If your customers have had good luck with cannabis for chronic pain or stress, they’re probably a great promoter of your products. However, a certain stigma remains in this industry—and creative, educational marketing strategies can help bridge that gap.

Determine Your Target

For those who have a strong focus on CBD products, your target market may be older folks with pets. You could set up a marketing email campaign around seasonal weather changes, when inflammatory pain becomes most challenging, to remind your target market that help is possible at your shop.

If your target audience ranges in age, as many dispensaries’ customer bases do, you should focus your marketing campaigns on the product itself, the quality of source ingredients and the limited-time offers available at your dispensary.

If you want to cultivation a younger audience, seeking the emerging Gen-Z demographic, you will need to tailor your campaigns to their interests. You can do this through design or with a partner business.

No matter what age your target audience is, it is important to always keep them in mind when you are creating these marketing campaigns. Always ask yourself if what you’re doing will be appealing to people who fall into these categories you’re looking for in your consumers. Think of both the customers you currently have and the customers you are trying to reach.

Go as Mainstream as Possible

Your dispensary is a legitimate and legal business. Do your best to work with cannabis-friendly professionals, from cannabis real estate companies to accountants to insurance agents. Once you have a solid business connection with these professionals, do your best to get your name out in the community.

For example, if you have a cause that is near and dear to your heart or you have hired someone who champions a particular cause, study up on local fundraisers. Events such as fundraising walks, half marathons and other events that will allow you to raise your visibility will benefit your company by bringing you into the mainstream. Consider setting up a canopy at a fundraising event and handing out free bottled water and a reusable tote bag to get your name out there.

Another great way to go mainstream in your area is to partner with local businesses to create co-promotional campaigns together. Find a popular local coffee shop and design a sticker together that incorporates both products. Partner with a local artist to create a mural on your building or a window painting, this can keep your dispensary an attraction for Instagrammers as well as new customers. No matter what partnerships you make, be sure they sell products you agree with, and you enjoy working with that business. Put everything you do on social media and your dispensary will no doubt grow in its following through these partnerships.

Be Dog-Friendly

If you dispense CBD products for pets, make your shop as dog-friendly as possible.

Create an open floor plan and easy access for four-footed visitors, and do your best to stash away any products that a dog could lick or mouth at canine height.

You can also use this as an opportunity to promote your store with photos of the dogs that come visit your shop. Always ask their owner if you can take a picture of them, but you can use these pictures on social media or put them up inside your store. This is a cute way to interact with your customers and show them you care about them and their pup!

Offer a Loyalty Program

Let your current customers know that you appreciate them by providing them a discount on their next visit. Try to be as mindful as you can about what each customer is looking for in their purchases. If they're buying CBD oil from you this month, send them a special discount for edibles. If they purchase the blend that you market for anxiety, consider sending them a discount for a sativa product known to help with focus. By recommending other products that may help your customers and improve their usage, you can also make more sales and improve your relationship with each customer.

RELATED: Want More Loyal Customers? 

The past year has been a tough, anxious time. You offer a product that can help people shut down the stress and worry of the world and help to shed fear. Make your shop and product offerings a place to step away from the stresses of the world and build a calmer life. Once buyers know that you are a trustworthy source of these products, up the offerings to address the next step.

Promote Your Expertise

Offer a newsletter that provides customers and potential customers the information that you have on conditions commonly treated by cannabis. If you have information on a new pain management product, print up a laminated FAQ sheet and post it near the new offering. Offer a flier in the shopping bag for buyers on new offerings coming up.

Starting a dispensary isn't easy. If you have a passion for cannabis because it helped you to overcome a health condition, or if you have an employee with a compelling story, get that data out there. Make sure that you offer information on the science of how the product functions as well as anecdotal evidence.

Monitor Your Reviews

Study up on your own reviews.

If someone came into your shop and leaves a wonderful review because the employee helping them was compassionate as well as knowledgeable, you now have two thanks to give; the employee and the reviewer.

