Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
All right, We can get rolling. Thank you all for joining us. As I mentioned a little bit before, when we first hopped on, you can bring questions to us. There’s a little Q&A function. Look for the icon at the bottom of the dock. You’ll see that. Click it. Ask questions throughout. We’ll try to get to as many as we can. This webinar lasts about an hour, and so if we need a little bit of time – I want to be respectful of everyone’s time – if we need a little bit of time, if the conversation gets rolling a little bit more, we can certainly tack on a few more minutes. I’m Jen Lamboy. If I haven’t met you yet, I’m with Hybrid Marketing Co, of course, a Cannabis Marketing Agency here in Denver, Co. We are going to get started in just a couple more seconds and we’re talking about Brand Visibility 101. So cannabis is one of those industries where staying power seems more like a superpower. If you’ve been in this space really even for just a short amount of time, a long couple of years, you’ve likely seen brands vanish. So today we’re talking cannabis brand visibility. I’m joined today by Peter Vogel, who is the co-founder and CEO of Leafwire and Raquel Hochroth who is the Vice President of Rosen Group. We are going to cover tactics on staying top of mind but also how to maintain lasting customer engagement within the cannabis industry. So just a little background on the panelists who are joining us. Peter is a sales and business development expert having co-founded several companies in the fintech loyalty and marketing space. Most recently Peter also co-founded Leafwire which is the LinkedIn of cannabis. It has quickly grown to become one of the largest business networks within the space. Peter has also been a thought leader across several industries. He’s been featured on BBC America, Bloomberg TV and NBC News. His insights and predictions have also been cited on CNET, Entrepreneur Adweek and so many more. Raquel is also our panelist here. She and her team have been leveraging more than a decade of public relations experience and expertise with a focus on the burgeoning cannabis industry along with food, beverage and tech. Raquel has also honed her skills in cannabis PR working with companies across the supply chain from seed to sale, spanning consumer facing products, brand launches and startups. Everyone from startups to MSO’s as well as cutting edge technology firms that drive innovation within the cannabis realm. So with her strategic approach, media savvy and extensive network, Raquel also crafts compelling narratives that drive mainstream visibility for her clients. She propels them to success in the rapidly evolving industry. I’ll say rapidly evolving and and often volatile as I think we can all attest to. The Rosen Group is headquartered in New York City. They’ve got clients across the country and the globe. She and her team are leaders within the fast growing space and they’re probably best known for driving tangible results, which in cannabis is a must-have, not just a nice-to-have. So thank you both so much for joining me. I want to dig into the conversation, but I also want to kind of give folks an idea of, you know, kind of do a little bit of intro there, but give me a little bit more information about yourself, the work that your organization is doing and we’ll start there. Peter, you want to jump in first?
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
Sure. Thank you very much. Happy to be here and thank you for the nice introduction. I appreciate it. So I came into the industry about sometime in 2017, so I’m in year six or so. So I guess that’s a pretty long time for cannabis, not for most other industries but for cannabis. And I can second what you said earlier. When I first started in the industry, I went out of my way to network and have lunch and meet with tons of people just because I didn’t know anything. And I would say half of those people are gone. That I learned from them and thought they all had amazing ideas and businesses and really respected them and I thought they knew everything from, you know, how to be successful. I thought their brand, everything they’re doing was great. And half of those people are gone. So yes, I would agree with you that there’s been a lot of change in the industry, there’s been a lot of evolving and I would almost say devolving as well as everything is not always going the right way for us and cannabis. But I will say our perspective is maybe a little different because we at Leafwire are very focused on B2B. So we’re focused on building biz brands for businesses who are reaching businesses, not necessarily consumers. So I think we bring a little bit of a different perspective to this and that, you know, a lot of people when they think of branding are thinking you know Coke and Pepsi and you know reaching consumers. But what we do, we really focus on how to make businesses stand out and reach other businesses. So that’s that’s a little bit different, but it’s it’s all the same marketing principles, it’s just a little different angle.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Raquel, you want to jump in there?
