA), sales the week of 4/20 have increased from $89.7 million in 2018 to over $175.6 million in 2021 – an increase of 196%.
But these sales don’t just happen automatically. Cannabis brand and retailer marketers must leverage smart and effective marketing strategies in the weeks leading up to 4/20 in order to drive incremental sales. So how does this work?
Strategic Planning
Every successful marketing campaign begins with strategic planning in the weeks leading up to 4/20. Every retail location and brand is different, attracting unique consumer audiences, and understanding this is the foundation of effective marketing activations. Not only should cannabis businesses have record one-day sales as one of their primary goals, but they should also set themselves up to capture valuable consumer data on 4/20 that can be further leveraged to improve sales throughout the year (and on 4/20 every year afterward). This is only achievable with the right kind of strategic marketing plan in place.
An example of successful cannabis marketing can be seen with CannaCraft, a California-based company. CannaCraft’s brand line reflects the company’s focus on health & wellness, cannabis education, and giving back to the communities they service through cannabis-centric philanthropy and activism. These brands include Farmer and the Felon, AbsoluteXtracts, Care by Design, Keef, and others. CannaCraft effectively connects with consumers focused on health & wellness through market research and a progressive data strategy. By analyzing consumer trends like website visitation (e.g. what content are visitors interacting with, signing them up for loyalty programs, and tracking the products they purchase), CannaCraft captures personal consumer information like demographics.
Through analyzing purchase habits and historical website and visitation habits, CannaCraft can create an even more refined consumer profile segment by adding psychographic data. By further using geo-location tools, CannaCraft can see if the consumers who visit their website are also going to gyms, fitness classes, juice shops, GNC, Whole Foods, etc. Targeting consumers who are visiting health & wellness locations within close proximity to retail locations where CannaCraft products are sold (and layering on the other segments mentioned above) helps drive sales with a targeted consumer category and further develops brand loyalty with these consumers.
These strategies are critically important in optimizing market spending for one-day promotions like 4/20 - otherwise, businesses will waste media budgets targeting prospects that have little to no interest in purchasing branded products or visiting retail locations.
Do Research and Know Your Audience
A retail establishment or cannabis brand’s audience can be highly diverse or relatively niche. Knowing which demographics are most attracted to a particular brand, dispensary, or product should fundamentally change the way cannabis marketers develop their strategies, content, and activations. For example, using 4/20 celebrations as an avenue for fostering marijuana destigmatization among progressive consumer communities through themes of social equity, legalization, music, sports & entertainment, or health & wellness can drive incremental sales and further expand the base of loyal customers when 4/20 is over.
But who is your consumer audience? Cannabis consumers have become the largest new consumer segment in the U.S., with more than 145 million Americans living in areas with legal cannabis. This has resulted in a wide array of emerging consumer profiles, encompassing vastly diverse demographic segments. These emerging consumer groups intersect with broader market segments based on their dynamic personal interests (such as Health & Wellness, Parenting, and Entertainment), making it almost impossible to effectively appeal to everyone at once. Knowing which audiences comprise the majority of a brand or dispensary’s customer base is fundamental to developing effective marketing campaigns that will motivate consumers to shop on 4/20.
So, instead of making broad guesses about who is visiting dispensaries or purchasing specific cannabis products, companies should use first and third-party data insights (lifestyle information, education levels, income, age, gender, etc.) to discover which consumer profiles are predictably giving them business. Two solutions marketers can leverage to do this are retargeting and loyalty targeting. Retargeting allows brand and retail marketers to target consumers who visit their websites and follow them around the web to analyze their website traffic. Through this strategy, marketers are speaking to an audience that they have already engaged AND it allows them to segment the cohorts that fit their consumer profile/s. Loyalty targeting encompasses leveraging a brand or retailer's loyalty data to understand whom their core consumers are and targeting those consumers and like-minded consumers. Additionally, brand and retail marketers can use the information to craft 4/20 ads and promotions that speak directly to those consumers. And while retargeting and loyalty targeting is always useful for marketing development, it’s even more important when creating and placing content for one-day sales opportunities like 4/20 (It's also important to note that this is first-party data. First-party data is now essential to digital marketing campaigns).
Select Which Platforms to Activate Based on Your Audience
Now that your audience is identified and your high-level plan has been outlined, you’ll need to select where your ads are going to run, where your activations are going to take place, what types of 4/20 promotions to run, and how you will speak to your consumers.
