JERSEY CITY, New Jersey – Cannabis technology is on a full out Sprint. The combination of investment, increase in market size and the growth in online ordering has driven most operators to position themselves as localized ecommerce businesses. While the common myth that you cannot advertise your cannabis business online is still alive and well, many operators, particularly in the mature markets like California have entire teams dedicated to strategizing, executing and analyzing the impact of digital or internet based sales efforts. Because of the limitations in vendor choice from the non-cannabis world – most of the daily tools leveraged by eCommerce brands outside of cannabis are not feasible in this industry. All of this leads to a breeding ground of innovation and solution creation in the name of better business.
The most recent innovation in the field of eCommerce and Analytics is the launch of the NOMAD marketing analytics suite from Safe-Reach media. Through their partnership announcement with Sweet Flower, a leading Southern California retailer; NOMAD and Safe-Reach look to offer solutions that had not yet existed in the world of cannabis marketing. While there are a bevy of loyalty and CRM marketing tools available – very little exists in the world of “paid media” or online advertising and analytics.
“Online Marketing for Cannabis is unique in a host of ways. Particularly with channel diversity (i.e media delivery) – as more channels come into the space, how do we understand what is truly effective against our client objectives when Google Analytics isn’t perfect and most of our platforms exist in their own reporting Silo?” Safe-Reach has set out to answer this fairly unique but critically paramount question for all size and types of operators in this growing industry with the release of their NOMAD platform. Says CEO Adam Schlett “We’ve been quietly in beta with a host of large MSO’s testing NOMAD across their marketing teams. As we continue to refine user experience towards simplifying the complexities of data analytics, we are confident that NOMAD fills a gap for operators of all sizes with respect to ecommerce attribution and analytics.”
“Safe-Reach has been a trusted marketing partner for well over a year. Utilizing Nomad has led to keener insights into the effectiveness of marketing initiatives across multiple platforms with greater reporting and visualization down to the sku level.” – Tim Dodd, CEO Sweet Flower
While some of the larger players in the space make moves on consolidating vendor services – many smaller or task specific platforms rely on integrations with other vendors in order to work within the framework of most clients. It’s not uncommon to see operators in the dispensary or delivery world with 3-5 different POS/Ecommerce and loyalty marketing solutions. Being able to simply plug into these solutions and start delivery data engineer level analysis within a few mouse clicks is really the impetus for NOMAD and its functionality. “We know Cannabis marketing teams are either short staffed or focused on a bevy of different marketing initiatives. Few if any operators are investing heavily into data analytics so these operators are depending on vendor tools to fill in the gaps – we saw a demand in providing serious data processing power and output to users who don’t have the time or bandwidth to learn or subcontract work to engineering resources.
As competition increases across adult use and medical markets, the ability to quickly deploy marketing capital where its effective in new customer acquisition or in customer reactivation will continue to climb in importance. While NOMAD’s conception seeks to resolve issues in the cannabis retail space in the near term, a more longer term application could solve similar needs across more traditional ecommerce verticals as well.