Raquel Hochroth, VP at Rosen Group
Yes, Hi everyone and thank you for having me again. I’m Raquel. I’m at Rosen Group PR. We’ve actually been around for 30 years, but in the cannabis space for I guess probably over a decade now. We started with the inception of adult use in Colorado and really have developed that niche ever since. As Jen said, just working with companies across the supply chain, consumer facing products, celebrity brands. You know, seed to sale companies and ancillary companies and more, so we’ve sort of seen also all different parts of the industry survive, like the CBD crackdown of New York City in our own backyard here. So we’ve also seen a lot of ebb and flow over the years. A lot of people get in, a lot of people get out and so navigating that, a lot of publications would be willing to cover cannabis, and then not. We have this story that we love. that one of our friendly reporters at The Wall Street Journal, when we first approached them about one of our clients, he was like, “Nope, absolutely not, can’t touch it.” And then lo and behold, like less than a year later, sure, there we were, you know, in print, front and center. So now some of them won’t touch it again. So it goes back and forth. We’ve also seen some publications close down or you know, still have the stigma and not want to cover it. You know, it definitely is one step forward, two steps back. We see it a lot. But you know, it also is exciting to navigate some of the challenges, try to create staying power with these brands, create really meaningful, sustainable campaigns. Education, we found, is key. There’s still so much lack of education. And so, you know, we try to navigate those thought leadership pieces. And you know, it’s not always just getting the brand, the product name out, but, you know, finding ways to get the brand insert into the larger conversation that’s going on.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I find it so interesting. Oftentimes the conversation within cannabis as education is such a big thing, but we’re often thinking about education for the consumers, whether it’s on cannabis beverage, you know, the legalities, all of it. However, I find that there’s a huge lack of education on the inside of the industry. What are some of the things that you are often finding yourself having to educate prospects and clients on, things that maybe they don’t know. What don’t people know? Is that too general a question?
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
Sure, I can jump in on that. So Leafwire, our primary form of revenue is advertising. So we do campaigns for clients all the time and we’re talking to dozens of new companies every week and we do find a lot that education is 100% needed and I’m sure it’s true for for Raquel’s kind of point of view as well that, you know, you have to essentially convince people that marketing is actually important and getting the word out about what you do. And it’s interesting, this is kind of an anecdotal example, but we talked with a company that did, they’re basically like a company that made food supplies and ingredients and they were telling me they just built this new facility. They had like 30 employees and their monthly expenses were like $200,000 or something for their business. And I asked what they were doing for marketing and they were spending $500 a month on a Google cost per click campaign, $500.00. So there’s like .25% of their budget was going towards marketing. And I tried to dig into that and ask why. And they kind of just didn’t believe you had to market yourself, that if you were good enough people would just know about you and come to you and buy your products. And so that’s step one for us is just convincing people that. Marketing is a thing that exists and matters and you need to actually think of that as one of your just, lik,e you have someone that runs, you know, does your books every month. Just like you have someone that does operations, like you have to have some marketing to promote your company. And so for us, education-wise, that’s just step one and, I’m curious to Raquel, I’m sure you with PR, that’s the same thing, I bet.
Raquel Hochroth, VP at Rosen Group
Yeah, I mean, I would definitely echo what Peter said, what education is. So a lot of people don’t know what PR is, even though they maybe think they want a PR campaign or think they need one. But you know, when it comes down to it, kind of understanding what exactly like an earned media campaign looks like and what it entails and and all of that, there’s still much to be discovered in a lot of our conversations, which is fine and actually great, and that that’s why we’re here. So yeah, you know a lot of people don’t always know right away, but exactly it means they just know that they need something to get out there. So we, you know, really try to explain, whether we’re having an initial background conversation or diving into the campaign. And even sometimes when you start, you know our clients aren’t always sure what exactly is going to happen. So you know, we really tried to explain what needs to be done, how to get out there, how this is going to impact their brand, you know the number one question is which I know you might ask later but you know what what are the results going to look like and people always think they’re sort of like a cookie cutter answer. And you know really it depends on the brand, the goals, what they’re doing. And so we try to work work with with y’all that are watching to figure out like what exactly is you know, what is your company, what is your product, what are you trying to get out there, are you conveying it correctly and and working with y’all to even find out what exactly that is. It is a crowded space at the end of the day and I know a lot of people are working on really lean marketing budgets also as Peter said. And with all the market constraints, you know, it’s definitely challenging, but which also makes it equally important to really discover what it is you’re doing. What can you speak about finding, again, education and all moments. You know, it’s not just that we’re going to be like the brand name, the brand name, the brand name for media campaigns. So really like understanding what it is we’re trying to get across here and what your brand is really trying to get across.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Sure. Well, I think also maybe in the defense of cannabis brands and companies as well, not only is there the need to understand that marketing is a thing, Peter, but also what does that look like on the strategy side. Oftentimes when we get folks coming in the door who aren’t even necessarily new to the cannabis space, but they’ll think social media 100%. Do you guys do social? Yes, of course. We also do you know the full spectrum of of what you would expect with the marketing agency, but really kind of through the lens of the business outcomes with that at the heart of the strategies that we build. But not only is marketing a thing, yes, the tactics are not the strategy. So if you’re coming in with social or you’re coming in like, “okay, here’s my Hail Mary, Raquel, I’m going to go ahead and throw all my budget into PR”. It’s actually part of a larger picture. Peter, you guys are doing something new and interesting to kind of add to that marketing mix as well. Let us know what are you guys working on right now. What are you launching?
