If you are talking about marketing, the most important factor is savvy.
Money helps, of course, and if you don’t have marketing savvy, then you will need a ton of money to make up for it.
The key to marketing is getting your name out there, and letting people know you exist. The major franchises do well because they have national marketing campaigns, but we don’t have that. To drum up more business for our medical cannabis dispensary, we needed to get creative and unleash some marketing savvy. I tried to leverage something that every member of the staff had, which is a deep knowledge of medical cannabis and the products we carry. These budtenders are experts in their field, so I made them available online to answer questions from the public. Using text, messenger, Zoom, or Facetime, anyone online could contact us through the medical cannabis website to ask a question. Any question, having to do with our cannabis store or with the products in general, and my budtenders will answer your query in real time. It won’t lead to instant sales, but it will start to spread the online footprint of our medical cannabis dispensary, and raise awareness of it. The more people know who we are and how smart we are about medical cannabis, the more our reputation will grow. Eventually this will translate into higher sales, especially if we can get the medical cannabis delivery service up and running like we intend. We don’t have a lot of money for marketing, but with our medical cannabis knowledge hopefully we can succeed.