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Dispensary rises above regulations and reaches the right audience

KiaroHyperRainBarrel

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Kiaro's inspired approach to digital marketing lead them to take the high road
 
 

The Challenge

Since cannabis became legal in Canada in October 2018, over 280 stores have become licensed across the country. With such a crowded market, how does a dispensary effectively create digital brand awareness and acquire loyal, recurring customers while differentiating themselves, selling the same products?

Kiaro, meaning “to emerge from darkness into light,” is a fully compliant cannabis retailer for the forward thinker. With both brick-and-mortar and online retail spaces, Kiaro approached us with the task of helping them navigate the complexities of federal advertising restrictions, create meaningful brand awareness, drive in-store traffic and cultivate an online customer base.

Since Saskatchewan is one of the few provinces that allow private online sales, it was important to Kiaro that their digital marketing efforts were meaningful and boosted their online purchases to create a steady, predictable revenue that carried a big impact.

 

The Approach

Our strategy included several steps. To prepare, our team used our unique Hyper and RainBarrel strategies to target every 19+ location in Saskatchewan—over 400 locations. The first step was create an audience from every 19+ location in Saskatchewan, including bars, casinos, liquor stores and clubs, during the months we knew there would be peak festive of-age activities. The second step was running an additional, ongoing targeting layer over those locations to reach a larger audience while running A/B tests to see which ads resonated more with the growing audience.

A RainBarrel custom audience is created by collecting geo-significant data. When someone snaps a photo, checks the weather or summons a ride, their action becomes geo-significant data available for device capture. Our efforts cultivated a custom audience of over 70,000 unique devices. We then served Kiaro’s custom audience and all 19+ locations in Saskatchewan “brand awareness,” “thought leadership” and “eCommerce optimization” campaigns, maximizing the advertising efforts while ensuring regulatory compliance.

Multiple pieces of creative were used to understand which calls to action and which branded messages resonated most with potential customers. Over the various campaigns, we analyzed and compared the artwork and messaging, continually adjusting to fit the needs and goals of the campaign.

 
 

 
 

The Conclusion

Kiaro was very pleased with how well the campaign was executed and impressed to see that by incorporating Hyper and RainBarrel technologies, we were able to meet their intended goals.

Focusing on their specific (and federal-regulation-approved) audience allowed Kiaro’s campaigns to precisely target the intended users, significantly increasing brand awareness, website traffic and revenue. Even though there were many potential obstacles, Kiaro was impressed that our LoKnow experts rose to the challenge of helping our client navigate the complicated landscape of digital advertising in this new, competitive and highly-regulated sector.

 
 

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