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So we do what I guess what’s called paid media versus earned media. So what we do is campaigns, but people come to us and we advertise for them, whether we do direct e-mail campaigns on Leafwire or other partners and we actually, we kind of act as a one stop shop agency as well. So we’ve spent a little over $3,000,000 on advertising for both Leafwire and all of our clients. And we partner with companies like Marijuana Moment, Cannabis Business Times, Cannabis Business Executive, Ganjapreneur, Weed Week, all of those and we essentially place advertisements for our clients on their media. So we kind of act as a one stop shop agency. So we’ve been doing that for years. And we had a large ad network called Equitive come to us and they wanted us to help them build a display network where you could put banners up on sites like CNN, USA TODAY and ESPN and show banners only to people who were interested in cannabis. They were cannabis business people essentially and they had no way to do that. So we reached out to a bunch of our partners, you know, a bunch of the people I just listed. We all put cookies up on our websites. We could see who visited our site, we combined this big group of people and we got up to about 500,000 individuals and now this display network can target 500,000 people out on the World Wide Web on 10,000 plus websites. So now there’s actually a way that you can do display advertising, which is what a lot of the mainstream brands love to do and someone can see your advertising on sites like ESPN, CNN, et cetera. So it’s a brand new way that we can reach people. I mean, we’ve done e-mail campaigns for years. We’ve done banners on our own websites. Everyone knows sites like MJBiz or Ganjapreneur or Leafwire and you can do advertising there. But if you want to go beyond that, you know, you can now advertise out on the web to reach all those people. So that’s kind of the new thing that we put together and have been educating a lot of our clients about.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Sure. Awesome. Raquel, as far as Peter talked a little bit about how they’re targeting, who they’re targeting on the PR side, how is that, how do you target, and maybe give a little bit of background on really what is, or if you could quickly define even what is PR. Because I want to start on a base level to where we’re all understanding exactly what PR is and when it comes to targeting specific folks, how does a PR agency do that?
Raquel Hochroth, VP at Rosen Group
Yeah, So I mean PR, public relations, you know we really are well, we actually do more than public relations. We’ve kind of become your full-fledged marketing partner and can kind of guide you on all of these things that we’re talking about today. But our goal really is to get your brand and your voice in the media or media coverage. So whether it’s an article you know in a publication or if it’s a video interview on CNBC, in a newsletter, a podcast, anything really, just getting the messaging out there, putting out a press release. We do super targeted pitches to tailored media to get again, just really to get your brand out there, your messaging, your spokespeople, who the brand is, what you’re offering, what makes you unique, how you fit into like the larger dialogue, you know, what’s going on in the cannabis industry and also really get you third party credibility. Especially in cannabis, you know, there’s a lot of companies now, so you know, how do we know we could trust your edible or how do we know you know this is, you know, actually lab tested vape or whatever it is or even an ancillary company. So by getting you in the news, you know, that often gives people a level of trust and third party credibility. You’ve been in Forbes, you’re just named on Inc. 5000, and you’re on CNBC, whatever it is. So that’s really kind of the end game there is besides just getting the messaging out and getting a sale, having a dispensary come to you that wants to carry your product, attracting new talent, you know, by seeing your name out there, there’s all sorts of visibility and results that can come from it. As far as you know, tailoring your audience when a client onboards, we try to pull everything we can from the company. Again, what makes you unique? You’re in edible, OK. Are you fast acting? Do you have Delta 9 or 11 effects? How long does the product take to take effect? Who is your audience? Is it 35 year old women or whatever it is? So we try to pull everything. A lot of people in the industry, you know, it’s their second career. Does the founder have a cool backstory? Are you doing something interesting on the social equity front? So we find out everything and then that helps us tailor to who we’re targeting. If you’re a flower company does it make sense for you to be quoted in a fashion magazine? So kind of along those lines, and making sure that your product is getting in front of, whether it’s you know, your potential consumer or stakeholder getting in front of them. Hopefully that answered the question.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Sure. Well, I think that the natural next question is, is, OK we understand that marketing is a thing. We understand that we need to dedicate some budget. We need to understand the different channels and understand that the tactics aren’t necessarily the strategy. Another question that we got from folks when they are coming in our door is how do I know or how do I measure ROI with your two organizations, how are you showing folks that you’re working with that their return is worth it?
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
Yep, So on a, you know, on the simplest kind of explanation. When someone does, for example, an e-mail campaign with us, so they do an e-mail blast. So it’s like a standalone email we all get all day long from companies. So it’s 100% the content of the advertiser. There’s the most obvious thing, you know, we send reports that show how many emails are delivered, how many unique people open them, how many unique people clicked it. From that point. It’s usually on the client to track what happened after someone got to their site. And one of the things that we do all day long is we try and coach our clients on making as clear a call to action as possible and defining in advance what they want success to be. So for us, since it’s all B2B, most of the people we deal with are trying to get people to request information, set up a phone call, you know, if you’re a lighting company, if you’re a lending company, if you’re an ingredient that sells, you know, thousands of pounds of, you know, CBD isolate at once, you want someone to fill out a form and ask for more information so that you become part of their kind of sales funnel. So what we do in order to make it so clients can measure ROI, we try to make it so that in an e-mail campaign, there is only one thing that people are supposed to do, in an e-mail that it’s 100% clear, there’s not go to our Facebook page, you know, learn about this, learn about that, and also maybe ask for more information. We try and make it so there’s one call to action, make it 100% clear, a big button above the fold, and make it so that the page that people land on is actually doing what that call to action is, like we don’t have them land on the main page. If they’re trying to get people to request info, we have them land on the request info page. And we’ve also even asked clients to redesign their request info pages because some people will have paragraphs and paragraphs of info and that’s all you can see. You can’t even see the request info until you scroll down like three times. And that makes it so people don’t even know what to do. So that’s the way that we tell people to measure results and we try and help them so that we think they’ll have the best results possible.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
That makes a lot of sense, yeah.
