WHAT DOES THE SOCIAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE LOOK LIKE FOR CANNABIS BUSINESSES IN 2024?

Host: Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.

Guests:Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co. & SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
So thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. I don’t do this often, but after seeing the title of this webinar, I decided to get out a crystal ball. I don’t have a crystal ball.

But what does the social media landscape look like for cannabis business in 2024? Who knows? I feel like on the daily, it changes. The rules might change daily. I don’t know, these guys are going to let us know.

Probably not daily. But for example, most likely if you’re on LinkedIn and you’re watching and or participating in the Hall of Flowers, the Chris Brown blow up…this is proof that social media platforms, not only on the B2B side, on the B2C side. These are ways for you to have conversations with, of course, colleagues, thought leaders, your customers. It’s a platform. These are platforms for conversation. Controversy, chest puffing, chest bumping. All of it, all of it. All of it.

So actually, to speak on the topic, I brought two of the brightest stars on the Hybrid team to cover social. This is because more times than not, it probably feels like you’re navigating the unknown. Like I mentioned just a second ago, when it comes to social. So I’m thinking about shadow bans, community guidelines, unclear rules, swift penalties, all of it.

Wonderful to see you all. I’m Jen Lamboy. I’m the director of strategy here at Hybrid Marketing Company. We are a business outcomes focused cannabis agency. We’ve been at it in the cannabis space since 2015. We focus primarily on five key business drivers.

So increasing revenue, reducing risk, reducing cost, improving cash flow and asset utilization. And I am so super excited to be joined by our content director, Aaron Rosenbluth, and social media manager, graphic designer and influencer, and the Oui’d Fairy, SJ Gingras. Together, these two build and execute brand building social strategies for our cannabis clients throughout the full supply chain. So if you’re consumer facing, if you’re a B2B organization, they’re about to share their knowledge. They’ve got answers for us.

I also want to say, before they jump in and introduce themselves, I always want to mention that we are offering a little treat. So if you can stay till the end of the webinar, stay on us, stay with us live, we’re going to share the details of this little treat. The other thing I want to say is, if you have questions, and please, please ask, I know some use the Q&A function. If you look at the bottom of the screen, there’s a little icon. Click on that, submit your question there and I will politely interrupt my teammates here with your questions. If we don’t get to them, we’ll circle back to some at the end. I’m going to zip it. Aaron, jump in there, introduce yourself, and SJ as well.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Jen, for that great intro. You’re talking about some real time events that actually have me thinking about the value of community and developing community, which we’ll get into in social media. So that’s a perfect example. Even though comments might be divisive and it’s a hot issue for a lot of folks, it’s a good example of how you can develop and foster a sense of community around all kinds of topics in comments and on social.

So we’ll get into that later. But I’m happy to introduce myself. I’m the Director of Content at Hybrid, so I’ve been here, I was the first employee, I’ve been here since day zero, I like to say, and involved in cannabis accounts quite heavily since 2015, kind of escalating around 2017 into today.

And since that time, I’ve watched the complete overhaul of feeds, the way things work, advertising restrictions, changing, algorithms constantly changing. So we’ve seen a lot. And I’m really fortunate to have the support of SJ, who we’ll meet in a couple of minutes, on our team, who is one of the most brilliant creative minds I think I’ve ever met in my life, which is saying a lot. So I’ll turn it over to SJ and we’ll get started.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Awesome. Thanks, Aaron. I’m SJ. I have been on the team for about a year and a half. I do social media management with Aaron, and I also do all of the execution that comes along with that, hence the graphic design, and then also a weed influencer as the Oui’d Fairy.

Um, so that’s pretty cool. And that started when I got to hybrid as well. So it’s been really interesting. I kind of joined the team at a time where cannabis restrictions are the most lenient that they’ve ever been, but still restrictive and still learning so much and things are always changing. So, yeah, super excited.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Actually. Really quickly, I want to point something out for anyone that doesn’t know. SJ just referenced their alter ego influencer. Alter ego. The Oui’d Fairy, which brings up a really interesting point.

SJ has the unique perspective of having the perspective of somebody who sees social media management from a brand perspective, representing a company versus social media management from an influencer standpoint. So that’s a really unique lens that most people don’t have because the things tend to work differently for influencers versus brands. So really good points to bring up.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Right. Thank you. Well, I’ll just hop right into our presentation. Aaron, you want to take it away?

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Sure, yeah. So we’ll start here. So when cannabis businesses think about social, they’re usually asking a handful of obvious questions. A lot of you might be asking this right now. So how do we navigate restrictions? What happens if I violate community guidelines in terms of service? How much cannabis consumption or content can I really show? How can I improve ROI? So these are all really great questions. There’s a lot in each question.

We’re going to go through a lot of this and kind of answer them. But the next slide shows that while folks are thinking broadly about this, high level questions regarding how do I keep my account from being deleted, can I show content cannabis consumption? What can I say? How do I show ROI in something that’s really challenging to show ROI? Those are great questions to ask, but on the next slide, we present what you should really be asking so that we should go into thinking about what audience, what portion of your audience, what demographic is on social media, what experience can I provide for that audience?

How do you build a community around the brand? How do I inspire loyalty, engagement, and user generated content? How can I create a lifestyle around my brand people strongly identify with? And what does my audience want? So really kind of looking deeper and not thinking about it in a self-centered lens from a brand’s perspective, but thinking about it in a community development and giving people an experience and giving them what they want, kind of taking them out of their day for just a minute.

People are always looking for some level of escape, particularly during the workday. So social media winds up being that momentary respite from whatever is happening that you want to avoid. So that comes down to the experiential aspects of it.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
This whole slide is basically talking about the fact that you need a strategy more than just, you know, what restrictions can you get around or what ROI you want. You need a strategy deeper than just that. Like providing the experience and creating a community or a lifestyle is going to be far more impactful for your business than just thinking about ROI or the technical difficulties of social media. So we’ll kind of transition into, oh, what’s up, Jen?

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I was going to add one little piece, too. When you’re thinking about the strategy, you know, if we boil it down to just avoiding, you know, restrictions, shadow banning, all those people, all those things. If we’re looking at strategy developing, that is also not something super easy to do. Where you want to start with that is actually your business outcomes. So what are the goals you’re trying to accomplish?

