Intro to Marijuana Delivery Service Marketing

Eduardo Silva: Good morning, and thank you for joining the Foottraffik and Sprout webinar. We're going to give just a couple minutes here to allow more participants to join, and we'll kick it off in just a moment.

Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon, if you are on the East Coast. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. We are Footraffik, we're the leading dispensary and marijuana delivery digital marketing agency in the US and Canada, and with me today is the CEO and founder of Sprout.

Jaret Christopher: Good morning, everyone. This is Jaret Christopher. I'm happy everyone could join us today.

Eduardo Silva: Perfect. So a little bit about myself. I am the VP of Sales here at Foottraffik. I have over 18 years in sales and marketing and experience. I work out of our HQ here in San Francisco, California, and I will be helping you guys with some of the content here pertaining to digital marketing, hopefully bestowing a lot of the experiences, if you will, to your business.

Jaret Christopher: And good morning or good afternoon, everyone. This is Jaret Christopher. I am the CEO and founder of Sprout. We are a leading CRM and marketing software technology specifically designed for the cannabis industry. We've been working in the industry for going on four years now. We have customers in 24 States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, and I'm looking forward to sharing with you some ideas about how we can help generate more business.

Eduardo Silva: Thank you, Jaret. A couple of housekeeping items here before kicking off. We will have a few special offers to share with you today, so please be sure to stick around until the end of the webinar. We will also be covering quite a lot of content in a short period of time. We only set ourselves 30 minutes today, so please do take a moment to place your cell phones on mute to avoid distractions. Also, get familiar with the Zoom conference interface. If you browse to the top of the screen, you will find a Q&A section in the control panel. This is where you're going to be asking questions throughout the webinar today. We do have moderators on the line, and they will be helping answer those questions throughout the presentation.

Let's go ahead and just dive in. Foottraffik has been in the market of digital marketing, if you will, within the cannabis space for the last four years. Prior to that, the founder and CEO, Guillermo, has been working within the cannabis space, mainly in the medical, for the last seven to eight years. And together, our team has over 35 years of digital marketing experience. Here are some of the customers that we work with throughout the country and in Canada. We have over 200 stores that we work with at any given time, these may be different levels of marketing strategy, if you will, but this crosses all 20 plus states, including Canada.

So the environment we are working in has rapidly changed thanks to the coronavirus. Right now, we can either adapt and rise to meet the challenge, or we can stay the course and face the consequences of failing to change. In this slide here, we are showcasing some of the impacts that the coronavirus has actually had in the cannabis space.

What do we know so far? Well, there was a huge stockpiling of cannabis by consumers when the shelter in place requirement was announced back on Sunday, March 15, in California, Washington, and Colorado. All of those states, including other states, showed a similar trend. Now, as you can notice here from this huge spike, it was followed by a huge dip in sales.

There's something to be said about this. Where are the consumers now? Well, they're all online; the same day the mass purchase rush took place in the US, the US experienced the highest number of online users in the history of the internet.

Now I will share a quick example of some really creative thinking from one of the dispensaries out on the East Coast. Edgewater, out of Maryland, called Mana Supply Co, chose to spend $100,000 to convert a former bank into a secure drive-thru for its dispensary.

Although this is a brilliant idea, today, we will share with you how you can spend a fraction of the money to ensure you address your customers' needs and sustain your profits throughout these uncharted waters—that is, COVID-19 and the future of customer purchasing behavior.

What are the risks of not taking action and adapting? If you're not where your customers are, which is just say online, they will certainly go to your competitors and/or find other means of getting their product. Many states have recognized dispensaries as an essential business and have even relaxed regulations to allow for curbside pickup or even delivery. If you're not advertising to consumers, you were not top of mind with them when they were seeking these services.

Now is not the time to cut back on your marketing because your competition is going full steam ahead. One thing is certain, depending on how long the current crisis continues, more and more consumers will be shifting their habits of purchasing due to the shelter in place orders.

Today we're going to be covering three specific strategies that have been tried and tested to enhance the way your business performs. We will be talking about Geo Ads, Google Ads, and SMS marketing. So let's go ahead and dive right in.