Raquel Hochroth, VP at Rosen Group
And on our end, you know, a win really for every company is going to look a little different depending on their goals. It could be, you know, a social media post that doesn’t get taken down. It could be a New York Times article. This is sort of like the million dollar question here for us always. You know, maybe it’s again a dispensary read an article and saw it and contacts you to carry your products. We have one example that we love. We had a client in California, seed to sale company. The CEO did a long format Q&A. The team sent it to their investors just so they can you know, read it. They got to see a little bit more of the backstory behind the founder and you know what he was doing with the company and all that. And they called the next morning and we’re like we’ve had the article with John and we want to add $2,000,000 to our investment. So we call that the $2,000,000 article and you know, it’s wild how that could really, you know, impact their business. And that was all from this one article that we got. So you know, sometimes it could be hard to measure and I know people hate to hear that, but it is true, it comes in different forms. It really does. But you know, every time we can get your name out there, you know, we kind of consider that a success. It’s a product roundup again, if it’s a long format interview, if it’s a comment on the latest taxation law, you know, we try to get all those different angles and we find that there is an audience for that, you know, specific angle even if you’re a product. Again, if you have the CEO talk about a tax law, you know that could impact in a different way. Maybe they get invited to speak in the next local government meeting, you know, something like that. So there’s a lot of ways. We know product sales are always key, but you know there are a lot of layers to the awareness campaign.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
It’s interesting…Oh, go ahead Peter.
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
Oh, sorry Jen, I was just going to add to kind of on the same wavelength as Raquel, we hear and see referrals are are really big in the industry And a lot of people, a lot of people who may not even be part of Leafwire, on our e-mail list or distribution, end up reaching out to one of our clients because they got something forwarded to them by someone we did promote a market to. And we see that happen a lot. And I think cannabis is such a small industry. It’s kind of like that $2,000,000 article idea. You get one person who sees something and it doesn’t have to be the person from the company. It could be an investor. It could be a lawyer. It could be the company that sells fertilizer to a cultivation, but they see something cool and they want to share it with people so they send it to someone. So there’s a lot of indirect benefits that are unfortunately hard to measure but not as easy as the two millionaire article idea. But it that’s referrals are really big in the industry so that’s something that’s you kind of have to figure out how to figure out where your business comes from by asking questions and you know, who, how did you find out about us, etc. But that’s really big in marketing too.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Sure. Well, I think even just starting at the baseline, typically organizations have an idea on business outcomes, whether it’s you know, a certain amount of revenue generation and growth, whether they’re maintaining other business, you know, additional business objectives even outside of revenue. So if you start there like, what is a goal for the organization really? And then kind of unpack it a little bit more, our marketing director, Tyler Jacobson loves to ask the question, “what does success look like?” So if we start there, then we also know what does failure look like, What are some of those main pieces where we know, OK, this we don’t have to know exactly. And on the digital side, we can know exactly what success looks like and kind of you know, kind of unpack some of those metrics and analytics but know as an organization where you’re trying to go, are those are those targets actually realistic When we look at market share, you know we do a comparative and competitive analysis to within the competitive landscape to say “Hey organization A, here’s what the larger landscape looks like, let’s see, is it possible even to kind of snap up market share, is there market share to snap up?” So trying to figure out around the question on ROI, you know, you can always start big with those larger business objectives. Boil it down like I was saying, Tyler suggests like, what does success mean, like in a particular campaign or maybe for that particular quarter also. Yeah, so great. Thank you for sharing both. I wonder if there are any other super awesome campaigns that you got, either of you, have seen success with that you want to share.
