The following press release and materials were originally published September 17, 2019 by the Bureau of Cannabis Control based in California:

To All Interested Parties,

The Bureau of Cannabis Control (Bureau) recently published two notices outlining the existing statutory and regulatory requirements for all advertising or promoting of commercial cannabis by licensees and non-licensees in the state of California. Failure to comply with the requirements for advertising may lead to significant financial penalties, as well as suspension or revocation of a license.

Both commercial cannabis advertising notices can be found on the “Licensees & Consumers” page of Bureau’s website, or on the “General Resources” page of the California Cannabis Portal. The notices may also be accessed by clicking the links below.

Notice Regarding Advertising of Commercial Cannabis:

https://bcc.ca.gov/about_us/documents/19-290_advertising_cannabis.pdf

Notice Regarding Advertising of Commercial Cannabis by Non-Licensees:

https://bcc.ca.gov/about_us/documents/19-289_advertising_cannabis_nonlic.pdf

What This Means For Your Brand:

The ever changing political view towards cannabis can sometimes feel like it’s taking a step backwards, but not in this case it just means that prospective cannabis entrepreneurs must invest in serious planning. Here’s a few times on how to create and executive a clear marketing plan while still adhering to restrictions and limitations.

Know Your Customers By Knowing Your Numbers

The most important thing a company can do in order to accurately target new and existing consumers is to understand who its current customers are and how they are interacting with the brand.

This means finding ways to capture customer demographics not just emails at applicable touchpoints a customer has with a company, both online and IRL. These kinds of interactions include purchases, brick and mortar visits, social media interactions, website visits, and participation in loyalty programs or other offline events.

Understand the Power of Market Research and Lookalike Audiences

In order to grow your business you will need to reach people who are not yet your customers. Constant market research and studying “lookalike audiences” enable you to identify and market to people who most closely resemble your best existing customers.

By tracking real-world cannabis behaviors, like purchase history and dispensary visits, and marrying these attributes to a larger demographic profiles, including financial and lifestyle attributes, you can use your current customers to identify prospective customers through advanced lookalike modeling. By reaching people who are most similar to your best existing customers, you are much more likely to find new customers in a much more efficient manner than trying to reach the entire online universe.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

As you begin to run your digital advertising campaigns targeting your different audience segments and lookalike audiences, you will start to collect enormous amounts of data on how effective and efficient these campaigns are.

Measuring the success of these campaigns requires the ability to track engagements beyond simply clicks. It is necessary to receive full attribution data on your media so that you can understand if your ads are driving sales. Once the proper measurement is in place, experimenting with slight changes to your targeting parameters, ad design, and calls to action can have significant impacts on how effective your digital advertising campaigns are.

By collecting and comparing data from all these minor variations you can identify the optimal combination of ad attributes and targeting parameters to dramatically improve the performance of your campaigns and reduce your customer acquisition cost.

Looking to streamline all of the above? Schedule a complimentary consultation today to create a clear, compliant and successful marketing plan for your business: ely@elyagency.com or 805-201-8050.