Welcome to the Pre-Roll Marketing Matrix. A series of articles on how to better market your cannabis pre-rolls.
Great marketing doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg.
As more companies and industries lose trust in the agency model, it’s making way for more innovative, cost-effective approaches.
In the first part of the Pre-Roll Matrix, we talked about the importance of marketing your pre-rolls.
And then we went through the five strategic questions for pre-roll marketing.
Now let’s look at some different approaches to keep your marketing budget in check.
Avoid Generic Outsourcing
Outsourcing typically equals generic, which is great with functions such as finance, compliance, etc.
For more nuanced functions – like marketing comms – generic is the opposite of what you want.
This is why so many enterprises struggle to realize any kind of ROI when hiring cookie-cutter agencies that run on “best practices” and “deliverables.”
And it’s the real reason why so much of the marketing in cannabis is boring and ineffective.
Marketing communications also require thoughtful integration with the rest of your business’s strategic choices along with the ability to raise new questions and navigate new choices, while learning and knowing your target audience inside and out.
Develop Content Systems
Nearly all businesses today – B2B or B2C – have to build out some sort of media/content functionality.
Newsletters, blogs, podcasts, videos, photography, graphic design, etc.
Sounds expensive, right? Although it doesn’t have to be expensive with the use of content systems.
This isn’t about cookie-cutter methods or templates, etc. It’s about getting creative, working smart, and getting the absolute most out of your marketing budget.
For instance, you could take one podcast interview and turn it into a blog post, newsletter, video, and perhaps dozens of social media snippets.
If it’s a great podcast interview/discussion, you could potentially turn that into a month-long series of articles.
You could also apply this same principle to video shoots. Don’t just shoot the video for the one campaign. Grab footage and photography for all your core themes, and then organize it all into a library of “ingredients” for future campaigns.
Content systems are a must for any type of long-term marketing effort – and big caveat here – they only work if your content is compelling and adds value in some way to a specific audience.
Target Specific Customer Segments
So many cannabis operators fall into this trap of thinking their products will sell themselves because they’re absolutely certain they have the best weed out there.
Or they identify their target audience as everyone who consumes cannabis.
These are both big mistakes.
Cannabis consumers come from all walks of life. They use cannabis for different reasons, they have different pain points, desires, challenges and goals.
If you want to communicate and engage with your customers or potential customers, if you want to inspire customer loyalty, and put your brand into their minds and hearts, you’ve got to make some choices about who you’ll target and how you’ll differentiate.
Don’t try to be everything to everyone because that only dilutes the effort and brings the effort back to boring, generic marketing that nobody cares about.
Ensure Product Availability
Imagine building up a huge buzz around your brand and then making your product hard or impossible to find on store shelves. It happens more often in cannabis than you might realize.
Getting your inventory and manufacturing processes in check is an absolute prerequisite to any marketing/brand spends.
In the case of pre-rolls, depending on how many joints you’re producing each month, aligning with a reliable automation partner is key if you want to avoid production bottlenecks and ensure your product is always available.
Are You Ready to Build a Pre-Roll Empire?
Effective pre-roll marketing doesn’t require a massive budget. By avoiding generic outsourcing, developing smart content systems, and targeting specific customer segments, you can make a significant impact without spending a fortune.
And of course you want to back all this with reliable production processes, so that you can easily meet demand, maintain quality, and keep your product on store shelves.
Are you ready to explore pre-roll automation now? Check out the Hefestus brochure!