Not with social, necessarily, but as a business itself, often those goals are, there’s a revenue target, there’s revenue growth, or in cannabis, sometimes it’s breaking even. Sometimes that goal might look like, I want to be acquired in two years. If we start there and keep those at the heart of the strategy, it then becomes much easier to build. The other thing I’ll say about this, I don’t want to interrupt you guys too much, but I also think this is part of a larger marketing mix that has everything to do with brand building, communication, all those things.

So I just want to say it’s easy and simple enough to ask yourself these questions, but think big picture, really, what are you trying to accomplish with your organization? And that’s going to help the decision making become a lot easier when it comes down to whittling it to a particular channel like social.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. I mean, really looking at your goals and working backwards, you made a great point. You know, if you’re looking to be acquired down the road versus just wanting to not be acquired and just build a really great legacy business with a huge following, the way you approach social. And we’ll get, I keep saying we’re going to get into this because we will. Whether you go strictly by your brand guidelines and brand book, because if you’re wanting to maintain a very clean feed, because you’re going to sell down the road, or if you really do want to build community, um, how willing are you to get pretty uncomfortable and kind of breaking free from that box, um, to do what needs to be done?

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
So, yeah, well, we can get into some of the tough realities because that’s just something we all have to face. It’s something Aaron and I face all the time. We have to deal with these things. Um, and I’m sure you as a business also experience this, but, um, social media is just not going to be a revenue driver like other industries. There’s a ton of restrictions.

You can’t advertise on social the way you can in other industries. And even if you do advertise on Twitter, which we can kind of, we’ll get into that later, but it’s extremely cost prohibitive and really only an option for big multistate operators or MSO’s. All these platforms are pretty vague about their restrictions. They are lenient on some things and then really strict about other things. You can’t use specific words or hashtags.

And then a tough one that Aaron and I try to convince people of a lot is that ad like social media feeds are not successful. And by ad like, I mean things that look like posts that are text heavy or very corporate looking or very stock imagery heavy. These kinds of feeds, people are not going to social media to see ads. They’re going to social media to escape from the reality of the world, which is ads and, you know, real life and work and whatever. So that’s something to think about.

And then the last thing is that TikTok really hates cannabis, and that’s tough. As the Oui’d Fairy, I kind of face that. You know, I posted a video that had a bong in it for a second and it was immediately deleted. Didn’t tell me why, just deleted. And then now I’m thinking I might be shadow banned.

So, like, you know, my, my videos are not getting promoted as much, and I don’t know why. I thought I was being pretty safe, but it’s like, the reality is, it’s very unclear.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, they don’t tell you. That’s part of the challenge is that you can’t get a clear answer. You can get some vague answers. There’s a lot of conversation among folks in the industry who are coming up with their own hypothesis around this, occasionally Meta or X or some of these platform providers. They’ll come out and they’ll give you a little bit of information, but it doesn’t tend to go too far beyond, well, don’t show or advocate for sales.

Don’t show some of these very specific things that are, I got to say, specifically, but they’re also vague. So they’ll tell you not to do certain things, but then you’ll try to work through all of these restrictions, regulations. You think you’re creating content that is safe, and then you’ll have a random post that, for whatever reason, gets flagged. It’s always maddening and it’s very challenging to find a real answer. And you make a great point with the ad ike social media feeds, that’s where we go into the idea of breaking free from brand guidelines. Sometimes that’s not going to be the thing that people are wanting to engage with. And ad like feeds are, A) it’s going to get you in trouble because it goes back to kind of highlighting sales specials, promos, and then B) it’s just not why people are there. People aren’t there to see your ad. They’re there for several other reasons. But you have some really great points.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Aaron, if you want to take away some of the exciting opportunities.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, so there are exciting opportunities. So, you know, I published a LinkedIn post myself where I was likening social media management in cannabis to Sisyphus rolling a boulder uphill, only to have it fall back down and just endlessly doing this. It does feel like that. But I still think there’s a lot of exciting opportunities for cannabis businesses in here.

And we generally, as a team, want to look through a positive lens. So we’re happy that it does. It forces you to think outside the box. So, you know, you can’t sit here and rest on your laurels and just pay for engagement and pay for everything that happens to grow your feed. You have to actually get dirty, think outside the box and experiment.

And I think that’s a lot of fun. So it gives you the ability or the chance to show who you really are and get a little bit crafty in a way that you might not in other marketing channels. Then, of course, we’ve got now Meta, who is still the most restrictive. Um, well, actually we’ve got TikTok kind of in there with them, a little bit more restrictive actually, at this point. But Meta for years was like they were the elephant.

They, you know, we couldn’t get around their really restrictive terms of service and community guidelines. They wouldn’t tell you why they were flagging a post, or why they were removing it. You just go into your feed and you would see something that you didn’t want to see. That was a warning, essentially, that if you continue down this road, you were going to get your account deactivated. So now they’re actually showing you, if you go into your settings, you can take a look at what posts are potentially offending and they will allow you to either archive, delete, or you can submit a request for them to review that post because you think that they’re wrong.

So they’re working with the industry more than ever before. You wouldn’t get any information, you would just have to, you’d just be restricted, which is what shadow banning is, actually restriction. They’ve said for years that they don’t shadow ban, they just use a different word for it. They restrict your account. So that’s what was happening and now it’s just a little bit more freeing. And they’re a little, they’re playing a little nicer with the industry so kind.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I will say, on meta too. Now, you can post all kinds of stuff. You can post flower, product consumption, pretty much anything along those lines. I’ve seen really no limitation in that regard. The only thing you still cannot do is advertise or allude to the sale of cannabis. But other than that, like, it’s super lenient. I mean, compared to TikTok, definitely, definitely more lenient.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Which is a complete reversal, just a complete reversal from the way things were. So that’s a really positive statement. And it’s probably, I mean, it’s probably them watching Tumbler, X offer advertising and kind of, you know, just the way things are happening. When one platform provider makes a move, the other ones have to follow suit in some way, otherwise, well, they’re going to fall behind. So that’s probably part of what’s happening, but also an exciting opportunity.

You know, it allows you to build a community and lifestyle around your brand, which is a lot deeper than just selling something, like thinking about it for the long term. Like, I want to build a genuine, loyal community around my brand, my dispensary, my business, and a lifestyle that resonates with these people, that’s associated with what I do, what we provide. So I think it’s an exciting opportunity to really do that and then provide a unique experience. It’s all rolled in together. So thinking about it from that experiential lens of how do I build a community?

