One of the most critical steps in any business plan is knowing who your target audience is. Why? Well, this tells you who the people interested in purchasing from your cannabis business are, and this knowledge helps you develop the rest of your business plan.
Finding the right target audience for your cannabis product or service can be tricky – especially since there may not be a lot of third-party resources to do research from. If your business is an existing cannabis brand looking to build a new business plan and you’re not quite sure who you should be targeting, one of the first places to look is your own customer data. Are there any trends? Is your original target audience not who your top customers resemble? It may be time to hit the chalkboard. Establishing or updating your target marketing can help you to tailor your marketing strategies so your efforts reach the ideal customer.
Read on to learn the six main steps to help you locate this so-called “ideal customer” so you can successfully deploy your marketing strategies and achieve the best results!
1. Doing Market Research
Every successful plan is backed up by extensive research. That’s why to find the people interested in your cannabis business, you have to do thorough market research.
When doing market research you’re looking for things like market trends, customer demographics, and consumer behaviors related to your current or future brand.
If you take a look at your current customer base and find that your core consumers are 35-45 year old moms, when you thought you were marketing to 21-35 year old festival goers, you may want to work on your messaging to lean into your core customers.
If your brand is new, you’re starting from scratch, so it can be helpful to do research on products and brands that you would see yourself as a competitor of. It can also be helpful to do general market research.
For example, Flowhub reports that:
- Young adults are more likely to try cannabis over cigarettes.
- Cannabis tinctures(-24%), topicals(-8%), capsules(-4%), and flower(-8%) sales declined in 2022
- Alternatively, there was a spike in sales of products like beverages(+10%), edibles(+10%), vapes(+5%), and pre-rolls(+12%)
Using this information, imagine you are an infused beverage company looking to acquire customers for your new direct-to-consumer platform. You know there has been a spike in interest for products like yours, so you target different audiences based on the consumer profiles to test who may be more likely to engage with your brand.
2. Finding Your Niche
A niche refers to a specialized market segment for a particular kind of product or service. The cannabis industry is a diverse place—allowing for various niches to be created within it, such as:
- Sun/Earth/Organic Cannabis
- Wacky/Wide Variety of Edibles
- Wellness/Treatment Focused
- CBD-only
- Beverages
- Small-batch/Exclusive
There are many more! These varying branches are why identifying your niche is crucial because it helps you understand your potential customers’ unique needs and preferences.
Using that same infused beverage company example, once you know your niche is the cannabis-infused enthusiasts, you can narrow your target audience to people interested in other infused products and create focused cannabis marketing campaigns that resonate with them.
3. Creating a Buyer Persona
Buyer Personas are another great way to narrow down your niche. These semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers are based on the data and research completed in the previous steps. They should include ideal demographics, interests, and behaviors. This step will help you better understand what drives your audience to purchase products.
The ISA Group narrowed down cannabis consumers into the following six personas:
- Everyday Enhancers: The people who use cannabis to heighten their senses and fully immerse themselves in their preferred activities
- Escape Artists: Also, in the recreational sphere, they use cannabis at the end of the day to unwind and destress.
- Trendy Tokers: Social users that like to try new things. Tend to be female, young, and high-income earners.
- Self-Care Seekers: Less experienced cannabis users that are interested in cannabis as a self-care treatment.
- Practical Partakers: Similar to escape artists, this persona tends to use cannabis at the end of the day for a practical purpose like pain or stress relief
- Mature Medicators: Older cannabis users willing to experience with cannabis for the purpose of managing pain as an alternative to prescription medication
If you were the infused beverage company, you might target the everyday enhancers by advertising your product as a daily drink meant to give you a light buzz that helps you get through the day—or to the practical partakers by promoting the drink as an alcohol-free way to relax and unwind after a long day.
4. Utilizing Keywords
Think about what you typed to find this blog if you came through organic search. Keywords research is the best way to see which words are being used to attract your desired audience. When you know what your audience is actively searching for relating to your product or service, you can use that insight to create your content strategy and refine your larger marketing strategy.
For example, that trusty infused drink company might want to use the following keywords to attract customers to their different media channels:
- Cannabis-Infused products near me
- Cannabis-infused online products
- Cannabis for stress relief
- What are CBD-infused drinks
- Alcohol-free alternatives
- THC-infused drinks
Utilizing these relevant keywords will lead people interested in purchasing or learning more about cannabis-infused products to the companies’ media, including their website content, blog posts, social media posts, and other marketing materials that include these highly searched keywords.
5. Using Social Media
Millions of people get on social media every day, searching for content that matches their interests, which makes it a great tool to find and engage with your target audience. Be sure to create an experience vs. just posting about your product. If you need help, give us a shout.
Creating engaging content that includes the results from the previous steps and stays within the guidelines of the big social media channels can help increase your company’s visibility, thereby attracting and targeting more customers.
Most social media platforms also gather analytics on your page’s performance. These analytics give additional insight into your followers’ demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Keep in mind that cannabis-related content is heavily monitored on some of the big social media platforms, so knowing the guidelines and rules is crucial for your account’s lifetime.
6. Reassessing and Refining
Like everything else, you need to review and reassess your marketing strategies as your business develops to ensure your strategies are still effective and you are keeping up with your target audience’s needs and wants.
This can be done by constantly monitoring the performance of your marketing and social media campaigns, reading customer feedback, and reviewing website analytics. Reassessing will allow you to make data-driven decisions to improve your strategies and products and help you achieve better outcomes.
How The Flower Agency Can Help
As mentioned previously, identifying your target audience is the most critical step in the success of your cannabis business, and it requires a lot of time and research. The Flower Agency is a cannabis marketing agency that specializes in helping cannabis businesses that don’t have the in-house resources to conduct market research, define their niche, generate buyer personas, create keyword strategies, and leverage social media correctly to find the perfect audience for their product or service. Allow yourself to save time and get the best results by letting The Flower Agency be an extension of your team.