Raquel Hochroth, VP at Rosen Group
Well, thankfully we have worked with so many awesome companies over the years. So I guess a few that I thought I could kind of quickly highlight here. I know I mentioned Doug earlier and just want to, I would like to highlight them again, it’s just a seed to sale company in California. We were able to leverage so many different parts of the brand and that’s why we were able to have such a successful campaign, which I know might not always be the case. But you know in this case again we have the CEO who would quickly comment on any regulatory or legislative, any changes going on in California. We had folks in the lab that could comment on anything on the technical side. We had someone, a chef in the kitchen who could comment on edibles. They had consumer facing products, dispensary openings. They were part of when Outside Lands launched Grass Lands and it was the first time cannabis consumption could happen on site. So we were just really able to target so many different audiences, inside trade, cannabis media, local California media, music and pop culture, you know, leveraging the events and all different kinds of facets in that way. So that’s just an example of a way to kind of leverage all parts of the company, all different spokespeople. I know that’s not always the case, but you know that is a good example when you have different elements like that. We also work with Azuca. They’re a technology infusion company. We’ve been with them since day one when they were figuring out their name. So it’s been really awesome. They also have really unique spokespeople, a chef in New York City to, you know, a business serial entrepreneur, women in New Mexico, and that they call the odd couple of cannabis and just using all different elements there, you know, they’re super B2B and have amazing technology and fast acting edibles. But we can also leverage their product partners and there’s just a lot of different elements there. They just were named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America. So you know a lot of opportunity there. And then, sorry, one more that I just want to highlight. We work with a company actually in Germany, which is really cool to have kind of an international reach to BlueMall Group, they’re a medical holding company, and they’re really on the forefront of German legalization. And just like the larger European green rush that’s going on, they definitely see their challenges just as much as we do. And the US with again, one step forward and two steps back, but we’re really able to leverage the spokespeople. There’s a lot of different updates that happen with the news and we get statements prepared and ready to go and we’re able to regularly place them in Forbes, Reuters, Bloomberg, MarketWatch and all of the top, you know, mainstream media, Politico. And it’s just really awesome to be able to get the word out, get education about the legalization space that’s going on even in Europe and how it impacts the US. So just what I want to show like sort of a breadth of how we’re able to target like all different media from the cannabis trades to mainstream media, whether it’s again like Rolling Stone or I know they do a lot of cannabis coverage, but just kind of like the lifestyle space to also, you know, these really like tier one business publications.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
What sounds like it sounds like they’re probably are just in every, every sector of this industry, too. There’s, there’s big piles of dog doo to step in. Have you guys had to deal with any clients that have come to you with a challenge that you really had to help reverse something that has happened whether it’s negative press, maybe an ad spend that was mismanaged. Anything like that where you know, even just tips around, like how do you, how do you avoid some of that, some of the common pitfalls that you both are seeing?
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
Sure. So we did actually recently, and I do want to comment on a positive campaign as well, not just the negative, but the on the problematic side, we did have a, we’ll call it a kind of an ingredients manufacturer, like someone who makes you know, isolates and things and sells in bulk to people and etcetera. And they came to us, and I’d just done a campaign with one of the biggest without naming names, one of the biggest kind of business sites out there and had done a campaign with them, a big e-mail blast, spent thousands of dollars and essentially had almost zero response to it. And they showed us the e-mail they used and we looked at it and it was almost impossible from looking at the e-mail to figure out what to even do. Like what did they want people to do. There were four or five different links to like, price, price sheets on their website to something about the ingredients, then something about the company. And then there was at the very bottom you can almost not even find it was a link to go to get more info and they were judging the results based on that. And then when you clicked on that, it didn’t even go to the info page, it went somewhere else. So we essentially helped them redesign their entire e-mail, asked them to rebuild a page and they essentially were able to get almost 10X the results than they did from another e-mail they did which was a, you know, theoretically a bigger company than us because they actually sent something out that was just very easy simple call to action and it landed on a place where they could do that thing and you know, request information. So and this was just in the last couple months this happened and but it very much demonstrated how big a difference you can make with you know, pretty minor changes, just making messaging clear, easy to understand. And I will say on the positive side too, one of the clients that we’ve worked with now I think for almost three years has we, we, we work with a lot with people in the financial space. As you know, banking is such an issue and payments and so Dama Financial is one of the companies that we’ve done campaigns for, for I think three years and they’ve renewed campaigns probably like 7 or 8 different times. And what they do really well is one, they let us promote them across the industry and target all the sites that we think are best for them. So I mentioned earlier, we kind of act like an agency, so we promote them to the Leafwire audience. But then we also work with Marijuana Moment, which is a great newsletter for anyone that doesn’t get it, and they do standalone emails. We promote them with companies like Cannabis Business Times or Ganjapreneur or Weed Week. So they’re spread across, and they also have consistency. So fortunate for them, they have the budget to be able to advertise consistently every month and that’s something that most people don’t do and I think is a big detriment especially in B2B marketing. People don’t always need new lighting or a loan or you know, a new widget for the company. You only need that, call it, once a year, once every couple years. So you can’t just send one e-mail out campaign and expect people to remember and know that you’re there. You have to be in front of people consistently. So when they do need new lighting or a security camera for their dispensary, they just saw something about you in the last week or two. It wasn’t six months ago. So in B2B, it’s especially important to be relevant to people all the time. And then the last thing they do really well is the call to action, they always promote one thing. It’s very simple, learn more about XYZ and they land people on a page where they can do it. So they’ve done those three things, the targeting, the consistency in the call to action or what we kind of hammer down with our clients all the time is those 3 principles.