I have an opportunity to build a community. I have the opportunity to think outside the box, provide a unique experience that nobody else can provide because I’m genuinely showing who I am. So I think that’s all really fun and exciting, and then it’s an outstanding opportunity, has always been and continues to be an outstanding opportunity to connect with influencers who can highlight and elevate your brand because of all of these challenges and restrictions in a way that you might not be able to. And then also, for user generated content, gives you the opportunity to get out there and create carefully crafted, intentional experiences in the real world that people can’t just help but take a photo of and share to their audience, which elevates your name.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I’m going to toss in a question from one of the attendees on this topic because we’ve got high level ideas, what you’re talking about kind of being, not only being authentic, having a strategic, a strategy. So Sarah is asking, she’s saying, I read an article that said it was a myth that the cannabis consumer is craving educational, social content. So she says, what are some suggestions? Well, A) is that true? And B) what are some suggestions for content around cannabis that isn’t education, that hits the deeper strategy, but also doesn’t violate platform guidelines, which I know you all are going to get to, but I’m just throwing it out there now.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Such a good question. SJ, you want to take that one?

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, I think so. I saw something about that as well, about people not really wanting educational content. I feel like it’s kind of true to a certain extent. Like, if your entire feed is that, then maybe people don’t really want that. I think sprinkle it in here or there if you, if you’re feeling like you need something to refresh your feed.

But, you know, Aaron and I talk about the fact that people are going to social media to laugh, cry, get angry, connect to a community, see familiar faces that they identify with or connect with in some way. And we have some examples of feeds that I think that we think are successful. But if you can kind of try to hit on the entertainment value, you know, people, and if you, if you’re going into the stoner demographic, like, these people in an ideal world are, like, stoned out of their minds. They’re just, like, looking at their phone. They want to laugh, they want to be like, that’s cool, that’s funny. You know? So if you can, and that’s where it is important to break away from your brand guide, because maybe your brand is more serious, but that’s not really what people want on social media, especially not Instagram. Like LinkedIn is a better place for serious thought leadership conversations about pushing the needle in the industry. Leave that for LinkedIn.

But your Instagram, your Twitter, your TikTok can be funny. It could be outlandish. It can be something that someone in your demographic will actually stop and want to interact with. And that’s kind of vague, but we have some examples of that stuff.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Also…Oh, go ahead, Aaron.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Oh, I was going to say. So, the education. This is an interesting point for me personally, because we’ve talked about this as a team for years and with our clients for years. So when I kind of entered the marketing realm in cannabis education, and people still talk about education all the time. Our blogs were all about education. Social media was about education. And it’s been proven over years from the SEO data. When we publish that content, I know it’s not social, but when we publish a blog to a site and it’s entirely educational, something around terpenes, for example. People just don’t engage. They tend not to care.

And we’ve seen it on websites and we’ve seen it on social. So it just tends to not be the thing that people are there to consume, which is exactly what SJ was just highlighting. And so that kind of goes back and we are going to show some examples of this, the way to rethink that. So you’re not violating terms of service and community guidelines and you’re not just sitting there with education, which is probably the obvious lowest hanging fruit from a topic standpoint, thinking that realm of experience. How do I provide something that is just a break from a 30 second, 20 second, 10 second break for this person from their day?

And we’re going to provide some pretty great examples of how some brands are doing that. But it’s just thinking about it through the experiential lens. Education doesn’t work.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I’ll say, too, around that, the education piece, maybe there is still value for it, but not necessarily on a social channel, but something that you can do. And of course, I know that you all will have examples, but think about not only are you humanizing your brand for folks to come, so we’re talking on the B2C side, retail and brands both. But also there’s an opportunity to highlight who you are and how you show up in the industry. So if there’s, you know, things that you hold values that you deeply hold, if you’re celebrating your team, if you’ve got a new hire or you’ve got a new position, maybe Instagram isn’t the way to do it. But if you’re doing a community event and you’re sharing pictures some way that you can, some way that you can humanize even more.

That flavor of who you are is really what also endears the consumers and the customers to your brand as well. So you don’t have to feel so boxed in. Think about what interests you and what are the things that interest you about a particular organization. I think Tyler, our marketing director, often says people don’t necessarily follow brands. And his example is if you’re wanting to have a martini in the evening, you’re not necessarily looking at Tito’s feed.

So, you know, we’ve got it, you know, there’s a challenge. There’s a challenge ahead of us because we’re leveraging a platform that is really much more for almost human to human connection.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Right. People don’t really go to Instagram to interact with brands. It’s just so true. And that’s why it’s so important that you provide an experience and a lifestyle and a community that people can get behind. And the thing about influencer marketing and user generated content, too, is that people are only going to create user generated content if you give them something worth posting about. Like have a crazy experience at your dispensary waiting room, or show up really big to an event and make it crazy or give away cool goodies. You’ve got to provide an actual experience for people to want to post about.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah. You have to be intentional. There has to be thought into everything. You can’t just post and set it and forget it. We say that all the time you’re using a publishing platform, which hopefully most companies, you know, if they’re managing social themselves, are thinking that materially, where you’re creating content ahead of time and publishing it. Even if you’re doing that, you still have to go in and maintain and answer, talk to people, be part of the community, get in there in the comments.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
And more than just yes, also that, that makes me think of, like, how we always recommend, it’s the human to human thing. Like, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna have an Instagram account, make sure you’re replying to comments and getting back to people quickly and interacting like an actual person would on social media.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, yeah. And don’t just, again, don’t just reply with a fire emoji, please.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Only emojis as a response.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Throw away. It’s lazy, you know, and a lot of that. And you give yourself the opportunity to rise above brands that are doing things a lazy way by doing it. So there’s nothing I hate more than not just cannabis, you know, any industry, when I, when I look at a brand’s post and I look at comments, and I’m just curious. Sometimes I shouldn’t be looking at comments because that’s where the outrage machine kicks in.

But if I do that, I’m all, I’m often disappointed by watching the brand, um, not interacting with people who are leaving genuine comments. So not interacting with people who are leaving comments more than just emojis, you can kind of let those live. But, you know, it’s like, makes me think of, um, I’m into music, so I think of bands, you know, and kind of why I don’t like arena rock. It’s because the band, everyone is up here on this pedestal, down here in the audience, the fans, there’s a separation behind them. So, you know, you go to a punk show you’re going to have the band coming out potentially into the crowd interacting with you, and it makes you feel connected to them. They feel connected to you. I think it’s the same thing in social.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
That’s true. Well, I’m going to go on to our next slide, which is examples of these fun accounts that we’re talking about. So I think probably our favorite example of an account that does a great job of providing a feed that is out of the brand book and truly entertaining is going to be thetravelagency. And so that’s, that’s this one in the middle here. And so if you go to their account, I highly recommend it.

