Juana Niche

Springbig is an amazing solution for cannabis brands looking to connect directly with relevant customers. Their software connects to dispensaries point of sale software, giving cannabis dispensaries a robust CRM and cannabis brands a direct targeting method for their promotions. 

With Spring, brands can send a text campaign to customers who have purchased a similar product, or customers who have made any purchase within a given period of time. For example, If you are selling chocolate edibles, you can set up a text campaign for 20% off your chocolates and send it to people who have purchased any chocolate edible product from that dispensary. 

Sure, there are challenges. Text providers aren't willing to let you send blatant cannabis sales messages through their airwaves. But like most challenges, there are creative ways around it. 

Tune in to learn more about what Springbig has to offer. And if you want to get in touch with Todd, or listen to his podcast Elevate Your Grind you can use the links below:
www.springbig.com
[email protected]
youtube.com/elevateyourgrind

Lelehnia Dubois is the founder of Humboldt Grace, an online cannabis community building on the plants values of love and grace. Lelehnia talks about her upbringing in the legacy market and how she ended up deeply connected in the Humboldt cannabis community. 
She describes the online social group as a virtual way to host a potluck - where you can bring your services and expertise to share with friends. The social platform they started on is Facebook groups, and they've expanded to Clubhouse conversations. 

You can join the conversation at www.humboldtgrace.org or find Humboldt Grace on Facebook, Instagram and Clubhouse.

Registered Nurse, Massage Practitioner & Alternative Pain Specialist Anna Oliviera discusses the wellness sector of cannabis. What are new cannabis consumers thinking about and buying? We go over the dangers of opiod addiction, favored form factors for wellness consumers, the difference between a topical balm and an extended-release patch, how terpenes play into your high, and trends Anna sees on the horizon for the cannabis industry.

Bryan Buckley of HVGC (a.k.a. Helmand Valley Growers Company) is part of a group of veterans doing something incredible - cannabis research for veterans with Post Traumatic Stress (PTS). In this inspiring episode Bryan explains the mission behind the HVGC brand - to research and discover the therapeutic benefits of cannabis to combat the PTS, opiate addiction, and alcoholism that is far too common among veterans.

One of the highlights of this talk is when Bryan explains how influential the treatment of veterans will be to strengthening bipartisan support of federal legalization. Unlike many California cannabis brands, the HVGC brand is geared towards veterans and a conservative-leaning demographic. If their research provides ample evidence that cannabis can provide therapeutic relief for our veterans - we are very likely to see a major cultural shift towards acceptance of this plant as medicine.

HVGC has partnered with brands and is open to partnerships. You can learn more about HVGC at www.hvgcompany.com or reach them by emailing  [email protected] or you can follow HVGC @hvgcompany on Instagram.

SUMMARY & TIMELINE

1:01 Bryan's Background   

3:35 Surprising Findings   
How supportive the cannabis community as a whole is. 
The paradigm shift of our nation of how they kind of viewed cannabis in 2016 vs. now in 2021.

5:15 Veterans & Terpenes
A really good terpene for veterans is Myrcene.

6:27  How the Cannabis PTS Research Will be Conducted

7:26  Are you doing fundraising for this currently? Or?
If you're in California and you buy Helmand Valley Growers product, 100% of the profits will go back to our veteran medical cannabis research.  Or you can donate to the non-profit battlebrothersfoundation.org

8:54  How have you been seeing success as a cannabis company with reaching out and getting the word out about HVGC?
We found our niche audience.

10:45  Cannabis Trends, especially as it relates to the treatment of post traumatic stress and helping veterans.
Live resin sauce becoming a big thing and overtaking the distillate market. Day-to-day microdosing. Universities researching cannabis. Federally, cannabis becoming more available to people. 

12:40  Is CBD popular among the veterans that you know?
It is. I know some people who take it, and they love it. And I think it's great if it works for them. I'm not sure where the military stands on CBD. And I'm talking about, like, for active duty individuals. I'm not sure if they're allowed to use it at this time. I think that's going to open up because you're just seeing more and more kind of benefits and more athletes who are using CBD and things like that, it's really helping out inflammation.

13:31  Ways that cannabis brands can get involved helping HVGC
Collaborations & Co-Branding

Ever wondered how to do cannabis market research? Adriana Hemans sheds light on what the ISA Group offers the cannabis industry and about how much it costs to get started.

Cannabis ads are seemingly banished from paid Facebook and Instagram advertising. But there are a few key tactics that cannabis marketers can use to maximize their outreach and utilize the powerful targeting tools of Facebook Ads. In this episode, Kevin and I discuss some very important digital marketing loopholes that you won't want to miss. We also discuss the importance of carefully selecting your hashtags and keeping your profile free of any banned keywords.

Kevin Urrutia is the founder of Voy Media - an advertising agency in New York City that specializes in high performance Facebook advertising.

00:00:51 Kevin's Background

00:02:09 Cannabis Restrictions vs. Facebook Ads

00:03:03 The Education Loophole

00:04:40 Ad Content - Videos vs Graphics

00:05:45 Clever Calls to Action

00:06:26 Video Production Costs

00:08:23 How to Optimize Targeting

00:09:17 Avoiding the Shadow Ban

00:11:01 How to Contact Voy Media

Author of Branding Bud: The Commercialization of Cannabis - David Paleschuck on the key elements to building a successful cannabis brand. Some of the topics we cover include types of purchase experiences, archetypes of brands and of consumers, the importance of brand promise and consistency, and how traditional branding methodologies are affected by the many regional laws and regulations in our industry.

00:00:39 - David’s Background in Corporate America 

00:02:42 - Types of Purchasing Experience: The Transactions vs The Shopping Experience 

00:04:51 - Educating Buyers, Budtenders, and Consumers

00:07:01 - Mistakes New Cannabis Brands Make

00:07:29 - Types of Consumers

00:09:16 - Archetypes of Cannabis Brands

00:13:47 - Implementing Branding

00:17:07 -Trends: Hemp Increasing, Data & Research Improving, and Beverages Gaining Popularity

00:20:47 - How to reach David

Check out David's book Branding Bud - The Commercialization of Cannabis at brandingbud.com

Space Coyote Founder Libby Cooper on the foundational elements that are crucial to starting any brand - including a cannabis brand. We  talk about the importance of your brand's origin story, why you need a deep understanding of your target audience, and what trends are heading towards us in the cannabis space, especially trending solventless extraction methods and an increasing desire among connoisseurs for pure landrace strains that showcase indica and sativa characteristics.

In this episode I interview Garo Keresteci, founder of FUSE create in Toronto Canada. Garo and I discuss the lessons he learned in the early days of cannabis marketing, the importance of budtenders and in-store demos and in-store signage at retail locations, and the impact COVID-19 has had on digital orders. 

Traditional mass marketing isn't available to cannabis brands. Social media platforms might obliterate our hard work at any moment. Enter in-store displays and signage. On this episode I talk with Sachin Gulaya, founder of Alpine Vapor in California.

Sachin covers the role of dispensary displays, what to keep in mind when considering developing a display, and about how much you can expect to spend.

Check out Alpine Vapor's website:
alpinevapor.com

Follow Alpine on Instagram:
@alpine.official