Raquel Hochroth, VP at Rosen Group
I just want to, sorry, I was just going to chime in that I just totally agree with what Peter said about the consistency because we experienced that too. You know a lot of companies sometimes want to maybe take some shortcuts or just do a one off campaign or start and go and we always really try to emphasize that the consistency of having a steady drum of noise and reaching out is so important. You know it takes like three touch points I think until someone really remembers or resonates with a company. So you know just doing a one off isn’t really always the most effective. It’s got to be layered, t’s got to be consistent, of course. It’s got to make sense. You want to just throw out random news. But you know, and that, and that’s what we also do to make sure we’re finding, you know, different nuggets of maybe you don’t even realize it’s news, but we’ll try to identify different things to get out there or different things you could comment on. The news is endless in the evolving cannabis space, but I just think that consistency point is crucial.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Crucial. Absolutely. We were just at a B2B SMX event in Boston earlier this month, earlier in August, and there were two folks talking about touch points, Gary Maggiolino of InterSystems and Marcia Trask of Integrate, what they said, so think about this, it blows my mind. Even now, the number of buying interactions needed to complete a single buyer’s journey has increased from 17 to 27. So 27 touch points if you are just doing a single campaign. The same thing applies with just a, you know, a very general marketing strategy that doesn’t even include PR. If we’re talking about 27 times, impossible with the social media post here and there, impossible with the LinkedIn, you know, even if you’re hosting an event like a webinar, like they’re like the conversation has to always be continuous, relevant, valuable. What you’re bringing to the table is actually, you know, maybe there’s thought leadership, maybe there’s, you know, there’s connectivity within the space as well, but that number. To me that feels really big. Are you guys? It feels really big. But it also brings, you know, drives home exactly what we’re talking about, that consistency of message, looking at your budget and knowing that when you dedicate a portion of it, and and sometimes it can feel like a big portion, but when there’s there’s a return on investment, there’s you know, there’s challenges. And when we go back to exactly what I kind of mentioned when I first started this conversation, as we see folks vanish right out of this industry, maybe they pop up in another, maybe individuals pop up in another organization within cannabis. But if you’re trying to stay top of mind, I think you know I’ll say it all day long, Peter and Raquel also, making that investment, being smart about it, knowing again what equal success is so important.
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
You know, it’s funny the numbers you used, I actually say something very similar to that. I used the numbers 7 to 30 because they used to say back, I think it was like from the 50s someone had to see an advertisement 7 times or something before they acted. And I tell people it’s more like 30 now because of the Internet, because people are bombarded with so much information all the time. And that’s one of the reasons why, you know, I mentioned the display network concept earlier. That’s one of the things that I find so interesting about that is when you’re paying a cost per thousand impressions and you’re targeting people, you can show an ad for not that much money. You can make sure you target and get one person to see your ad. The goal is, you know, 30 to 50 times to get one person to see the same banner on different sites all over the Internet. And that’s one of the interesting things that display advertising can do. Because if you think about, you know when we go on like Facebook or CNN or whatever, if you’ve ever clicked on an ad for Allbirds shoes, which I have, you know, the wool sneakers that are kind of cool and light, I have a pair. So I like them. But I’ve clicked on the ad and now that ad will pop up for me everywhere I go. But that’s the power of kind of retargeting is that, you know, once you find the right people and you can show them an ad over and over and over again, you get to that number, that 30, which is really hard to do. But that’s I think the power of something like that.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Absolutely. There’s a couple questions I want to bring to the table too from those who are joining us here. So Peter, on the new initiative that you covered earlier in the conversation, the question is, is this programmatic advertising? And the other question to kind of add on to that, folks are wondering what is your point of view on ad fraud?
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
So yes, it is. It is programmatic. So it’s through a display network, it’s called Equitive. It used to be called the smart ad network, but there’s 10,000 plus websites and you can target geographically certain areas, you can target ages, you can target types of websites. And then what we brought to it is you could target a cannabis business community. So that’s what we kind of added to it and created our own channel on that programmatic network. And I’m not 100% sure what ad fraud is referring to specifically. I don’t know if you have any context there.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah. Let me see if Tom can add a little bit more to that question. I’ll be watching the Q&A. Tom, if you want to add a little bit more to that question too. I’m not, I’m not 100% sure.
