My career started at a non-profit and every client or employer since has been a small business with a limited budget. So getting scrappy and creative within limitations has become second nature. This is especially handy in an industry such as cannabis, since we are even more limited especially with marketing and advertising channels.
In my newsletter, Pru’s Musings, I wrote recently about the power of bridge building and forging strong partnerships as part of a solid marketing strategy. When you work with others, whether it’s a local charity, another small business, or your neighbors, your impact goes farther and you reach a wider audience. So of course building partnerships should be an essential part of any marketing plan.
As an example of industry censorship issues, since my newsletter is connected to Stripe for payment processing, I have to be careful talking about my cannabis marketing work too much in it. I don’t want to raise any red flags, even though the platform I use, beehiiv, is cannabis friendly, most online payment processors are not. So I wanted to expand on my recent newsletter on community building and partner marketing with a specific focus on the cannabis industry here on my blog. I own the WordPress Installation and I would hope a host called Green Geeks would be down with talking about the green. (I’m not selling anything here, y’all).
Specifically, I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned about building strong retailer-brand partnerships in cannabis. Much of this knowledge I’ve learned from trial and error over the last six years leading Marketing at Doobie Nights dispensary in Santa Rosa.
What Makes a Good Cannabis Retailer + Brand Partnership?
One thing that makes cannabis unique is that brands can’t sell directly to consumers, at least not in the California licensed market, and cultivators or processors who make the products can’t ship anything over state lines. So the farms and brands must rely on distributors and ultimately retailers to sell their products. Building brand loyalty is pretty damn hard when you don’t have direct access to customers or their data. Building strong relationships becomes paramount.
A good partnership is reciprocal and mutually beneficial. It’s also essential, so it’s worth investing time and marketing dollars into. This is where brands should have a strong field marketing presence as well as showing up in person at each retailer. Brand reps that connect directly with each retail team and make sure training and marketing assets are shared with retailers and updated often, help set retailers up for success. Where there are poor or stagnant sales, there are often assets, marketing support or training lacking.
Retailers have many options, especially in a market as mature as California’s, so when it comes to curating a menu and choosing which brands make it on the shelf, it helps to really know who you are before you start submitting orders. That starts with Brand Strategy. Knowing your audience, your competitive advantages and differentiators, and your brand values can help you choose which brands you want to work with and which products to carry. And likewise, cultivators and manufacturers will know which stores and markets to target and where their products will sell best by knowing who they are and who their products are for.
First, you’ve got to be a brand. Know your values and your why, and you’ll know who to align with. Partnerships that fit well are a great way to strengthen your brand, communicate who you are to your audience, and cross pollinate so that your content reaches your partners’ audiences and vice versa.
Brand Checklist for Building Retailer Partnerships
- Marketing Assets: Create a folder that you can share with all your retailers that includes the following media assets:
- Logos: black, color, and white versions of your brand logo, preferably high resolution PNG files with transparent backgrounds.
- Product Photos: at the very least, clear close up photos on a white (or transparent) background of the products that show both the packaging and what’s inside it. These don’t need to be huge, about 1000 pixels max, for uploading to the retailer’s POS. Also sending product descriptions, or having all of this available on your website, is super helpful.
- Lifestyle Content: photos and short video clips that show the products in context, focusing more on the people and vibe of your brand and appropriate for social media.
- Custom Promo Assets: your retailers will love you if you create some custom graphics to promote deals you often run at their store. Set up some templates that you can easily customize for each store with their logo and your branding.
- Budtender Training: Making sure your products reach the right audience means you first have to get in front of budtenders. Be sure that you send training materials (video links, slide decks, multiple formats if possible) to every team you work with and better yet, incentivize and track training and sales incentives with a platform like SparkPlug.
- Engagement: Building brand loyalty is a long game, but starting one local community at a time creates a solid foundation. Enable your sales reps to get creative with promotions, utilizing marketing budgets to engage at events, in store pop-ups, and in fun giveaways. The best engagement incorporates both online and IRL audiences! Find creative ways to support your retail partners on social media by collaborating on content, tagging stores in fresh drop posts and listing them on your website so fans know where to find your brand.
- Events: Choose B2B and B2C events that you participate in carefully, and find ways to participate that don’t break the bank, like including samples in a VIP goody bag at a B2B conference instead of shelling out for a full booth. The best events are local to your farm or facility and benefit your community. Partnering with a non-profit near you to host a beach cleanup or a food drive is a great way to build brand awareness, and you can bring in a local retail partner to help promote and participate as well.
- Consistent Communication: Try to check in with your retail partners often, at their preferred pace. Don’t ghost as soon as the first big order is in, that’s just the beginning of the relationship. Show up whenever you’re in the area and drop some snacks off for the team. It’s a proven fact, budtenders love snacks. And product samples. They sell what they know.
Retailer Checklist for Better Brand Collaboration
- Know Your Audience: Why do your customers choose your store? Knowing your key audiences and how best to reach each of them makes you valuable. It also can help you know which brands will be a good fit at your store and which products are likely to do well.
- Marketing Assets: Everybody just needs to have a press kit, ok? When you bring on a new brand, send a welcome email that introduces your team and processes. It can also share your website, logo, address and basic contact info so that brands can add you to the Store Locator page on their website.
- Create Opportunities: To get brands to engage beyond just getting their products on your shelves, you’ll need to create opportunities for brands to be more visible to your customers. Offer to share sales data and send sales reports for any promotions or discounts you run. If you have space in your store that brands can “take over” or set up displays in, come up with creative ways to let them utilize that space in trade for better prices or extra products. And perhaps the most fun for customers, offer brands the opportunity to help you sponsor events, loyalty program perks, and engaging campaigns.
- Communication & Tracking: Tracking all the various conversations you and your team has with vendors can be a bit daunting. At Doobie Nights I created several assets that helped with this: a contact spreadsheet of all of our brands and distributors (this is used as an email list to keep in touch regularly); a Partner Marketing Deck that shared customer profiles, our reach and marketing opportunities; and a Partner Marketing Tracker spreadsheet that tracked various branded campaigns and agreements with brands.
- Staff Training & Asset Management: In order to best utilize the assets that brands send you, you’ll need a media storage system like Google Drive that your entire team can access. Create folders for each brand and separate out website, social, and training assets. Send out new training materials from brands and samples to your team, track who has completed what, and incentivize everyone keeping up on popular brand knowledge and general industry training.
With these tips as well as those I shared in my Pru’s Musings issue on Community Building in Marketing, I hope you’ll nurture fruitful partnerships. The best part about cannabis is the people, and the community is definitely what makes all the extra BS we deal with worth it! Go forth and collaborate to reach new heights.
And if you’re a brand or a retailer looking for some help getting your brand set up for successful partnerships and marketing strategy, holler at your girl. And please check out my newsletter, Pru’s Musings, and subscribe to hear from me weekly or so.
