One of the biggest pain points for any B2C company in the cannabis world is driving brand awareness and converting prospects into paying customers in a market that is overly saturated with competitors. Plus, the very tight restrictions posed on the industry can make it even more cumbersome and costly for cannabis brands to advertise their businesses.

On our quest to solve this problem for Company X, we discovered a solution that is essentially 75% science and 25% art.

Efficiently Acquiring New Customers Without Increasing Ad Spend

After an initial programmatic ad campaign delivered impactful results,  Company X (a nationally recognized cannabis retail brand and dispensary) decided to scale up its investment in digital advertising in collaboration with their data-driven advertising partner, the Panther Group.

By testing various advanced targeting strategies to leverage key data sets, we deployed highly relevant and targeted ads with the right creative to the highest converting audiences, at the best locations, and most optimal times of day—helping Company X significantly reduce their total customer acquisition cost (CAC) by 57%.

Three Secrets to Finding New Customers Without Torching Your Digital Advertising Budget

1. Targeting for Relevancy and Intent to Engage or Convert

Using reliable, dynamic, and actionable data sets, we identified a wide range of target audiences who showed a strong intent to engage or convert based on their relevant content consumption trends, browsing history, topics of interest, and their geographic location.

Then, we produced ad creative featuring these specific, relevant topics, targeting the custom segments who demonstrated an interest in each of those topics. In doing so, this pivot in our targeting strategy enabled Company X to maximize their return on ad spend by a total of 57% across a 12-week timeframe. 

2. Honing In On Ad Inventory That Inspires Action

Along the way, we’ve also acquired access to an extensive native, display, video, connected TV, and audio inventory from over 40 exchange partners across 55K+ websites and applications. For Company X, we focused on delivering display ads through  large scale / tier 1 publishers such as Business Insider, Eater.com, Healthline.com, Insider.com, HuffPost, and more.

However, just as much time was spent optimizing for performance (if not more) throughout the course of the campaign. Which allowed Company X to test different outlets more frequently—ultimately helping them prevent wasteful spending on inventory that wasn’t moving the needle far enough. In turn, this gave us more time to focus on building a stellar roster of outlets with sizable and consistent ROI.

3. Think About the Big Picture

Now, for the art component of this solution.

Being able to connect a lot of dots into one big picture is essential to keeping the cost of acquisition low on a programmatic ad campaign. But the biggest challenge is that with so many moving parts, it can be easy to miss genuine opportunities to maximize impact.

Given that Company X is a retailer and operator of medical cannabis dispensaries, the number one question we wanted to answer was how best can they corner their competitive landscape. A question that led us back to square one: better understanding our target audiences, their medicinal needs, and how Company X can help. Naturally, this also prompted us to consider other things about our targets, such as what are their desired medicinal consumption methods? Who else is trying to communicate with them to address their concerns? And where are we most likely to reach them?

In response, Company X and the Panther group began proactively geo-tagging around pain clinics and near other medical marijuana dispensaries across the state—using highly tailored ad sets to speak to real patients seeking access to medicine and pain relief. This drove an increase in overall ROAS by 42%.