What are Geo-Ads? So geo-advertising is the use of display ads on mobile devices within a certain geographical region. Geo-Ads allow you to connect with new customers, right where they are. With the increase in internet use, online display ads help you keep front and center with your customers. We have a network of compliant cannabis-friendly sites and apps that allow you to share to display ads and drive sales.

What does this look like? So we offer three different ways in which Geo Ads can help your business. First is proximity, where you are able to target consumers within the area of your dispensary or your delivery area. This is very important. Geo-conquesting, the ability to target consumers and competing retailers to gain market share. And then finally geo-fencing.

What does this mean? This is the ability of drawing on a map, the areas in which you want to target, as well. Think of the shelter in place. Think of the neighborhoods in which your customers live. This is an example of how to actually leverage this platform in order to target specific retail locations to gain market share and get in front of the consumers that are actively purchasing cannabis. Another example is you can draw a perimeter around not only your dispensary but also your delivery area. So this will be an example for the San Francisco region. Here are some examples of the advertisements that we have produced as part of the service. We also design all of the creative content. As you can see from some of these example advertisements, most states require the license number to be displayed. Now, it's really important to understand that while users are either in line at a supermarket in today's current situation, most often than not, they reach for their phones and start browsing the internet and playing with other games. Now can actually attract those customers and get right in front of them while they're out and about and or ready to consume.

Let me talk a little bit about how Geo-Ads has helped some of our customers in the past and continue to do so. In this slide, we share with you a case study of a client called High Season. They were entering a brand new market. They had no customers, and they needed a really easy way to launch their new dispensary to acquire new customers. Footraffik employed geo-ads as part of the strategy. In order to adopt new customers, we drew a 20-mile radius around that location. We were able to display those ads across 600 plus display networks, and within that, we were able to acquire over 1000 customers for this client. The cost per acquisition was very nominal, as we all know. The average sale for a customer, right, we know what that is based on the different dispensary business you are in or delivery service to acquire a new customer, it's very important to keep your costs low. Let's transition to what Google Ads can do for you.

What is Google Ads? It is important to note that Google makes up 93% of all internet searches in North America. So what does this mean to you? If you are not on Google, you're not being found. Google Ads is a pay-per-click ad that shows up above search results. It is a powerful tool for obtaining new customers because it provides a predictable customer acquisition cost, unlike traditional advertising. By finding relevant keywords, you can get your ads in front of the people who are already interested in your service; they're already searching for cannabis when executed correctly. These ads can quickly increase your web traffic and help convert to sales. You see results immediately, and we provide transparent and trackable data to show your campaign's performance in real-time. Furthermore, Foottraffik is a certified digital marketing agency by Google for running Google Ads, and for the last four years, we haven't had one of our campaigns flagged or shut down.

So how can we help? If you're launching a dispensary or just want to highlight your service offerings, Google Ads will get you the new customers you need. With the shelter in place orders, people are searching for cannabis delivery services. Will they find you? Google Ads will ensure your business shows up when consumers are searching for services.

Why should you use it? More and more dispensaries are moving to delivery and pick-up only models because of the current crisis. If you don't act fast, you are certainly losing customers to other dispensaries. If you don't already have a delivery landing page, you can set one up very quickly and create ads to send new customers directly to your delivery page and or menu. We can help you set that up very, very quickly.

Don't get your account shut down. There are plenty of cannabis and delivery dispensary-related terms that you can't use in Google ads. Not only will your ads get removed, but Google will cancel your account, so save yourself the time, the headaches, and the money by giving us an opportunity to manage your services for you. We not only create your ads, but we also monitor their effectiveness. Based on your ad spend, we make changes on the fly and ensure you get the highest ROI possible.

Here's an example of a search result without Google Ads. This is organic search results, right? Somebody searches for a dispensary near them, they're going to get just organic. Google Ads allows you to position your services above all others. This is very, very compelling for an end-user. What you're seeing here is the limited real estate that is on a mobile device when a consumer searches for any of these services. There's only room for four different service providers. If you are partaking in Google ads, you will appear on top of all of them, despite your existing search organic search results capabilities. Very important.