Is one of your 4/20 target audiences millennials who are also interested in health and wellness? If so - just like the CannaCraft noted above - your programmatic strategy, OOH strategy, event strategy, street team strategy, and traditional media strategies should reflect this. Marketers should develop 4/20 events/promotions that showcase the themes that interest their target audiences.
Likewise, the data that cannabis marketers gather during the research process should directly lead to the specifics of their 4/20 marketing strategy, indicating which platforms and locations will be the most effective for ad placement, activations, promotions, and more. For example, if a cannabis marketer knows that their target audience is interested in yoga, they may want to do the following:
Leverage programmatic video ads organically adjacent to yoga, health and wellness content on websites like Health.com, Women’s Health, MindBody, etc.
Purchase a billboard outside of yoga studios and health stores within the vicinity of retail dispensaries that sell their products.
Hold a 4/20 event with a local yoga studio with a sign-up promotion.
Leveraging the above solutions are great! However, these mechanisms only work with continuity. Once prospects discover a brand's website, content should highlight the connection between their products and the target consumers (bonus -- take an educational approach). If it's yoga, one of those themes is personal wellness. This lets consumers know why their goods are great for yoga, meditation, recovery, and other wellness-related activities. Working with retailers, these brands might also secure premium advertising space on DOOH platforms in the dispensary or create in-store showcases for all their health-related products.
Dispensaries themselves may want to partner with local yoga studios to create cannabis-themed classes and guided meditation events on 4/20, leveraging their digital signage platforms, loyalty programs, and other resources to highlight these promotions at every opportunity. That’s exactly what some dispensaries in Phoenix, Arizona are doing - by partnering with Age of Aquarius Studios to provide cannabis-themed yoga classes during the week of 4/20, these dispensaries have chosen the right platform to meet the needs of their health-conscious audience.
Deploy a Location-Based Strategy
Diving further into the mechanics of consumer targeting, geo-location solutions are a necessary part of an effective 4/20 marketing campaign. Thanks to the plethora of mobile devices that many of us can’t live without, information about cannabis consumers and canna-curious consumers is at marketers' fingertips. For example, the other locations cannabis consumers visit can be gathered during the audience research process. These locations can act as a proxy providing intelligence about your potential consumers. If your target audience is seen at a stadium and/or arena frequently, spotted eating at Sweetgreen and frequenting the gym, visiting office buildings in midtown Manhattan, and shopping at Whole Foods and Bloomingdales a marketer might assume this person is a health enthusiast, business professional, and sports fan. This is a strategy both brand and retail marketers can harness, using first-party data segments (loyalists, historical purchasers, website visitors, digital ad campaign data) to increase scale and enhance any 4/20 marketing campaign.
Be aware brand marketers! Consumers generally prefer the convenience of visiting retailers that are the closest to their homes or the places they work. In light of this, cannabis brands must make sure that their messaging is compelling them to visit the specific locations where those brands are sold. Brands should consider partnering with retailers to ensure that their targeted ads are pushing consumers to the retail locations that are conveniently closest to them. Creative messaging should focus on doing this, with every ad driving consumers to a landing page that populates with the closest locations that sell these products.
For retailers, a focus on geo-location retargeting and competitive conquesting can be two of the most effective methods for increasing their 4/20 foot traffic. Historical visitors are among those who are the most likely to visit a location during a short promotional period, and dispensaries failing to devote the necessary resources required to reach them are missing out on key 4/20 sales. Likewise, dispensaries should work to target new consumers within a predetermined radius of their location, historically known as geofencing (now trade area targeting), and create competitive conquesting activations that pull business from other dispensaries within a mile or two of their establishment.
Consider Activating Promotions, Deals, and Experiences
One of the most fundamental parts of generating record 4/20 sales is developing the right promotions, deals, and experiences to get consumers shopping. Brand and retail awareness are a good start to effective marketing but are often not enough to pull customers' attention to digital ads or motivate them to visit an establishment. Consumers want to know that they’re getting a deal on cannabis products, and they want OOH experiences that are truly memorable. Offering promotions that center around the 4/20 holiday are a great way to get audiences interested enough to click through a digital ad or take special note of in-store media/signage.
