Marijuana Dispensary Profit Strategies

These strategies will increase your dispensary profits

If you’re looking for an easy answer, there isn’t one. There are only two types of customers, the ones you already have, and the ones you don’t. A great profit strategy targets both dispensary customer types and masterful strategy niches these down even further. We’ll look at both, and investigate what profit-increasing strategies your dispensary can use on each.

Grow your dispensary customer base with SEO

You can’t advertise online. That leaves you with traditional media options and even then you’ll have to find ones that are willing to work with you. All of that work for an unsure return on an outdated advertising mode? We’d pass, and you should too.

Put the power in your hands with dispensary website SEO.

We aren’t going to treat you like you don’t know your own business. New customers obviously correlate to increased sales. We’ve detailed these extensively in our cannabis client white papers where our clients saw 33 to 66% gains in sales.

One client claimed he saw a 500% increase at a single dispensary location, but didn’t think anyone would believe him, so let’s look at site traffic gains before and after SEO.

Example 1:

Big dispensary in a major metropolitan city

In the two months prior to SEO (October to December 2017), new customer website visits averaged to 290 a day for our client.

Our first SEO checklist was completed in mid-January (the second micro-speech bubble in the image) and new customer traffic has risen steadily, averaging roughly 450 new customer visits each day from October to December 2018.

That’s a 55% increase in new customer website visits in under a year. Unlike a billboard or magazine ad, SEO helps to reach customers outside of your viewing area. Dispensary search engine optimization works every day and isn’t restricted to hyper-local targeting if your dispensary is located in a tourist city or near an attraction, airport, or business center.

Example 2:

Small dispensary in a major metropolitan city

In the two months prior to SEO (August to September 2018), new customer website visits averaged to 50 a day for our client.

Our first SEO checklist was completed in mid-October. New user traffic has increased to an average of 75 new users per day in just under 2 months. You can see the immediate jump (after the first mini-speech bubble) in the Google Analytics screenshot.

That’s a 50% increase in new customer website visits in just two months.

While we can’t display profit data from our clients, it’s not a stretch to equate new site traffic with an increase in sales. At Sherpa we also specialize in local dispensary SEO, which becomes a greater factor the larger your city is and the more competitors you have in your area.

Collect your customer data and sell directly

According to Invespro:

(Considering how easy it is to create a loyalty program or text-message marketing campaign, your existing customer should never forget about your brand.)

The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5 – 20%. (Not only is it cheaper to keep an existing customer, it’s actually easier to sell them your products.)

Most companies use their website, email marketing, content marketing, and text message marketing to reach existing clients.

Set up a Rewards Program for customer data collection.

Once you have a reliable database of customer info, you can market directly to your customers as a whole with product deals that provide a good ROI, or you can segment your lists even further and market to individual niches.

What is dispensary niche marketing?

List possibilities include:

• Customers who primarily purchase concentrate
• Customers who primarily purchase edibles
• Customers who primarily purchase flower
• Medical marijuana customers
• Customers who buy products in a set price range

You can see how in-depth this can become. Many customers prefer Indica over Sativa, or vice-versa. Have a specials day for these product types, send out an email and instant message to the appropriate list, and you’ve got a built-in and interested cache of customers already.

Campaigns like this don’t just increase profit. By catering to your individual customer’s needs without them knowing, you build trust in your dispensary, and propagate the idea that “My favorite dispensary knows me, and they know what I like.”

We’ve also covered specific dispensary marketing strategies so you can put these general money-making strategies into practice. There are some marked clientele differences between recreational and medical dispensary SEO though, so make sure you’re choosing the right strategies for your business model.