I will share with you another case study. So Vireo Health, a client of ours out of New York, Manhattan, was launching a new delivery service in a very heavily, densely populated region. They needed a foolproof approach to attaining a web audience. We launched a Google ad strategy for them strategically positioning results within particular areas. So think of Central Station, the subway, parks… think of areas around you that would be really important for your customers. The results of this campaign in 2018 were north of $400,000 in revenue generated over 10,000 unique website visits at an ROI, which was unparalleled, of a $56 return on investment for every dollar spent in Google ads. If this is not enough evidence that Google Ads work, I'm not sure what is. Let me transition over to the CRM and SMS with Jaret.

Jaret Christopher: Thank you, Eduardo, very informative. Folks, as I stated earlier, Sprout is an all-in-one CRM and marketing platform for the cannabis industry. It is a very robust CRM platform that includes features like contact management, includes, of course, text messaging, including both SMS and multimedia messaging MMS. It includes email marketing, loyalty, mobile surveys, analytics, and we integrate with most of the major POS systems in the cannabis industry.

But today I'm only going to focus the presentation on text messaging, and I want to demonstrate how text messaging combined with online advertising that Eduardo just very thoughtfully articulated, how we can grow your business. These two technologies and these two services combined can take your business to a whole nother level. In front of us here, we're looking at four key components of our text messaging software application.

On the far left, we have multimedia messaging. That also stands for MMS messaging, and that enables the cannabis brand or dispensary to be able to upload both graphics, so JPEG files PNG, and also animated .gifs so you can bring these images to life and tell a story through pictures. We are the only software application in the cannabis industry that allows our clients to upload as many as five images on one text message. And you can layer in calls-to-action between each image. This not only allows you to establish your brand—so in the example on the left, we're looking at Hashtag. Every time Hashtag sends out a text message, they're branding their dispensary. But they're also, with internet MMS messages, able to feature a lot of content—other graphics, other pictures of products that are focused on the audience. If they're interested in pre-rolls, they can upload a picture of pre-rolls; if they're interested in flower or edibles, they can upload pictures of those as well. So this is a very effective way to grab the consumers' attention. They see your logo, see your brand, see your menu, and click over to your online menu today. And you know unfortunately with how our world has changed very quickly with this coronavirus, we're seeing our clients have a huge uptick in response rates and customer engagement by using text messaging and linking it to their online menu or linking it to their pre-order page where they have on-site pickup or curbside pickup or delivery.

The next phone where it says Green Dragon, that is a mobile coupon. We are the only company in the cannabis industry that has some unique features around mobile couponing. We can create countdowns right inside the phone. We can have a call to action where a consumer sees a deal, has an offer, and has a matter of two hours or three hours or even three days to be able to respond and redeem that offer right through their cell phone. We also have a technology called ghosting—these offers can vanish. They can poof, you know, after they expire to avoid fraud or companies or individuals that are copying coupons and trying to reuse them over and over again.

The next cell phone—the third one in where it says Pure Oasis—that is a perfect example of how our clients are sending out text messages, promoting their brand, and including a link directly right back to their menu, driving traffic to online orders, which is extremely important in today's climate. And the last image to the far right is a mobile survey. So Sprout, inside it's CRM, we have an entire marketing center. You can build very easily, within a matter of minutes, customizable surveys. You can ask your customers what type of cannabis they prefer, what type of brands do they like, and then that data will automatically populate into Sprout, into your CRM, and then you can send out targeted messages offers based on their likes and previous purchases as well. So here's a little case study. This was a new dispensary. Our clients are comprised of both companies that are up and running—they may be using some other type of text messaging or CRM, and they're moving over to Sprout because we're a very robust platform and we offer a lot of features and functionality that other companies do not—but we also have customers who are still building out their dispensaries and they're gearing up for a launch, but they want to make sure they have a very successful launch.

So this case study we're showing you here is a new dispensary that, you know, six months leading up to launching, they signed up with Sprout. They used our technology, and we helped them build a very large subscriber database. So in the far right, you see that within a 90 day period, we took them from zero subscribers to almost 24—25,000 subscribers. Underneath, you can see that they've sent out over 300,000 messages. Anybody that understands marketing understands that the size of your consumer marketing database can be directly proportional to the amount of revenue you're generating every day, every week, or every month. This is very much a consumer direct marketing industry.

