An Easy Guide to Marijuana Dispensary Advertising

The legalization of recreational cannabis has significantly broadened the audience when it comes to marijuana dispensary advertising. While there are definitely still some restrictions when it comes to advertising on network television and even some digital platforms, there are opportunities to reach your ideal demographic.

In this article, we’ll suggest a few ways to utilize marijuana dispensary advertising to increase your brand awareness and storefront traffic.

Outdoor Advertising

In competitive cannabis markets such as Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco etc. making sure your brand is recognizable is essential to the success of your business. While advertising using outdoor signage and billboards may be costly, if you can afford the expenditure it can certainly pay dividends.

Acquiring advertising space on a billboard in close proximity to your storefront is a huge advantage. Billboard placed along freeways are also helpful as heavy traffic can help you reach a captive audience. If your marijuana dispensary advertising budget isn’t large enough to purchase a billboard, there are other strategic outdoor advertising spaces such as bus benches, bus wraps, subway ads, and poster walls that can help raise awareness.

Print Advertising

Another way to reach cannabis enthusiasts is to advertise in magazines with a large subscription. However it is extremely important to make sure that a large majority of their audience is based close to your dispensary location. You want to be very selective when advertising in print so you can spend your advertising dollars wisely.

One way to see which print ads are effective is to gather referral information when new customers check-in. If you have a low referral rate from print advertising you may want to consider reinvesting those dollars in another form of advertisement. You should always ask a magazine for a breakdown of their audience before investing in an ad to make sure it makes sense for your cannabis retailer.

Events Advertising

Whether it’s a cannabis convention, a concert, or a weed tour, advertising at events is a worthwhile investment. Not only are your directly engaging your target audience, often times you can send a representative who can establish meaningful relationships with potential clientele and answer questions face to face.

Often times events are looking for sponsorship opportunities so by reaching out you can really secure some prime advertising space. If you find that this type of advertising is effective for your business, cultivating these relationships with event hosts can lead to future opportunities. It’s important to note that any event that promotes the use of cannabis must have a specific business license to do so.

Digital Advertising

One of the biggest advantages of using digital advertising is having the ability to target your audience in a very specific way. While there are restrictions on certain platforms, namely Facebook and Google Ads, that won’t allow cannabis related verbage or imagery, there are way craft strategic advertisements that can drive traffic. Knowing what language is safe to use can really give you an edge on the competition.

Social media is a huge part of digital advertising and using your channels to spread your messaging is crucial. The best way to convert clicks into customers is using call to action campaigns. Acquiring a customer's email address using contests or engaging content is the life blood of advertising. Once you have their email you can craft targeted email campaigns using your the marketing tools in your dispensary POS software. IndicaOnline can help cannabis retailers reach consumers so they can capitalize on their marijuana dispensary advertising.