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
So I came from, you know, like an online marketing background in affiliate marketing where people are getting like an incentive to do something, like you get paid to go download an app or you get paid to do something. You tend to get a lot of fraud with that sort of thing. Most of the advertising we do, it’s either e-mail or banners or thought leadership, like articles where there’s really no incentive for someone to click through or, I mean it’s hard for anyone to do something fraudulent. In that sense, I’m not sure exactly what Tom means.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
And sometimes, I mean we’ve even seen, you know, parasitic marketing for those who are familiar with that too. Sometimes when you’re trying to dupe the system it typically isn’t a great, great tactic, although within the space I’ll say since I’ve been in cannabis the amount of risk tolerance varies from organization to organization. What we’ve seen in recent years as business maturity has increased folks aren’t, you know, they’re not so willing to say hey you know let’s see if this works. They want to know before they dive in, also because they’ve got investors who want to make sure that before they throw some money on the table that there is, you know, metrics in place to measure whether or not a venture is going to succeed. So we’ve talked a lot about brands, companies who have come and gone. There’s a question here on the table. Is there any advice for new brands entering the space, maybe folks with a more limited budget or folks who are just kind of getting into cannabis?
Raquel Hochroth, VP at Rosen Group
Yeah. So I would say two different things. One is from logistics and figuring out your brand voice is just really thinking about that. Like what makes you unique? What makes you stand out? Are you being transparent about that too? And how are you conveying it, which I’m sure all of us here could help companies identify too. Sometimes it’s hard to even know like, you know, you have a cool product but you don’t know why or how to tell others. So that’s one. It’s just really making sure you’re finding your unique brand voice and making it clear. And then just on a general level is just not giving up, staying the course. The industry is changing quickly, but as long, even though it’s been a few years, it’s really just the beginning. I think there’s, you know a lot of day to day challenges that come up and are really frustrating, whether it’s the social media post, a whole account being taken down, having to change the packaging and the last second, you know, delays here, delays there. But you know those are all solvable if you just keep your eye on the larger picture, you know you will be successful like staying, seeing the longevity and and the longer it ahead, you know the industry has a lot of potential. Still, we can feel the excitement and all the industry events, the smaller ones, the bigger ones, you know, from MJBiz to a local gathering. I went to a rooftop event here in New York City a few weeks ago. You know, the energy, it’s still big and there’s a lot, you know, a lot that’s still going to happen. So to really kind of, you know, stay in for the long haul so we don’t have to talk about all these people popping up.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I’ll say too, you know, what I will say about the cannabis space is we’re a tight knit community. In some ways I feel like we look out for each other. I even see sometimes on LinkedIn posts where, you know if there’s a potential partner that someone has had a negative experience with, the community sometimes shares that online too. So if you’re new to the space lean into folks and build your network with those who have already been here for some time. We all have all, I think I can speak for all of us. We all have some of those battle scars. I think we’re very willing as individuals within the space knowing that it is such a volatile industry to share our experiences, to share, you know, “Hey, watch out for that particular pitfall. Hey, maybe you know when you’re when you’re vetting an organization, ask for these three things. Ask for a little bit of like who they’ve worked with, who you know, projects that they’ve worked on.” You know, don’t be afraid to dig and ask a little bit more on the question side too. I’ll say for us as an organization, when folks, when we engage in the discovery process on the marketing side, we dig into revenue numbers. So not only revenue goals, business objectives. I want to know exactly what the sales platform and plan looks like. I want to know what the marketing and sales tech stack looks like. I’m not afraid to ask questions of organizations because I want to know if we are partnering with a client, a prospect or even a partner, I want to make sure that all those pieces have also been well thought through. Again, like I mentioned that the business maturity is there not even within the cannabis space. You could be new to the space, but bringing something really valuable to this industry. But don’t be afraid to ask questions of those who you are either hiring as vendors, who you’re, you know, those who you’ll be partnering with as well. I will say sometimes organizations will say like, oh, I don’t want to share my secret sauce. I don’t want to tell you everything. And I just think, you know, I’m not going to start up a whole other company. Like I’m siloed and I’m working in this industry and the reason I’m asking is because I want to make sure that this is going to be a successful partnership. So not only can we as a marketing agency move the needle for you, but that you’ve got, you know if I’m driving tons of traffic to your website. Is there a plan in place for you to then convert those folks? You know if Peter and Raquel are bringing lots of eyes and attention to the brand you know they also want to make sure that, hey like this whole spectrum of the plan can only work if all the pieces are really kind of working together and well mapped out. It’s kind of my soapbox.