Consider profiling employees who work directly with the public in your newsletter. Let your employees, as well as your clients, know that your team is knowledgeable and caring.

Cannabis is a very personal product to use and may be a difficult choice to make for some who've only heard the negative data. It can be nerve-wracking to break through the societal pressures to say in a review, "I used this product and this is how it helped me!" A positive review is well worth celebrating and rewarding with a coupon or a boost of loyalty points.

In late May 2020, amid a wave of protests against the killing of George Floyd, Purple Heart Patient Center in downtown Oakland was burglarized. They took everything and destroyed the place, owner Keith Stephenson says, and Purple Heart has been closed ever since.

But Stephenson and his team are planning a grand reopening this spring—sometime in May or June—and he’s looking forward to getting back on track with the cannabis dispensary he founded in 2006.

“It was a time where operators and cultivators and many folks in the industry went to prison for dispensing cannabis,” he says. “And you look at where we are now, and it is totally different.”

Soler Eduardo

What Stephenson was setting out to achieve in 2006 is similar to what he’s hoping to deliver to the Oakland cannabis industry when he returns in a few months. He wants a more inclusive and diverse industry, one that allows marginalized voices to participate in the development of a legal cannabis framework. What might a licensed cannabis market look like with a plurality of voices at the regulatory table?

More than 10 years ago, Stephenson helped push the social equity conversation into the spotlight of local cannabis regulations. As an earlier member of the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club, his history as a California medical cannabis patient had given him a front row seat to the opportunities that a legal cannabis space could provide to those in need.

“Social equity was one of the ideas that I brought to two council members in the city of Oakland,” he says. “I recognized that there would be a segment of individuals are left out, based on how the regulations were written in the city of Oakland. Growing up in an environment where I saw the war on drugs, it was a telling sign to me at the time where I realized if the rules and regulations that were presently in place stayed in place, then there may be fewer operators who have the fortitude and the desire and the acumen to successfully launch a cannabis business.”

In took those ensuing 10 years for the social equity conversation to pick up traction in a post-Prop. 64 California market. The city of Oakland passed a social equity policy in 2017 that prioritized applicants who came from communities disproportionately impacted by earlier cannabis prosecution. 

Initially, at least half of the city’s cannabis permits would be directed to those social equity applicants, and other prospective businesses could move up in line by sponsoring a social equity applicant.

As Stephenson describes it, the opportunity to pair cannabis businesses of different stripes provides an edge to both companies. The established team can impart some degree of business experience while reaping a benefit, and the social equity team can pick up insights into navigating the often complex world of private, regulated business.

“Fifteen years ago, my greatest worry or concern was not going to prison,” Stephenson says, painting a picture of contrasts between then and now. “So, while that is not the issue now, the issue now is still finances, business, having business acumen, being able to make it past the regulatory process. For any young entrepreneur, older entrepreneurs, social equity applicants, you have to have the ability to navigate all three of those barriers to entry. And the industry is not becoming cheaper. Operating is becoming more expensive.”

In order to ensure that the industry isn’t given wholesale to the operators with the deepest pockets, Stephenson says it falls to cities like Oakland or Boston or Chicago (or wherever) to promote a more equitable playing field in this new industry. Unlike almost any other business in the U.S. right now, cannabis is uniquely emerging from the unregulated ether; its history on the wrong side of the law and its gargantuan revenue projects over the next decade allow an opportunity that must be tended carefully, Stephenson says, something that he insisted on long before adult-use legalization swept across the country. It starts with social equity policies written into law.

But it goes much further than that.

“What a lot of social equity applicants bear is a stigma that something was given to them—just because,” he says. “Once you understand the war on drugs—how it impacted urban communities, how they were targeted—then you start to understand that this really is an excellent way for us to balance the scales of injustice or misjustice that was done decades prior.”

If getting in the door is one thing, Stephenson is quick to point out that active businesses (social equity or not) can use the cannabis industry to lift up communities more broadly. He recommends that businesses hire locally and create an economic opportunity for those in the community where a business is based.