Unique promotions and deals (like 4 pre-rolls for $20, etc.) are gateways to other products that might generate a higher profit margin, but these deals need to be supported by the right advertising prior to 4/20. Utilizing advertising at the point of purchase to entice existing customers to make an additional purchase or to try something new, can be highly effective, but this should be used in conjunction with supporting media on platforms relevant to the target audience. Programmatic advertising solutions, for example, make this easy to achieve, giving brands and retailers access to premium digital ad space in the locations their target audiences already frequent. Programmatic advertising is the future of cannabis marketing, allowing for the optimization of ads in real-time, ensuring that the right audiences see the messages brands and retailers want them to see. Private Marketplaces available to marketers provide an avenue to buy premium channels more efficiently and are readily available to cannabis brand and retailer marketers. Some names include publishing giants like Rolling Stone, Men’s/Women’s Health, Forbes, and even the Wall Street Journal.
Used together with Digital Out-of-Home advertising in dispensary locations and one-of-a-kind Experiential Activations such as Higher Standards’ multi-state live launch of their K. Haring Glass Collection (featuring an artist showcase, giveaways, discounts, and more), cannabis businesses can grab the attention of potential/existing customers, motivate them to shop and drive 4/20 sales to record heights.
Pro-tip: Brands and retailers alike should be prepared to meet the needs of consumers who would rather avoid the big crowds on 4/20. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the cannabis industry to start adopting delivery and direct-to-consumer (D2C) solutions, and as a result, these are now important revenue streams/channels that marketers should be thinking about. Retailers won’t have the opportunity to lead these consumers to other products in-store, so they should be thinking about creative eCommerce solutions that ensure audiences are discovering new products and work to get those into the hands of consumers. Likewise, brands should partner with these retail eCommerce and/or solutions to enhance the discovery of their products by these consumers. These platforms can also be used to capture even more consumer data, making future marketing campaigns even more successful.
Green Entrepreneur highlights great examples of the kinds of promotions and deals that can really drive 4/20 business. In an article titled “4/20 Gifts for the One You Love” published just last year, Green Entrepreneur showcases several brand-specific product lines catering to various non-cannabis consumer interest categories, such as fashion, skincare, travel, sports, family, and more. Each of these promotional listings is supported by clear explanations describing how each of the product lines fit into the interest categories, with embedded links that take engaged consumers directly to brand landing pages, subsequently leading them to dispensary locations selling those products (or a D2C sales interface).
Deploy Creative Content that Speaks to Your Audience
Brands and retailers should think creatively about the ad content they deploy to drive 4/20 sales. Ad content needs to be compelling enough to motivate consumers to discover new products. These discoveries will likely require prospective consumers to do a little more research. As a result, cannabis marketers should make the discovery process as easy as possible. Creative messaging is a great avenue target consumers with a more 1:1 focused engagement.
Not only should the deals, promotions, and events be cleverly tied to the 4/20 holiday itself, but the mediums in which the ads are presented should be similarly creative in their own right. Businesses should think about more than just static billboard images or overly simplistic store signage: 4/20 campaigns are the perfect opportunity to activate innovative ad mediums, such as video content, social media material, or native content on the digital platforms their target audiences visit.
Measure Success
Having the best strategic marketing plan is a great start for 4/20 success, but it's only the foundation to making it happen. It is imperative that brands and retailers also know their 4/20 key performance indicators (KPIs). Without KPIs, how would a retailer or brand know why their 4/20 was successful? Was it online sales? Was it retail foot traffic? Was it in-store sales? Was it competitive differentiation? Was it education? Your campaign should be set up to drive these outcomes and the correct mechanisms should be in place to track these KPIs. Retailers can work with geo-location partners to track foot traffic. Cannabis brand and retailer marketers can work with POS companies and research firms to track sales, engagement, intent, and awareness. You can also work with Demand Side Platforms (DSP) and media buyers to ensure you’re garnering as much data as possible to determine successful engagement, e.g. CTR, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Revenue driven, and more. Visualize the data in Google Analytics and ensure your data strategy and solutions are implemented properly so you can see trends, successes, and failures. These are the best way cannabis brands and retail marketers can leverage successful insights to optimize for a successful future.
Get Busy
With 4/20 quickly approaching, marketers can’t afford to waste time on overly broad and generally ineffective marketing content. By leveraging data insights, geo-location strategies, consumer retargeting solutions, intelligent DOOH content, premium ad space secured through programmatic buying, and interest-based deals/promotions, brands and retailers are practically guaranteed to have record-breaking 4/20 sales. Now, that’s something to celebrate.
So what are you waiting for?