First of all, you can see they’re not, they’re not dropping comments. That’s, you know, we’re going to say, hey, drop a comment back to your little people here. But content wise, so good. It’s like weird, entertaining, kind of whimsical, playing on these like stoners who are looking at their, I think they kind of assume the people that are looking at their feeds are high and they want to be entertained. And so I’ll scroll through my feed and I see a travelagency video and I don’t even realize it’s thetravelagency.

And then I watch the video, I’m like, damn, that was funny. And then maybe I’ll like it or go to comment and I look and I see it’s thetravelagency and I’m like, ah, of course it is. Like they’re sending me another weird, quirky little video. I think that’s great.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Even if you’re not high.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Even if you’re not high, it’s great.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Like it, that’s the thing. It’s like, I think it’s either way, it’s like if you’re, if you’re on your phone and you’re stoned and you’re scrolling, you’re going to see that and you know, it’s definitely going to cause you, I mean, to stop. People are just sort of mindlessly and passively scrolling, just like looking for that bit of entertainment, that dopamine hit. And if you catch, every time I see one of their posts because I follow them, we don’t work with them, just full transparency. But I appreciate so much what they do because I’m looking at something that’s totally wild and kind of out of this world.

And whether I’m high or not, it gives me that sense of being taken somewhere, someplace else, which also aligns with the concept of a travel agency. So you’re kind of like you’re a psychonaut, you’re a cerebral traveler. And those moments highlight that. So you can kind of, it just pauses you and you’re like, what am I looking at? It’s great. It’s a really interesting way to do it. And yet they don’t have the most award winning engagement. I like to point that out, only 205 likes on post.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Which is not groundbreaking, but it’s still, I’d say that’s better than an account that maybe gets like a thousand likes, but the content is just nothing to it.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
And it might be more genuine. I mean, they’re getting, they get real comments, they get real likes. It’s that goes back to the conversation of, you know, do, would I rather have 1000 people liking my posts that are never going to interact or purchase for my brand or do I want 200 people who like my post who are highly engaged and might actually take a step into my dispensary or buy my product from a dispensary?

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
And keep in mind, too, if you don’t, if you don’t know thetravelagency, they’re actually a New York based dispensary legally, you know, legally operating in Manhattan. So again, to Aaron’s point, this may feel like, okay, I’m going on this little journey. I mean, this is content that I sometimes, you know, I show my daughter because, that’s a kitten. You know, it’s a kitten doing something odd or, you know, whatever, whatever it might be. And this is, you know, this aligns perfectly with how they want to show up and who they say they are in the space. And so comes to mind, thetravelagency, of course. And, you know, whether or not they probably have followers who may not even be New York based, I follow and I’m nowhere near.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
And there’s nothing really very, I shouldn’t say nothing. If you go through their full feed, there’s very little branded content. It’s not what they’re doing. They’re not, they’re not adhering to strict brand guidelines. They’re just creating an experience.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
So I want to quickly point out a couple of things about the other posts on here that I think are great. So this Blazy Susan post is users, user generated content by red_eye_sky. We follow each other on the Oui’d Fairy account, little mutual’s action. But she’s great because she’s not getting, I mean, at least from what I can assume, she’s not getting paid by Blazy Susan. But there’s the mutual beneficial relationship where she’s you know, maybe getting sent some Blazy Susan stuff, but she’s creating posts.

Blazy Susan is using the collaborate feature here, and so they’re getting engagement from both accounts. So Blazy Susan gets all of her followers to like and comment. And then red_eye_sky is getting all of Blazy Susan’s followers and commenters and likes to interact on the same post. And what I think is great about this post specifically is because it shows up really well in the Blazy Susan feed, because obviously you got the branded bucket hat, you’re showing consumption with the product. And it’s the purple pink kind of like color palette that Blazy Susan has.

So love that. I think a great example of user generated content, mutually beneficial, matches the branding, you know, but it’s not totally just like a photo of your product with your logo plastered on it. It’s more than that. And then these posts down here, just fun. Good example of a different aesthetic.

You can kind of, I think these kind of appeal to people who are like, you know, these are very shareable and also very aesthetically pleasing. You know, I could see myself posting this on my story, that kind of thing. And then a great example of a brand breaking their guidelines is Wendy’s. As I’m sure you’ve all heard or seen or experienced a Wendy’s tweet, at some point. Wendy’s is not known for, you know, they just take on a different Persona.

And also, Wendy’s does a great job at making their social media manager into a character that then represents their brand. And they’re kind of like this mysterious, behind the curtain person who’s kind of breaking the fourth wall and making the account funny, human, even using stuff like I, me, these like, first person pronouns, that, again, it’s like breaking down the barrier of this huge corporate identity and making it into like, oh, hey, I’m just like the social media manager running Wendy’s.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I love this, and I always love the fearlessness of this. It’s like, I mean, it’s really funny, but we’ve tried this before. You know, the key, I think, is finding a partner who’s a competitor who is willing to go there with you because they understand that while it might be a weird approach that scares people, it can be great for both sides, for both businesses, for competitors. We’ve tried it before just sort of casually and organically.

And I find that this industry, at least at that point, wasn’t necessarily ready to go there. Or when I was doing it, our competitor, our client’s competitor didn’t really get what was going on and they thought, why are you trolling me? They didn’t get it. I was really hoping to get Wendy’s and McDonald’s kind of back and forth happening. They didn’t pick up on it, but one day they will.

But I think, like, broadly, the fearlessness of that, I mean, Liquid Death is a great example of fearlessness. They go about this with the intention of having fun when they make the content. And then when you publish it and you see it as the user, you can feel that fun and that fearlessness and that willingness to experiment and perhaps go outside of the brand guidelines, far outside in some, some circumstances, you can feel that willingness, that energy there, and it makes people want to interact. It’s fun, it’s awesome, and share this stuff. Who doesn’t want to watch two brands get in some kind of weird argument? It’s perfect, right?