The team at Sprout has spent over a decade building marketing software applications for other industries, and we now in the last four years, we've been applying it to cannabis very effectively. And this is a perfect example of the type of business that our clients are generating using our technology. Our approach to doing this, we used mobile opt-in where we text to join. So we are one of the only companies in the cannabis industry that has shortcodes. What that means is we assign a keyword to your company, and the keyword might be "vaping." Text the shortcode, and your customers can opt-in. Eduardo talked about online ads digital ads; we have it. We have the ability to take these keywords and embed them on Google, and other websites and have other calls to action with our website widgets and link them into the banner ads that Foottraffik can create for you, and help you really ramp up and grow a very large consumer marketing database.

We also have digital kiosks. These or iPad or Android devices that sit inside the dispensary, and when a patient or recreational adult user walks in, they type in their phone number, and they automatically opt-in. As we're pulling down all of this data about your customers that we directly from them through a survey or through an integration with a POS, you're then able to create these targeted marketing campaigns using our software. In the example that I'm referencing here, this company, that translated into four and a half million dollars in revenues and just over 90 days.

Eduardo Silva: That is amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that very insightful info. So where does that leave us? We have a couple of options for everybody that has joined us today. You can ignore the problem and keep doing business as usual. That is OK, but you know what that is actually going to look like at the end of the line, right? It's almost guaranteed that you will start feeling the consequences within a few weeks if you haven't already. We can do some problem-solving. You can take the information that you have learned here and invest in protecting your company's future. We are at a make it or break it stage, really, which has been supercharged by the coronavirus. This is your go big or go home moment, which path are you guys choosing to take? We have put together some really easy, but also compelling initiatives here, and special offers to get you started. So 165 new customers acquisition, per month $1,650. This is a total of 500 new customers guaranteed for you in 90 days. This offer is going to be valid, up until the end of this month, and then Sprout also wanted to share a special offer with everybody that is in attendance today.

Jaret Christopher: Folks, in light of the coronavirus, we know how much uncertainty there is in the industry, and times are tough. This is the first time we have ever done this, so we're offering everybody that's on the webinar today the ability to sign up for Sprout. Let us help you generate business immediately over the next 30 days, no cost to you, and that includes up to 10,000 text messages, both SMS and multimedia messaging, and it also includes email marketing as well. Eduardo Silva: Wonderful, thank you so much for that. And here's another deal for everybody in attendance. So by attending the webinar today, you have qualified for free Yeti. Now, this is a $40 value Yeti. What you need to do is navigate to this code here to this link: foottraffik.co/webinars/giveaway-and-terms. OK, certainly happy to provide this to you after the call as well.

But one other ask for you guys that are on the line. Right now, I'm going to ask you to pull out your phones, since you have put them on silent, and text "March" to 411669 so you can get all of this information via the text platform. You can also navigate to the chat window. We also provided that link for you. And once again, go ahead and just take a moment right now to text "March" to the number 411669.

Gentlemen, if anybody has any questions for us, we have a couple more minutes here. Certainly will be happy to address any of these questions relating to any of the topics that we have covered here today. But we do want to thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. We certainly appreciate it. We hope that has been really, really helpful, and we look forward to speaking with you. Jaret, any other final words, perhaps reiterate, anything that we have covered here today.

Jaret Christopher: Yeah, folks. As human beings, we tend to respond to pressure right in right now. The entire world is under a tremendous amount of pressure, and this is the time to really think outside the box. Six months ago, you weren't thinking about online advertising, and you weren't thinking about building a large marketing database, and you weren't thinking about, you know, changes in consumer behavior where they're going online and they're ordering their cannabis, they're searching for dispensaries, they're searching for deals, they're using their cell phones, more than ever, you know—this is the time to act and we, you know, between Foottraffik and Sprout, we have a very unique, compelling advantage that by combining these two technologies and services right now, you can take advantage of what's happening in the industry.

Eduardo Silva: Wonderful, thank you so much, Jaret, for your time, as well as for sharing this really generous deal with our audience here today. I just want to leave with the words that I know that this was a lot of information for everybody, but as the industry continues to evolve and as we work our way through this pandemic, to learn more, please do feel free to call us. We're here to help. We certainly want to see this industry grow as well as evolve with the needs of our customers. Thank you guys very much for your time. I really appreciate it. And we look forward to speaking with you and helping you overcome this challenge. Have a great rest of your day.