California-based Culture Cannabis Club business was growing at a breath taking pace as they expanded throughout southern California. In the past three years they have grown from five stores to ten. Their latest expansion to Ohio landing them in an elite class of cannabis retailers, that being a vertically integrated, multi-state operator.
Culture was built on strong retail fundamentals of a knowledge able and friendly staff, vibrant and modern store fronts and a wide variety of affordable cannabis. Then they hired Jason Hutcheson, their new head of marketing. Hutcheson’s plans were to take the growing franchise into the 21st century implementing eCommerce. His vision was to prepare the organization for exciting world digital marketing.
The company’s only experience in digital advertising was Leafly and Weed maps a pair of cannabis marketing place platforms for cannabis consumers and retailers. While it took some time to reach positive ROAS, Hutcheson was eager to try other channels such as programmatic advertising.
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The executives were leery of exploring other channels after trying advertising on Meta, only to have their social media accounts shut down—a common occurrence plaguing the industry. WUNDERWORX, a full-service digital agency came with highly recommended to provide insights into formulating a winning digital marketing strategy.
Following an initial consultation, we determined that the Hutcheson’s leadership team had trepidation regarding the effectiveness of digital advertising. To reduce that perceived risk, we proposed a limited pilot focusing solely on just one of their ten stores.
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We wanted to create a brand awareness and reactivation strategy that embraced multiple channels while leveraging the client’s preexisting assets. To our surprise, we discovered Culture had grown a significant CRM database of 35,000+ customer emails. We also learned that they had previous success implementing direct mail campaigns.
Our plan would address multiple goals. First, reactivation. We took a subset of the 35,000+ emails and segmented out anyone who had not made a purchase in the past 90 days and made them an audience. We then implemented SAVVY DATA a low cost, Customer Data Platform that specializes in identifying online visitors. The plan was to gain better insights into the demographics of their visitors and later feed their direct mail campaign.
Within days of implementing SAVVY DATA’s pixel, were able to get amazing insights into who were Culture Cannabis Club’s customers. For example Generation X and Baby Boomers make up a surprisingly large demographic. What stood out to us was fact that female customers counted for more than 60% of their online visitors.
Armed with this data, were able to adjust our creative that would resonate with the audience.
As our creative teams toiled away on the ad units, our ad op teams were busy researching which competitors and ancillary businesses such as CBD, head shops, and smoke shops to target. By leveraging our geo-frame technology were able to capture the mobile IDs of consumers visiting these establishments and build an audience to start serving them ads.
Additionally we started with a five mile radius of their Jurupa Valley flagship store.
Once our attribution pixels were in place we ran the second half of the pilot on a different DSP, eliminating any of the client’s pop-ups to better streamline the shopping experience. Instead of focusing on certain products, the new creative leveraged Culture’s rich vibrant colors, their brand hero astronaut and well-known television motif.
In order to ensure the success of the marketing pilot, we knew one of the keys was to build a diverse, targeted audience for our programmatic advertising campaign. By converting the client’s CRM data, we were able to target their existing and former customers, keeping the brand top of mind while reengaging former customers by incentivizing them to return.
Finally, we added a conquest campaign that geo-targeted all of our client’s direct competitors. By geo-framing their stores, we could serve promotional offers directly to their competitors’ customers.
In conclusion, the executive team at Cannabis Culture Club were encouraged by the results and immediately set us to work on expanding the next campaign from one store in one market to six stores in three markets.
Interested in Learn More?
We understand the challenges that cannabis, CBD and hemp businesses face. If you would like to learn how to shift you marketing strategies to grow your market share and bottom line, let’s have a conversation.
WUNDERWORX provides the power of real-time compliant advertising leveraging user friendly eCommerce websites, programmatic advertising, email marketing, paid search, paid social, SEO, content marketing, direct mail campaigns as well as online visitor identification solution.
It’s time to start converting one click at a time.
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