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
That’s entertaining. Exactly. And then just the last thing to note is that I love that this Liquid Death post mentions the fact that it’s like real customers just because, you know, they got this DM from someone and it’s funny and hilarious and weird and it’s user generated content and they’re making use out of something as small as a DM and making a post out of it and using it as promo. Like, I think that’s just super smart.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah. And not uncomplicated.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Right. So I’m going to move us right along to our next point, which is we can kind of just blast through this relatively quick. I don’t know how in depth we want to get, but we basically just have yes’s and no’s of some of the major platforms. And we can send out these slides so that you don’t have to sit here and take notes at every single one of these. But I’ll just go through Instagram and Meta and Facebook real quick and then, Aaron, hop on the next one.

I think that this one is interesting because as someone who works with brands and as kind of like an influencer, I’ve been able to experiment with a lot of this stuff, Meta is a lot more lenient than before than what I’m sure you used to know Instagram as Aaron in terms of cannabis, but now you can post all kinds of stuff, paraphernalia, production, consumption, influencer type promotions of products, but not actually the sale. So that’s where they’ll get you. You can also advertise hemp and CBD, which is cool. And then there’s kind of like it’s interesting. Social media has these kind of like underground hidden hashtags and words and phrases you can use to allude to cannabis without saying it.

So, for example, you can’t use the hashtag cannabis, but you can use this hashtag with this little leaf emoji that is somehow known in the cannabis world to mean weed. And also that emoji mixed with the smoke emoji. It’s basically saying, like, I’m smoking weed. You can use OUID, which is how I spell the Oui’d Fairy. It’s kind of like an Internet way of spelling weed cleverly so that you get around restrictions.

And something I wanted to point to is that it’s super important to include 21+ and nothing for sale in your bio, just so that Instagram has no…don’t give them any extra reasons to ban you. Just be better safe than sorry. The biggest no no on Instagram, the words sale, deal, discount, bogo, buy, 20 percent off. Purchase, buy online.

You know, all of that. Do not do it. Don’t treat your Instagram, like we said, as an ad platform. It’s just never going to get promoted and you’re probably going to face a lot more restrictions than if you were to just focus on some of the stuff we’ve been talking about. And no paid cannabis advertising yet. And also don’t sell shit through DM’s.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
That just looks sketchy too, by the way. Yeah, it’s just there’s a lot of black market or legacy market operators on Instagram doing that very thing all the time. And they try to. They. They will try to make themselves look legitimate. And then you get a direct message offering you weed. It runs the gamut. Yeah, SJ, you made me think of something too, with the hashtags that you kind of can use creatively and to get around some of this. We’ve talked about this before, but it kind of reminds me of something. The industry has been…we’ve been doing this. The community has been doing this since the sixties, seventies, fifties, like, coming up with alternative names to reference the plant and the activity so that those who are outside of that community, outside the circle, don’t get it. So, you know, fortunately, where that comes from, I think it’s from the Grateful Dead. There’s a community around the Grateful Dead that started that stuff. Um, something that’s kind of cool in that, for me, at least.

It’s kind of bringing some of the tradition that’s always going to be here. Some of the countercultural ideas that should be kind of maintain the core of everything. Even as it matures, it’s still. You’re still doing that with these hashtags and. But you’re bringing it into this modern platform. So I think that’s cool.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
All right, take it away, Aaron.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Oh, LinkedIn. Okay. So this is perfect for me because I’m generally thinking more on the business end of things. So LinkedIn is the best possible place for B2B conversations for virtually any industry. And cannabis is also included in that.

You’re pretty free to speak about it from a business standpoint. I’m sure a lot of you who are listening, watching are on LinkedIn and do this already. Jen opened this conversation talking about a LinkedIn post. The industry really does live from a professional standpoint on LinkedIn. It’s important for thought leadership to happen there, so we have that bullet.

It’s also a really great place to recruit employees and to show your culture as a company. It’s a good place to develop those wholesale relationships. And also, you can use hashtags on virtually any of them on LinkedIn. But like other platforms, of course, the theme across all of this is no promoting sales or specials or anything on virtually any platform except for X. But that’s got its own issues, and we’ll get there.

You still can’t advertise THC, CBD, or hemp. And it definitely, it truly isn’t the place for B2C content. It tends to look really weird. Like, you know, we know some folks and we love them, and there’s others that, I won’t call it any names, but they, I’ve seen them use it almost as, like they would use Instagram or Facebook or any of these other platforms.

And when you’re in LinkedIn, you’re not in that mindset. You know, you’re there for your business to, maybe you’re trying to develop a connection, to find a job or you’re generating leads. Whatever it is, you’re not looking for messaging around the hours of operation of your business or your newest sale or special. So kind of just thinking about it from the professional lens, that’s what you do on LinkedIn.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
So then TikTok, sadly, most restrictive. But it’s crazy because TikTok is the place where you can blow up the biggest. If you are really consistent with posting. Kind of the secret to TikTok, I think, is posting so much. I honestly don’t know how these TikTok creators do it. You gotta be very. You have to have low production value to be able to. To post that much. But I think some of the biggest. It’s hard to say.

The people who blow up the biggest on TikTok post an ungodly amount. They’re super active. But, you know, at the same time, it’s, like, so hard for cannabis because you can’t use, you can’t say cannabis, you know, even your captions on your video, you shouldn’t use the word cannabis in, in your subtitles. You got to be using 0U!D to say weed or just, you know, also, zaza, for some reason, is a TikTok term for weed.

Like, I don’t know, so weird stuff like that. You have to be very clever on TikTok, and you also cannot post any consumption, smoking products, flower. The only thing you can really do on TikTok is talk about weed. I had some success talking, you know, interviewing people about weed questions. So there’s no product in it, but we are talking about consumption. We are talking about our experience with weed, but not showing it whatsoever. And even then, you have to be clever, like I said in your captions and stuff, absolutely no promotion of sale. Even then, it’s really tough. I mean, I was trying to find more examples of hashtags that work or words that work for cannabis on TikTok.

And you look up 420, just the numbers, 420, and it’s like, be aware of drugs. It gives you a warning, as if TikTok is trying to, like, protect you from dangerous drugs or something. So it’s very restrictive, but if you play your cards right, you can really find some success.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah. I was going to bring up a story of a client of ours. Their product isn’t available yet, but it will be soon. But they had somebody else post an image of their product in a demo at a trade show on TikTok. Post was removed within 24 hours by TikTok because it was obvious that they were showing actual flower and it was obviously cannabis related.