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
I agree with you 100%. Before you even said that I was going to talk about LinkedIn and Leafwire, of course, since we’re similar to a LinkedIn. But if you don’t have any money at all and you can’t commit any money to advertising, I would say using Leafwire and LinkedIn going on, you know, joining, create a profile. You can join groups on LinkedIn, on Leafwire. You can post anything you want in our news feed. You can post a question. You can post an article that you wrote. You can post something about your company’s new product, you know, completely free. And we send out, we send out a daily e-mail once a day called the Daily Buzz. That goes to now, I think it’s about 85,000 people all cannabis professionals, and we picked the top five or six posts of the day and we put it in there. So if you post something in there and we and people are commenting on it or liking it, we’ll probably pick it as one of the top six of the day and send that out to 85,000 people and that’s completely free. So, and but to your point of asking questions, I think the biggest mistake people make in communities like Leafwire, LinkedIn is they don’t participate. You know you, you need to post once in a while. You need to comment on other people’s posts. You need to connect with people. You need to like things. You need to make yourself aware as a presence, like you need to be there. If you just go on and look at it every day, passively, no one’s going to know you’re there and you’re not going to get much out of it. So it’s the participant, the you know, the actual participation and activity. And then on the next side, you know if you’re a company, if you have some funding, if you have more than just one employee, if you have 2, 3, 4, 5 people, you know you should be spending some money each month on marketing and PR. I mean it, it just should be and that’s you know, we were talking at the beginning about the education. Not everyone understands that or really knows that like to them spending $40,000 a month on their office and for employees and their technology makes sense. But to spend you know $2000 on marketing seems crazy to them like why would they waste the money on that. But if you have any money at all, you should be looking at marketing as a, you know, vital component of your budget and you should be setting aside X amount per month, you know whatever you can afford and using that for a combination of marketing, PR as just a necessity for for your business to grow.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Go ahead.
Raquel Hochroth, VP at Rosen Group
I was just going to agree with that, so go ahead.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Awesome. Well, I want to, I want to be respectful of time too. There’s a couple more questions here that we can get to and then we can wrap up on the hour. One of the questions is how do you target cannabis consumers for e-mail or text advertising as we are in a mostly cash business?
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
That’s probably good for you, Raquel.
Raquel Hochroth, VP at Rosen Group
Sorry, target consumers for e-mail or text advertising? tThat’s actually not something, well, e-mail marketing I guess probably you guys could speak to more. But I will say as far as like if you’re a product, you know really and I don’t, not sure if this is answering exactly, but you know something not to forget is the bud tenders, the relationships with the dispensary owners, you know, they have a direct contact with their consumers. I know some of them send text messages too. So really like establishing a relationship with them, making sure they know what are your differentiations like that make your product unique and stand out, making sure they try it. The more they know about it, the more they’re going to talk about it. They’re sort of like your frontmen, really they’re like on the line. So the more they like you, they like the product, they know about it. I’m not sure otherwise if that is answering that.
Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
And well, I can jump in there too a little bit. When we look at, we take an audit of folks’ digital presence including the website. We want to make sure that every page of a particular website has a conversion point. So what is that? What is the purpose of kind of each of those pages? Oftentimes that can be an e-mail capture for if we’re trying to to get more eyes on a site, but then we have these conversion points really spelled out in a clear way on the website as we’re building a list. So not only would we know the purpose of why are we building an e-mail list or even with text advertising as well? We want to make sure that that customer journey is is really clear. We don’t want to make folks think once they land on a website, as Peter was saying earlier, you don’t want to have tons and tons of texts with the call to action of like “hey subscribe to our enewsletter” at the very bottom. Folks don’t read, they won’t, they don’t want to really have to think about or figure out your website. So you want those those calls to action really clear on the other end. This is what I was kind of describing on that, you know, making sure that your sales process is also pretty nailed down as well. So once folks do come in the door, how are you going to engage and re engage them? Is it you know, do you want to get really specific on messaging? Not everyone who comes in the door is going to be exactly the same as the person who just signed up for your enewsletter or had opted in for a subscription or anything like that. So what we’re looking at is who particularly are we serving, getting really specific on target audiences, providing content for those. You know the segments specifically as well and then having that long game mapped out, so the basics of like a marketing tech, you know sales and marketing tech stack which we’ll get into next month on our webinar is really you know looking at CRM’s that not only fit your budget but also kind of have all the bells and whistles that you would need. So we, you know of course something like HubSpot for us on the B2B side is the gold standard, but there’s also additional platforms out there like active campaigns that have the same functionality at a fraction of the cost. So you know there’s, even if you are at cash business, but you’re really trying to build awareness and really kind of reach out to folks in a meaningful way, kind of building out that sales and marketing tech stack is going to go a long way and knowing how you’re going to engage continuously. But we’ll get into that conversation next month as well. I wanted to…it looks like we have got through most of our questions. Like I said, I want to be respectful of time here. I’m going to throw a screen up here so you all can capture e-mail addresses. If you want to reach out to either Raquel or Peter, let me go here. Yeah, awesome. So again Raquel Hochroth with Rosen Group. Her e-mail is raquel@rosengrouppr.com and Peter Vogel with Leafwire co founder and CEO of Leafwire. His e-mail is peter@leafwire.com. Follow them on LinkedIn. Start to build your community a little bit more. These are two really awesome resources within the space, thought leaders as well. Check out their websites as well. Join the conversation and Peter and Raquel, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing such incredible insights with the group.
Peter Vogel, Co-Founder and CEO of Leafwire
Thank you for having us.
Raquel Hochroth, VP at Rosen Group
Happy to be here.
