When budgets must be trimmed, marketing expenses often are the first to go. Largely, that’s because it’s notoriously difficult to attribute any kind of return on investment (ROI) to marketing campaigns. Although most businesses rely on marketing to get the word out about their products and services, teams struggle to demonstrate exactly how their spend impacts the bottom line.
But what if that weren’t the case? Imagine a platform with an enormous database and advanced technology so precise it can target specific consumers at specific times, match them with a message at the moment they’re most receptive, and then follow those shoppers straight through the sale, delivering astoundingly accurate, real-time data. Now, imagine if the platform were so confident in its ability to revolutionize campaign performance that it took a percentage of revenue instead of a fixed fee.
That platform exists: the NXTeck suite of products from New Frontier Data.
Hyper-targeted campaigns are NXTeck’s specialty. By employing advanced data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to leverage New Frontier’s thirty-eight terabytes of live data about real people, NXTeck targets, with pinpoint accuracy, precisely the consumers who are ready to buy. And, stunningly, NXTeck’s suite solves the attribution challenge by showing—with 92–93-percent accuracy—exactly who saw the message, where they saw it, and when they subsequently walked into the store. Now that’s precision.
Unlike other platforms, NXTeck doesn’t drop clients into an arcane system that may make sense to data scientists and web wizards but often befuddles marketing pros. Instead, NXTeck’s suite of products provides clear, data-driven strategies across all media channels, including not only hyper-personalized communication like email, social media, and push notifications but also cannabis-ascendant channels such as out-of-home options and over-the-top services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video. After a campaign launches, NXTeck shows clients exactly how the implementation impacts sales in the moment. Campaigns may be adjusted on the fly, allowing retailers to maximize effectiveness in real time.
Most dispensaries find native mobile marketing delivers the best engagement, according to New Frontier Data Chief Executive Officer Gary Allen, because it “meets customers where [and when] they are.” Precisely targeted programmatic advertising on the desktop is a close second, he revealed, followed by out-of-home campaigns.
“Surprisingly, rural dispensaries see amazing results from direct mail,” he said.
And those results can be breathtaking. According to Allen, NXTeck’s average client sees ROI equal to three times their spend within thirty days of a campaign’s launch. Outliers, like a major dispensary retailer in Illinois, have seen ROI of as much as fifty times their spend.
Allen realizes the claims are extraordinary, which is why NXTeck takes a percentage of revenue in payment instead of the more standard flat fee. By eliminating up-front fees, the platform enables dispensaries to spend their budget elsewhere while still reaping the benefits of a robust customer-acquisition engine.
“We’re here to be their ‘top of the funnel,’” he said. “I’m so confident NXTeck can transform the effectiveness of their campaigns that I’m willing to take the risk. This can be the great equalizer, especially during the fourth quarter when many are trying to make up for disappointing revenue earlier in the year.”
NXTeck’s platform is the product of more than a decade of gathering insights from real cannabis consumers, more than 7,000 retailers, and more than 980,000 unique retail locations. The extraordinarily detailed database contains more than 60 million active cannabis consumers, about each of whom New Frontier has an average of 649 data points. How the company acquired all that information is a closely guarded secret, but Allen said much of it is first-party facts and figures gleaned directly from consumers. In addition to maintaining a one-to-one connection with 493 million consumer devices, New Frontier conducts face-to-face interviews with large-sample groups of 5,000 statistically relevant shoppers three or four times a year. When consumers speak for themselves, the resulting insight is much more powerful than what can be provided by hypothetical models based on anonymized data alone.
“We have the data that drives results—real, measurable ROI,” Allen said. “Let us run your marketing program for the fourth quarter, and we’ll help you convert consumers you never knew existed into loyal customers.”
NXTeck’s capabilities reach far beyond advertising. The platform also can help stores manage inventory more profitably.
“One of the great things about dispensaries is you don’t get a lot of people walking in and walking out without buying anything,” Allen said, adding the average consumer visits a store two and one-half times a week. Combine that datapoint with other shopper-specific knowledge, and “we can give dispensary owners their best inventory based on the consumers who live within two to five miles. We also can tell them which products are making a profit for them.”
For precision merchandising to be worthwhile, though, the store must attract customers.
“Let us make you some money first,” Allen said. “Then we can do all sorts of cool things with inventory capabilities.”
He also said millions of untapped brick-and-mortar customers are wandering the streets in search of a dispensary that “fits” them. With the precise targeting offered by NXTeck’s suite of products, dispensaries can find them, attract them, and keep them.
“As we approach the end of the year, it’s time for retailers to make bold moves,” Allen said. “Cutting your marketing budget again won’t help. The only way you’re going to save your year is by filling the top of the funnel.
“As we all know, the fourth quarter is really the week of Halloween until the twenty-third of December and the week between Christmas and New Year,” he added. “Let’s get this set up now and turn your year around.”