But still, even with that post going up and being removed within 24 to 48 hours, it generated a ton of buzz and actual ROI. That is one example where we were able to say that this post, because the company is very new, they don’t have a lot out there, they were able to track some genuine sales, early adopters, for their product to this TikTok video that was up for probably less than 24 hours. So even with these being removed, it’s still worth taking a shot at it because you never know. Like, a post can wind up gone within 24 hours, but that post might get you enough traction there to have an impact. So, yep, really interesting world.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
So then, Aaron, I might let you talk about…

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I got a lot of opinions about that. So. So interesting one. I mean, it really is the Wild West. Like I’m saying here, you can post almost any style of content on X, formally Twitter.

I mean, it’s everything. Twitter has adult content, it’s got news, it’s political, it’s everything. So they don’t tend to have any restrictions on the cannabis industry, but I don’t think it’s worth being there. For most brands, from an advertising perspective, they made a big stink this year. Last year, everybody was talking about the fact that you could advertise there, but then when you actually started looking at it, we used the example of Cheech and Chong last summer.

By July, I think it was, they were spending upwards of $500,000 a month for sponsored ads. I can’t see what kind of. It’s insane. I don’t know what the ROI of those ads were. I mean, perhaps it was worth it for them for most, however, you’re not going to be able to spend the level that you must to have any impact on the platform or even to be allowed to advertise there. So it feels like it’s a channel for only those who can afford to do it and can perhaps lose money on it. Because who knows if you’re actually going to get direct ROI from it. From an organic publishing standpoint, under Elon Musk, as we all are hearing constantly, there’s problems with bugs their developers have left. There’s so many issues with publishing there that it’s often not worth the time. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. You have to publish so frequently throughout the day, tweets are buried and I would say they die within 20 minutes. So it just takes this constant care and feeding that we have just not seen benefit brands.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
It’s not like TikTok, where you can have this, like, crazy blow up post and then, like, get super famous. It’s not. The algorithm on X does not work that way. So it’s probably not really worth it for the amount that you have to post to be successful.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Exactly. For most brands, at least currently, it’s not worth spending the time that it takes to actually try to do anything there and use your money and your time elsewhere. There’s also this last bullet that we highlighted. Does X align with your company’s values? I mean, there’s just so many problems with…Under the leadership of Elon Musk and just kind of the politicized nature of the platform, the outrage machine. I like to say that a lot, but it’s really strong. It’s probably strongest there. So we’ve seen industry brands far outside cannabis actually make a point of leaving the platform. Lush is a cosmetics brand that some people may or may not remember. They’re still around. They started with Twitter, X. They made a point of saying, X. The way that they operate, the ownership, it does not align with our brand values, and we’re not willing to sully our brand and our reputation and violate our own values by being there. So they famously left the platform even though they knew it was going to negatively impact their finances, which is wild. And that actually wound up, they wound up leaving social media altogether, which we are not advocating. But I think that in all of this, there’s a question of, does this platform, any platform, does it align with our values as a brand? What does it say about us if we’re operating here? So it’s just a good thing to consider.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I’m going to interject with a question just to take us back a couple of slides. When we were talking, you don’t have to go back, but you all were talking about being bold, being entertaining, not showing product shots necessarily with a big logo slapped on them. Kelly, one of the attendees is saying, I want to take our social in this direction, but leadership is very traditional and only wants branded product images. How can I help communicate the benefits of these types of posts? And we hear this a ton, especially from the larger organizations who come in our door, who say, we just need to check a box. We don’t care if it’s, you know, we don’t care how successful it is. My leadership team wants me to. Wants me to check that box.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, that’s a hard one, SJ. I see. Do you want to, do you want me to take it or you?

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
We could kind of split it, because I think. I think, Aaron, you might have a better idea. You have more experience actually communicating to these higher level people. But I don’t know, I guess I could just take you back to this slide where it’s like you need a strategy bigger than just posting ad like content. You want to think about your brand, who is your brand? What’s your personality? Who is your audience? What do they want to see on social media? These are all questions that if you actually take the time to think about the higher level strategy rather than just the tactics that it takes to produce that kind of content, you’ll kind of like find your answer there. But as far as communicating that to your higher level, Aaron, take it away.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
You bring up excellent points, and there’s something in that that I wanted to bring into communicating that up to leadership. So I think if you are doing the diligence before you go to them, and you create at least the vague outline of a strategy, and you show how that strategy may or may not, could potentially align with an outcome for the business. Because if you’re talking to leadership, you’re pretty much always talking to people who are going to want to know, what’s the ROI? And again, this is a channel where it can be extremely difficult, sometimes impossible, to show direct ROI. But I think just being very clear on that, but then showing a comprehensive strategy, or at least, like I said, the outline of that strategy, and then, as much as you can, aligning that to an outcome and telling them that those outcomes don’t tend to come from strict brand messaging and aligning directly with the brand guidelines.

And I would encourage you to find examples of that within the cannabis industry or honestly, outside of the cannabis industry, like we were talking about, like Liquid Death.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
And Wendy’s.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Radio Shack, which is Radio Shack, is totally unhinged on social, you know, showing some of these examples of well known brands who are doing this very thing, stepping way outside of their comfort zone and seeing success there. That’s probably the best way to communicate that, I think, rather than telling, but making sure that you also have that strategy in there and that you’re speaking their language by ensuring that they know that you’re thinking about the outcome of it and you’re not just wanting to do weird things simply for the sake of it.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Right, right.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I agree 100% with that. We, like I mentioned, too, we’re seeing these larger MSO’s come in the door, and I’m trying to help. It’s either a CMO, a marketing director, a marketing coordinator, somebody who has to present this back to their executive team. Like Aaron says, you want to speak the language that they’re used to hearing. So when we’re saying, let’s go bold and let’s garner a larger conversation, like Aaron’s saying, tie it back to what those goals are for the organization and also consider social.

And sometimes you have to help them understand that, like mentioned before, social is part of a larger marketing mix. It falls into that bigger picture strategy, and it becomes a no brainer. The more that you have that high level framework. Then when it comes to these decisions about, oh, where should we go with social? You’ve already done all the legwork to really, to really build and foster the answer for those.