This is how he’s run Purple Heart, and it’s how he’s hoping to continue the shop once he reopens this spring. (He’ll also be introducing a new branded product line for the occasion.)

“It’s really important that the individuals who are speaking for the social equity applicants actually understand the cannabis business,” he says, “that they understand the community at hand and that they have an active partnership with individuals from that community that are substantiated beyond utilizing them to move to the front of the line, per se.”

If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed a new addition to the Hemp Grower home page.

Our team has worked to compile cultivation data from the 2020 season as states finalize those numbers. We’ve collected information about acres licensed vs. acres grown, indoor square feet licensed, growers licensed and processors licensed for each state where that information was available. HG obtained these numbers by contacting individual state departments of agriculture and the USDA.

That information is now available on the map you’ll see on the right side of our home page. To use the map, click on it and navigate to your state of interest. Click the marker on that state, and all available cultivation data for it will pop up. 

We’ve also put the information into a chart on the same page below the map. You can change the view on that data by clicking the three dots at the top of whichever column you’d like to sort by.

Both the map and table are available here.

States’ varied methods of collecting data are apparent in the map and table. Blank spaces in the table indicate the information is either still being collected, or it is not tracked by the state.

This data will be updated regularly, so make sure to check back for the latest numbers.

For any questions, concerns or suggestions on how to improve this page, send an email to HG Editor Theresa Bennett at tbennett@gie.net.

In fall 2020, Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO) introduced its Production and Use of Hemp course to provide students with the knowledge and skills needed to prosper in the evolving hemp industry.

Sven Svenson, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Agriculture at SEMO, teaches the semester-length course. It is designed as an introductory course on hemp's various uses and its role in human history. 

The course covers the basics of indoor and outdoor hemp cultivation, production, agroecology (the study of the relation of crops and the environment), interactions between cannabinoids and the human body, and the non-recreational use of hemp for food, fiber, fuel, phytoremediation, and pharmacology, Svenson says.

The university is offering the course to students for a second time in fall 2021. Since introduced, there has been high interest from students in the class, which has led Svenson to propose a Bachelor of Science Degree in Agribusiness: Cannabis Science, currently under review at various administration levels at SEMO, he says.

Here, Svenson shares more information about the course, education gaps in the industry, the proposed major and other inputs on the hemp industry.

Andriana Ruscitto (AR): Why did you start teaching a hemp production class at Southeast Missouri State University?

© Courtesy of Svenson

Sven Svenson (SS): In 2014, when the farm bill gave us the ability to start looking at this crop, at that time, the students began asking me for a course. It took nearly three years or more to get the university to approve it. I also got it approved as one of our general education core courses as well, which took me a little extra time to get through that process, but it was by student request. So, this was something that they wanted. It is not heavy on the concepts of recreational use. It covers just about every other piece but the recreational side, as recreational use is not legal in Missouri yet. [Editor’s note: Missouri residents may only use CBD to treat “intractable epilepsy” and need to be licensed by the state, according to the Missouri Department of Health & Senior Services.] We still cover cannabinoid physiology, and we talk about CBD and some of the other products that are out there, but overall, the class is student-driven, and that's what is relevant. 

AR: What should farmers' main takeaways be from the course?

SS: The course is targeted toward an introduction to students. The students in the class who aren't farmers are looking for how they can work hemp into their system as a rotational crop. We are in a farm belt that grows a lot of corn, soybeans, rice, cotton and more, which surrounds our community. So, the growers here are just seeing this as one more thing to put in the rotation, and perhaps their biggest concern is simply who's going to buy this. That is my most considerable counsel to them: I would never grow a crop until I know who will buy it, nor would I sell a seed until then. So, that is their biggest concern, and that is what they are trying to figure out. So, finding buyers and processors seems to be the biggest issue.

AR: Why do you think it's essential that the university teaches students about hemp production?

