Five Easy Ways to get More Customers

2. Social Media

Today, I can say with confidence that social media is more effective than Weedmaps and all other marketing methods, including a lot of paid options.

Many of the largest companies today in retail cannabis used growth hacking in some shape or form to get where they are today. Growth hacking is using clever techniques to quickly market your product or service, usually for free or cheap. If you want to learn more about growth hacking, read our indepth guide here.

Social Media Marketing is more important than ever. Especially for new and small businesses in the cannabis industry! With recent changes to the most popular social media websites algorithms, it is easier then ever for small businesses to compete with large multi million dollar corporations.

You can get started with social media marketing in less than 30 minutes. Simply create an account on Instagram, make sure to set it as a business or professional account post creation.

After you have an account, let's start getting some relevant followers and potential new customers. It's easy and repeatable every day.

Go to the search page on Instagram and search for hashtags including your local region. For example, #weedmapstoronto #weed416 #thesix #torontocannabis and so on.

Click on "Recent" instead of top and look at the first twenty posts. I'd recommend liking, commenting and being friendly in general. Don't try to promote your service or business yet! It is cruical to build awareness and have a human persona when getting started.

Be sure to follow everyone posting and commenting on the relevant hashtags for your area. You'll be sure to get followers, slowly at first but keep this up for two weeks and you'll quickly surpass 250, 500 and 1000.

Once you have started to get followers, it's time to create some content to post! There are a lot of different options for this but I recommend using a free tool such as https://canva.com to create beautiful, engaging content which is perfectly sized for Instagram or Twitter.

Creating Content

You don't need a fancy social media marketing expert or manager in order to run a highly effective social media marketing campaign. There are hundreds of tools to make it dead simple to create eye-catching, incentivizing content that new customers will engage with.

The first tool we recommend is https://www.canva.com
Canva allows you to easily create small, easy animated videos pretailored for social media platforms. I have no artistic ability but I have managed to quickly create numerous engaging posts for my Instagram and Twitter feed.

Whenever you create content, you want to try and follow a general theme or at least a general branding structure. This is critical to allow potential customers to recoginize your logo and name. This is the first key stage of building your online marketing strategy, awareness.

Three years ago it was enough to simply put up a pin on Weedmaps.com and wait for the customers to message you. Now-a-days, not so much.

You simply won't survive with this outdated strategy in 2020.

Imagine you have 1,000 potential customers in a fictional city. Not all 1,000 will want or need to buy cannabis at any one time. Realistically it's closer to maybe 10% of the total 1,000 customers have money in their pocket and are interested in purchasing cannabis. This still doesn't mean that they are actively searching for cannabis, just willing to buy.

The goal of building awareness is to have your companies name and service pop up in your potenial customers memory when they decide they want to actively search for cannabis products. Instead of blindly hoping for new customers to show up, increase your chances by marketing and creating awareness of your service, brand, product or dispensary through social media channels.

3. A Professional Website

The most important aspect of growth hacking and online marketing is creativity and technology. You are going to use both in tandem in order to carefully monitor what works and what doesn't for your business.

We can help you out with both of these, don't worry. If you have a website, fantastic. You're ahead of the game. If you don't, well, you will 100% need one for growth hacking to work for you.

A website is critical for numerous reasons. You want to track nearly everything that happens on your website including customer events such as when they view a product. You want a place you own and control where you can guide customers to in order to build awareness for your delivery service, dispensary or business.

This data will become your bible for moving forward in the right direction with predictable, repeatable success. Otherwise, you're just shooting in the dark. One day you might have great results and the next, nothing. With analytics and a website, you'll have a greater understanding of when your customers place orders and what your customers are interested in.

A great example is promoting a deal on Weedmaps and your social media profiles. (if you aren't on every social media platform available already, get on it)

What product should you promote? What price point? What's the length of the offer? How are you going to create urgency for this deal?

Analytics will answer all of these questions and so many more you didn't even think would be relevant.

Imagine if you knew the largest cluster of your customer demographic, exactly where the best place is to have a driver on standby with your products at the ready. What could you do with that information? Tons.