So then it’s like, of course this is what we’re going to be doing because this is how this one channel may align to the larger picture. I’ll also say, too, that our approach is we don’t go tactic for tactic. We don’t, you know, we don’t kind of check all these boxes in building the strategy. From that comes the, you know, the next level is campaigns. Within those campaigns, then there may be a call for social, there may be a call for email, some of those tactics specifically.

So if we’re talking about tackling something and wondering about ROI, you know, if you’re tying it to a larger campaign that falls under the strategy that speaks back to the business outcomes, these decisions become easier and easier for them to make and for you to pitch.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Aaron and I also definitely consider social media as a place for experimentation. And, you know, at the end of the day, if you can understand that social media won’t, at least in the beginning, like, it might not bring in the ROI that you’re kind of hoping for in the beginning, then you can at least treat it as an experiment. You know, try something new, try four posts that are kind of more out there and see if your audience reacts. And then, you know, if they flop or if your company hates them, you can archive them. Like, I think the stakes are a lot lower than people might imagine on social, especially if you don’t have, like, 100,000 followers. So, you know, treat it as a place to experiment and see where you can bring in your values as a company, see how your company might lend itself to a lifestyle, those are all things worth.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I couldn’t agree more. I mean, in marketing, where you should always be testing anyway, so what better way to test something then the stakes are high if you have a million followers and the lens is on you so deeply that people are looking for a reason to take you down. But for most cannabis businesses, we’re just not there yet for the majority seeing engagement. And while we’re not saying that you should be careless, intention should always be a part of this, but experimental, test things there and then see if what works, what people respond to, and perhaps that’ll help you inform marketing strategies elsewhere, more broader, you can test something on social and learn something that you can apply somewhere else. So I think eliminating some of the stress and the fear around getting bold and being a little bit funky and odd and testing things, getting away from that and being creative is going to be the way to do it.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yep. Well, we’re at 11:59, so we have a couple FAQ questions. Well, here’s our other just main takeaways. Like we just said, have fun, experiment. See what you can do with your social. There’s so much potential. It’s pretty awesome. Remember that people are going to social for entertainment, not advertising. Advertising just happens to be there, but they’re really going for entertainment. And if you want to inspire lifestyle, community, user generated content, you have to give people something worth posting about.

And if there’s one place to throw out your brand book and try something new, it’s social. That’s where I think it will be best received. Keep your brand book in terms of your profile picture, your facebook header, stuff like that. Other than that, experiment. See what happens.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
And I’ve got. When you all are ready to. I know, I know we are at the hour, but we have a slew of questions. SJ and Aaron, you can still hang as well. We can fly through some of these too.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, we’ll just hang out on this slide until we answer some questions. Okay.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
And this slide is great too. Our email addresses are here. The OUI’d Fairy. You can find the Oui’d Fairy here as well. So of course, Jen@hybridmarketingco.com, Aaron@hybridmarketingco.com SJ@hybridmarketingco.com, hit us up with questions. Let’s fly through these. So Beth is asking, how do you find influencers? And I’ll start with an answer here. We have seen some great work coming out of Hi-Curious, Lauren Mundell, if you are on LinkedIn find her, we can also connect you through our organization as well. SJ. Aaron, do you have, do you have thoughts on how you find influencers?

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
No, that’s, I mean, the best thing to do is to work with an influencer agency or somebody specialized in finding them, as you just mentioned. Otherwise, it’s just the heavy lifting of having somebody. You have to be in there, you have to identify the appropriate influencer and then as the brand, you can go out and just message them directly. Do some, hit the pavement and just do some digging and just try to develop those relationships organically. That’s the hardest way to do it. The easiest best way to do it is to go to a consultant who can work specifically with influencers.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I would say from my end, the way that I find people that I should be following on the Oui’d Fairy and people that I should be like connecting with in terms of influencers is find an influencer that you like and then go through their comments, see who else is commenting actively, frequently go through their following, see who they’re following or who’s following them. Also, I’d say accounts like Blazy Susan are good for that kind of thing because they have so much user generated content that you can just scroll through their feed and click on people, find them and then, yeah, dm them. I think, you know, if you want to work with someone, dm them. If they’re pretty active, usually they’ll answer. But I would say, yeah, if you want to go ground floor, I’d say just do some digging on social.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I put, if you want to also email me, I can connect you with Lauren as well and make that introduction. Okay. So can words like CBD and hemp be mentioned in Meta?

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Does Meta allow CBD?

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Totally.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, that’s why you’re even seeing, I mean, you still have to be careful, but we’re, so you’re seeing paid ads for CBD and hemp based cannabis products. So awesome. Not restrictive on that one.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Got it. Is paid media an option for cannabis and Al, maybe if we want to qualify. Do you mean paid social or just paid advertising? We can answer on the paid social, for sure.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Paid social, Twitter and Tumblr or X and Tumblr are the only channels available for social for paid right now. We kind of highlighted that before. X is for most prohibitively expensive and Tumblr, the audience is just not there. No disrespect to Tumblr. We’ve talked, they’re nice folks, but Tumblr has been in decline for a very long time. So when they opened up advertising, we feel that it was probably an attempt to sort of, hey, community, can this community come over here? We’re struggling, but it hasn’t. Nobody’s there, so it’s not necessarily worth the spend.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
And we’ve seen, I’ve seen ads from Cann, if you all are familiar with. Well, they’ve got seltzers, non THC, and they’ve got THC, seltzers and kind of something everywhere in between. We see them on Facebook, they’re on Instagram. Our suspicion is they’ve also got a nice health, they’ve got fantastic branding, they’re incredible, but they probably also have a healthy budget for allowing or encouraging Meta. Aaron, correct me if I’m wrong, to turn a blind eye.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. That adds to that vagueness that we’ve been talking about repeatedly here, Meta, particularly, has never been quite clear about what they will. Well, no, I’ll say it. They’re not quite clear about what they will and won’t allow. You think that you’re doing things right and others are not.

But then you see those people advertising. So that’s the thing. We’ve long hypothesized that it’s a pay to play scenario. So if you’re willing to dump $30,000, $50,000 a month to advertising, Meta, it appears, will take your money, even if you’re a cannabis business. So there’s been some unfairness here for a long time, and we think it just comes down to dollars. Yeah.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Al’s also asking, what channels do you usually suggest brands to leverage, since social is a big no. So maybe social is not a big no.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, yeah.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
So what? Otherwise asking what are their, what other channels? And I think that comes down to that, that structure. I was talking about business outcomes, determining your strategy, determining campaigns within the strategy. And then it’s a marketing mix.

