Surfside and From The Earth partnership yields big results
Surfside and From The Earth dispensaries recently announced a successful ad campaign that produced more than 3x ROAS.
In Missouri, businesses have struggled at times to find their footing with advertising. Most avenues are too expensive for startups or closed off from cannabis businesses. Additionally, regulations and changing guidance have made some operators trepidatious about investing too much time or too many resources into marketing or advertising while a layer of uncertainty existed.
Greenway recently spoke to David Craig, VP of Marketing at Illicit, Cosmic Seed & From The Earth Missouri and Travis Scadron, VP of Business Development at Surfside about the success of their recent campaign and how it came to fruition.
Identifying an audience
The objective for the companies was simple, dispensaries want to reach legal medical marijuana patients.
“We were trying to find a way to more precisely target our customer base with advertisements we felt they would respond to. In a limited medical market, connecting with Missouri’s patients requires a more finely tuned approach than marketing for traditional industries,” Craig explained.
Scadron added, “The main objective was to increase brand awareness for From the Earth’s retail locations in Missouri, thus increasing sales for the dispensaries.”
One of the keys to success for the companies was Surfside’s use of lookalike audience capabilities. From The Earth was able to upload first-party customer data and create new groups of customers that had similar characteristics to their current customer base. The most important factor was whether these potential customers had their medical cards.
“A lookalike audience is a group of consumers that have the same attributes as another set of consumers, but generally are not existing customers. From the Earth wanted to reach consumers who had the same attributes as their past customers, because those people were most likely to engage with the brand and retail experience in the same positive way.
“To do this, we utilized tracking pixels, historic visitation data, and CRM lists to figure out the attributes that past loyal customers had in common, and then utilized Surfside’s database to identify cannabis consumers within driving distance of the stores who also had those attributes. We created efficiency and saved ad budget by only targeting the most relevant consumers,” Scadron explained.
“This campaign was focused on driving brand awareness and new customer acquisition by engaging with in-market and near-market cannabis consumers. We served the initial ads to those segments to build awareness and then kept in touch by retargeting potential customers with subsequent ads until they began actively interacting with the brand, From the Earth’s website and online menus, and eventually completed a purchase,” Scadron said.
Targeting existing patients who had purchased cannabis legally in Missouri, the ad campaign ran across desktop and mobile, displaying popular cannabis brands that From The Earth had in stock.
For From the Earth, the ability to reach their targets and build their base was key, Craig explained, “Surfside created multiple audiences using their expertise in the field and AI-driven algorithms. This led to over five target audience groups per each of our five dispensaries, allowing us to segment customer behavior based on behavioral patterns shown to be most likely to translate into a patient visit.”
“Depending on the week, we’ve seen a sustained boost of between 2 to 3% boost in weekly sales across all dispensary locations. On top of that, we’ve been able to use the data acquired for other marketing campaigns and get a better pulse on who the customers really are,” Craig continued, “The ability to track in-store and online visits, and how those have translated to sales, has proven invaluable in justifying further expenditure in our SEM campaigns.”
How did Surfside reach customers?
Aside from identifying an audience, Surfside was also tasked with disseminating the ads, Scadron explained how the company achieves that.
“We serve ads on mainstream apps and websites – from Rolling Stone, Wired to Vanity Fair and the games/news apps on your phone, tablet or desktop. Through our DSP (fancy name for media buying platform) Surfside has access to buy billions of ads across millions of apps and websites every day.
“From a compliance perspective, we ensure all consumers that enter into the campaign’s audience pool are of legal medical or recreational cannabis age in the place we are serving the ads. We must also follow the requirements of each individual state’s 21+ advertising rules and regulations, which we manage for our clients as well.”
“When working with From the Earth, we identified the websites and mobile apps that are visited by the consumers who have the attributes that David and his team were most interested in reaching with ads. Before we serve the ads on those channels, we ensure the audience is located within proximity to the dispensary locations, dispensary accounts, or delivery zones. Then, we serve ads to those consumers on whatever websites and apps they visit.”
In advertising, it is sometimes difficult to measure success, but the data from the campaign makes success easy to define in this case. From the Earth saw up to 7.6x return on ad spend (ROAS) after running a campaign targeting downtown locations. The results of the lookalike audience and specialized targeting drove the company’s cost per visit (CPV) to each store down by 25% over average costs.
“The campaign has delivered over 4.5 million ad impressions to consumers that are all high-value prospects for From the Earth, increasing brand awareness, brand equity, and share of voice among the most important consumers in the state. We also drove a 3.15X ROAS to date, meaning the stores are averaging $3.15 in revenue for every dollar spent on ads with Surfside,” Scardon told Greenway.
Additionally, Surfside says that the click-through rate (CTR) across ad campaigns was 130% higher than average. Across all campaigns From The Earth reached an average of 3.54x ROAS.
“We have continued to see a regular increase in our ROI, with new customers increasing at our newest locations. Our target of a minimum of 3x ROI has been met 90% of the time, and we anticipate that number to skyrocket in the event Missouri becomes a recreational market,” Craig said.
Heading into the new year, Craig hopes to broaden the reach for partner brands, “We will be continuing with Surfside indefinitely, and are eyeing major returns in the transition to a recreational market when our customer base will increase by a factor of 10. Our brands will also be further exploring services with Surfside, and currently, we are evaluating a state-wide push on co-branded dispensary/brand campaigns to drive more consumption category specific traffic,” he stated.
For Surfside, the formula was simple, as Scardron explained, “We found success early on with From the Earth by only hitting the most relevant consumers with their ads, and measuring performance every step of the way. We can’t wait to double down on the campaign’s success this year!”
Data referenced in this story was provided by Surfside.