SS: We are in Missouri's central agricultural belt, where probably about 40% of Missouri's agriculture is in just a few counties here in the Southeast corner where we're located. So that's probably why as a lesser-known school, we have an extensive agriculture department because of the nearby agriculture. I see the crop as valuable, not just as a rotational crop in their agricultural farming operations. The students like the storyline where hemp is linked towards sustainability, where products can become substitutes for things like plastics, or how we can lead to things like biodegradable plastics. We also have many students in our horticulture program where their interest is in beginner agriculture, where we can use what we do in agriculture to improve the environment or repair the damage people have done to the environment. The students recognize this, and that the hemp plant can be very useful in that type of targeted use. 

AR: What do you think are the most significant education gaps among hemp producers in the hemp industry?

SS: One of the things that the students described the class as is making the step from what was essentially an illegal crop hiding in the shadows and bringing it to the professional world. So, there's this step of, how do you help improve the professionalization of the hemp crop side? The other piece to that is the business side, which helps students deal with issues like banking, finance, crop budgets, etc. When you've got a crop where the general data information is not available, or it's just now becoming available, how do you deal with those sorts of situations? For example, when you're doing corn and soybeans, there's data everywhere. So, it's pretty easy to find out the information needed to go to a loan officer that might consider giving you a farm loan, which is very hard to do if hemp is the only thing you're growing. Banks look at hemp as a huge risk crop, and farmers can't give them hard numbers to speculate on. So that is where we spend a lot of time talking about those sorts of issues. 

AR: Although hemp is not currently grown on the campus greenhouse, why do you think it's essential for students to engage in hemp cultivation while learning about it eventually? Do you feel that the school will ever grow hemp on campus?

SS: I think the university eventually will. The school is likely responding to legal issues to ensure that they don't have a liability that blindsides them, which I can understand. I don't like teaching without being able to be hands-on. So, whether it's in our horticulture program or any of our department's agriculture programs, we are very hands-on. We make sure our students can physically do the things that we teach them. Our greenhouse is a for-profit daily operation, and it's just the nature of what we do. Why would we introduce a plant if we can't even grow the plant? So, the permission to do that is working hand-in-hand with the development of the program itself. It's essential to get hands-on experience, even if it's minor. 

AR: What types of jobs or roles can the class prepare students for in the hemp industry?

SS: One of the things that the class explores are all the career tracks available in the cannabis industry, and students get fascinated by those and start to dream bigger. From just teaching the class one time, it led to a group of students going to the university and telling me they need to develop a major. 

AR: What is the proposed major, and what does it entail?

SS: The new major would be a hybridization of agribusiness, horticulture and cannabis science, where students will have business training and horticulture training. They'll be able to handle things like hydroponics, pest control, fertilization systems, irrigation systems, all that sort of things. We would also be partnering up with our chemistry department, so students will get a run-through of not just the standard chemistry classes but the organic chemistry classes. So, they'll have the familiarity with all of the equipment that they need to use that would be on the chemical analysis side, and they'll understand organic chemistry. So, they would essentially be three-way trained: trained as business folks, trained as horticulture managers, and prepared to handle any of the industry's chemistry side. When I looked at that, I thought that was a perfect fit right now for what the cannabis industry needs, and I think they're going to be very helpful graduates when we get that major in place.

AR: What does the future look like for the subject at Southeast Missouri State University?

SS: We're in a very conservative belt of the country, right in the middle of the Heartland area, so the university has to proceed carefully. I don't mind being careful as it helps you make fewer mistakes. So, we will move slower than I want it to go and probably slower than our students wanted to go. But I think that means, in the end, we're going to produce a better product for the students and produce better graduates because of that.

So, will it continue to expand? Yes, it has to. We are in an agricultural heartbeat here as far as where we're physically located. There are many corns, soybeans, rice, cotton, horticulture crops, and more; It's all here. Because hemp is going to become slowly part of the system and a part of what we do, the farmers here will want to include it. There are many questions and frustration about that because higher education is not moving fast enough to support the industry. And just in terms of information generation and educational programs, we can't do it quickly enough.