You know, depending if you’re. If you are a brick and mortar dispensary, you can leverage SEO all day long. Local technical, there’s, you know, there’s combinations also. Again, if you’re a dispensary, where we’re seeing high success rates and engagement, when we’re looking at super segmented messaging on the email and SMS side area.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Persona, too, for me, it comes back to Persona. I mean, I think the obvious ones for cannabis are, you know, Instagram and TikTok, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, kind of going down the hierarchy of importance. I think Instagram and TikTok are probably the most essential. TikTok’s, again, the hardest. But I think ultimately what it should come down to is your Persona research.

So if you’re doing your Persona research, you understand your audience deeply. You’re going to know where they hang out digitally. And, I don’t know, maybe for whatever reason, in your area, where your brand is. Facebook is the place where you’ve determined that your audience spends the most time. So that’s where you spend your time there primarily.

So ultimately, I think most everything should come down to Persona. If you understand who your people are, where they are, and how to talk to them, you’ll know which platforms to invest your time and money in.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Here is a good one. My state is medical only, and a part of the patient community online is anti-dispensary. How would you best plan to move forward when you get a lot of hate.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
That’s such a good question. That is a challenging one. I mean, the hate is sort of what inspires the algorithm to continue showing your content to people, but at the same time, you don’t want, that’s not necessarily a game you want to play. That’s a really, that’s a tough one. I think just working with some, I hate to say it, but some boilerplate messaging for how to respond to some of those negative comments is probably the best thing to do.

But I wouldn’t respond to negative comments with the same message every time. That looks so inauthentic, but just getting real and aligned with the folks internally in your company around, Okay, what is a safe way to handle this kind of comment and just having that sort of ready to go so that you can grab it and have an appropriate response. We can dig in. If you reach out to us, that’s a deep one.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, I want to think about that one more because that’s like, there’s, there’s multiple different ways you could go about that. You could, I guess, play into it and kind of push back on these people and lean into the whole, like, you know, people go to social media, like I said, also to be angry and get mad and to voice their opinions, even if they’re totally out of line. So you could play into it, but maybe not the best move. I don’t know.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I mean, I’ll see as an example out of the cannabis industry, if we look at, for example, the oil and gas industry, who typically doesn’t need, they don’t need marketing, except when there’s, all they need, reputation management and some unfortunate cases. But if you look at those larger industries, how they’re embracing it, they’re embracing the hate in a lot of ways. So if the community is pushing back against you, make yourself a pillar in the community by showing up at town halls, by sponsoring, if there’s local five keys, if there’s, within your community, there is, you know, an organization that is near and dear to your heart. Support it. And I’m not saying necessarily be incredibly vocal about your support, but show that you are part of the community that they exist in almost.

When I say embrace the hate, it’s, I mean, we see it in, well, sometimes in politics, we see it in those larger industries where you come in again, oil and gas is a huge, is a huge example where they’re really trying to humanize the brand, put a face to your brand, get out in the community, say, I am you and you, there’s great benefits. That’s sometimes where there’s education, what people don’t know, they’re afraid of. That’s where there’s some education opportunities where you can, you know, if we’ve got, like, an older generation who are coming in, we want to avoid them having a really negative experience with gummies, for example. Dig into it and, you know, of course, I’m sure your skin is already thick, but there’s, but there are, because you’re in cannabis. But there are ways to just go right into the fire with, you know, and with heart, I think, and really show who you are as an organization. And that authentication message, I think will resonate.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Oh, I totally agree with that. That’s great, Jen. Yeah, good insight.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
I want to circle back just one last little piece, because Al did provide clarification on. He’s looking for paid, just paid. So this is kind of outside, outside of social. He’s asking specifically on out of home marketing and programmatic. So I just answered him really quickly on out of home.

Depending on your, depending on what you’re peddling and where you’re peddling it, out of home can be great. You know, direct mail, billboards. Again, there’s going to be, as you know, restrictions within your state. You mentioned Al, in your question, programmatic. Keep in mind, the consumer or customer base has to be in the consideration phase for programmatic to work.

So if nobody knows who you are, you’ve got to take a step back and do the things that are going to build awareness and then move into. That’s where, you know, programmatic will take your money all day long. Those, those programs, and they are highly effective in cannabis. But again, the strategy is if you’ve got, if people already know who you are, that’s a great time to then introduce programmatic into the marketing mix. I think I got through most questions.

There’s one question. An organization that’s got a business as a cannabis festival trying to sell tickets. How do we sell tickets without being obnoxious or being ignored? We’re a mix of funny educational giveaways and sales.

Right now, if you all have Aaron and SJ, if you have any tips there, I also drop my email. I can also help with a larger conversation.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, that’s one. I mean, I think, please talk to us because that would require, to me, that moves far beyond social. That makes me want to think about, you know, like a full, a strategy that includes social but full marketing mix there. So thinking about as a component of the overall strategy to sell tickets to the event and drive awareness.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
So keep there. I think we covered most of the questions. If we missed any, our email addresses are here. Find us on LinkedIn. We’re happy to chat.

I’ll also say thank you. Thank you for hanging out all the way through the webinar. SJ and Aaron have a treat for you. Well, you tell them.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Oh, yeah, yeah. If you guys want to reach out to us, we want to offer a free social media consultation where you can ask us virtually anything. So just reach out via email and we’ll be happy to connect with you and have a conversation if you’d like.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
And that’s where we can also take a deeper look at your business, too, and kind of say, hey, social might be a great way to go. Or we found on your website the customer journey is broken. Let’s kind of back up a little bit and kind of fix that. That way, if we’re driving leads to your organization, we want to make sure that what you’ve got, whether it’s a website, ecom, whatever that looks like, makes it really easy for people to transact, however that, however that may look for your company.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yep.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Yeah, I think, I think we’re, I think we’ve covered so much. Thank you, SJ and Aaron. Always my lovely team who I love working with daily.

SJ Gingras, Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Love you. Jen. This was awesome. Thank you so much for having us.

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, Hybrid Marketing Co.
Thank you, everyone, for attending and asking great questions. And reach out to us if you’d like to talk. Yeah, we’re here for you.

Jen Lamboy, Director of Strategy, Hybrid Marketing Co.
All right, thanks all.