For example, a flash sale. "For the next 2 hours we are offering buy one get THREE free edibles to everyone on John St"

And of course, with analytics you can send a email or SMS message to your clustered customer base only. Talk about targeted advertising.

I have a website with Analytics, now what?

Before we get started though, a website with carefully integrated analytics is fantastic but you will also need to make sure your website is converting customers and keeping track of their contact information so you can grow your customer base.

You should be able to tell me on the spot how many customers you have, how many you've gained over the past week, how frequently they order and what their favourite products are. This is just the tip of the iceberg and when it comes to growth hacking, the more information you have, the better decisions you can make with higher confidence and accuracy.

Offer your customers a discount on their birthday, you've seen your favourite clothing store probably run a similar promotion.

Refer a friend and get a free edible, post us on your social media platform of choice for a free gram on your next order, leave us a review and write your username on the website checkout for 10% off!

When you have perfect information regarding your customers information, you can make perfect decisions for marketing and promotions.

4. Referral Programs

Word of mouth is king when it comes to advertising and marketing. There is nothing you can promote, no perfect ad or instagram picture which will ever be able to compare to the power of a personal friend you trust recommending your business.

You may of heard this before but an existing, repeat customer is worth the most. After that, a new customer from a referral and finally a new customer that blindly discovered your business.

You have a much higher chance of gaining a repeat, regular customer from a referral than from a new, blind discovery customer. If you can provide an excellent first time customer experience to a referral, they have a higher chance of promoting your services as well to their social circle. This can quickly snowball into massive new customer growth.

However, a good referral program is required to get this snowball rolling! Imagine if you have 10 of your current customers tell their closest 3 friends about your service. Then, those 30 new customers tell their 3 friends? That's 10 happy customers turned into 90 with referrals!

Killer Referral Programs

You have your website, it's packed with analytics tracking so you know exactly how your customers are progressing through your checkout form. Great!

You also are now saving all of your customers data automatically (hopefully) which will allow you to monitor your growth during the next stage.

What's next? Glad you asked. It's time to build your own killer referral program to triple your current customer base.

First of all, you should copy the pro's. It's exactly what I did to generate the super successful referral program we use on our Smart Stores.

Let's take a look at my personal favourite...

AirBnb pulled off some of the best growth hacks the world has ever seen on it's rise to the top. AirBnb has a killer referral program where they offer credit (and a good amount too!) to you and the person you refer when they book their first stay. This win-win strategy paid off for them in a huge way when a single happy customer in China referred their friends which started a massive chain reaction and led to AirBnb gaining thousands of customers in the China & Asia regions.

I would highly recommend taking a deep dive into the top companies and analyze the referral programs they use. It's very easy to adapt them for your own business and trust me, they're successful!

If you want me to take a free look at your referral program or help you create one, give me a call at +1 (289) 962 5380 or email at scott@deliverylabs.ai and we can get you started in less than 6 hours.

5. YouTube

YouTube is a great way for promoting your business and especially your products. It's super easy these days to create high-quality 60 second videos.

I would post videos as frequently as three times a week! Every new strain would get a personal "smoke report" from one of my employees that would go over the potency, terpenes, flavour and effects. These videos were huge for our own growth and were highly shared which boosted our social media presence as well.

It's important to create meaningful content that your customers would actually benefit from. It's strange but the less you try to promote your business and service and the more you focus on genuinely trying to teach your customer base something useful, the more successful you'll be.

You could create an easy video in which you go over some of your products and recommend different strains, products, forms and mediums for consuming cannabis depending on the effects they are seeking.

This makes it easy to generate lots of attention and if a viewer is interested in trying any of the methods you recommend, they easily know where to get the products they need.

I hope these 5 tricks for marketing your cannabis delivery service or dispensary will help you grow exponentially!

If you want me to take a free look at your business or help you create one, give me a call at +1 (289) 962 5380 or email at scott@deliverylabs.ai and we can get you started in less than 6 hours.

Looking for a website that can let you expand your online marketing? We can import all of your products from Weedmaps or Leafly in seconds and get you ready to go in less than an hour. Contact us for more information!