What if there was a data source that literally told you where your customers are? Spoiler: THERE IS!
No matter what you are selling, the digital tools of the trade in 2023 are familiar: buyer personas, keywords, maybe create content, leverage SEO, campaign on Google and Facebook. The overarching principle is simple: work out who and where your audience is and then go after them.
The problem here is that if everyone is doing the same thing with digital marketing, then the challenge of creating genuine engagement and conversions becomes increasingly more difficult – and expensive.
Now take away the ability to use Pay Per Click and Social Advertising because your particular vertical is Cannabis.
Most US states now have a legal cannabis market, but because Federal laws are not yet harmonized the business consequences range from lack of access to Financial Services to restrictions on Marketing because the likes of Google and Facebook will not accept cannabis-related search terms.
Cannabis growers and dispensaries are left with a serious challenge on their hands, along with the other industry challenges like the tax burden, competition eroding margins and regulatory requirements.
Help is at hand in the form of specialized Cannabis marketing agencies who will tell you how to optimize, largely by way of organic search, using local hashtags, niche ad networks and other non-SEO techniques. But one thing typically missing from the mix of organic search optimization is the use of alternative data.
What is Alternative Data, and How does it Apply Here?
In Finance, Alternative Data sources are used in the research phase of a transaction because of their lack of any association or correlation with typical metrics. In other words, alternative data points can shine light on a market and give the firm using them an edge because nobody else is. Getting ahead of the game means stepping away from the crowd and answering the question: Where is my audience?
Intuizi has been helping its clients in the Cannabis market to boost audience discoverability via its solution for compliant audience Geo Location data. Digital Marketing professionals in the Cannabis dispensary sector can utilize our Geo Location data and a visualization platform that addresses this question and allows for the hyper-local campaigning that is necessary with the restrictions on search terms.
Compliant Solution
If you are unfamiliar with or skeptical about the use of external data sources (sometimes referred to as “3rd party data”) , there is more good news. Even non-Data Scientists are now able to glean valuable market insights because of the availability of compliant, easily integrated data platforms.
The Intuizi platform is used by retailers in the USA to solve the challenge of finding the addressable audience. It is particularly valuable when there is a situation like that faced by the Cannabis market, where not all the traditional marketing tools are available.
Intuizi processes and presents historical visitation data from mobile devices. This enables our local retail customers to understand, for instance, visitations of your Cannabis dispensary or those of competitors. We already process this data for you to use it to target ads to those devices only requires a conversation and commercial arrangement with Intuizi.
Where the question of Compliance with CPRA and the other equivalent State-level data regulations is concerned, Intuizi gives you peace of mind. Only consented users’ data is presented to the platform, and furthermore it is not possible to identify individuals using the platform.
Data Intelligence put to the test:
With Cannabis dispensaries, data driven digital marketing works with a restricted set of tools. Intuizi adds hyper-local data intelligence for vital and actionable data insights that unlock your market.
Digital Marketing experts advise Cannabis dispensaries to use local hashtags and to optimize online presence for natural search. By combining this with Geo Location data around key Points of Interest such as their locations as well as competing stores and their trading areas, Intuizi gives you the tools for locally-focused digital Marketing campaigns.
Use Case:
Our client use Intuizi’s local data intelligence to understand the local Cannabis market players at a granular level. They are a SaaS-based solution for inventory data concerning dispensaries who have modeled out competitive foot traffic via our mobility data.
They then use that mobility data (visitation data) to determine where likely customers might spend their time - at a postal code level. This data is then overlaid with a variety of other data sets such as census data about the area, like income and average gender, demographic makeup, etc.
The results of this study were then used to design a digital marketing campaign to capture new customers with double digit incremental sales.
The campaign exceeded previous digital marketing outreach efforts, leading to an expansion of the original pilot campaign.
