Analyzing the Top Cannabis Dispensary Websites

What’s going on, everyone back at it again with another video, I’m really excited to share this with you, because, you know, have you ever wanted to have a multimillion dollar marketing budget, but just not have the multimillion dollars to be able to spend on marketing? well, a few of these businesses do, right.

So what I’ve done is I’ve taken a look at some of the top dispensary, listings to see what they’re doing. Well, maybe what I would probably improve on, and different things like that. So you can go ahead and gleam some of the insights that they’re doing already so that you don’t have to go and spend those millions of dollars.

And I can go ahead and tell you right away. So without further ado, I’m gonna hop right into it. So, I’ve done a decent amount of research on a few dispensaries and I picked, I think five or six, but P right here, looking in Las Vegas has probably the most reviews I’ve ever seen out of any dispensary. and they have 28,000 reviews, which is absolutely insane.

So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna dive in, see what these, some of these reviews look like, how are they getting more reviews? Then I’m gonna take a look at their website and see what they’re doing well on their website, to help better improve their business. So scrolling down here, we can look at the reviews right here.

And like, in my last video, I mentioned that there are four main things that you need to focus on in order to help better reviews for your, for your dispensary. Right? The first one is good customer service. That’s like, Hey, you know, in this example it says Liz, Haley and Victoria were such a great help with everything.

So that’s good customer experience. Then a good buying experience is like, see how this person says super clean, classy inside. Everything’s good. That’s like how the buy actual buying experience is. Right. You know, products in products in stock, does a store look great, that sort of thing. The third one is, price, right? So good pricing of, the product, right? So here it says price fits and then, good quality product.

So those are the four main, categories that you’re gonna see, kind of come along as I go through and review some of these reviews, right? Because the biggest spot where you can go ahead and make more money for your business is doing what your customers like and doing less of what your customers dislike.

That’s all you really need to do. Right? So here we can see Sierra says there’s Haley and Victoria were such a great help with everything. Very polite staff, super clean, classy price fits inside the bougie environment. I love it my first time here. And it won’t be my last fantastic review, right? If we scroll down here, you can see that everything, the opposite of that is why this person gave, one star review.

So bad customer service, horrible and rude prices are whatever I will pay for a good product, but I would pay more for good service. Right. I got pre-rolls just something fast and ready. It was not very good, right? So not good customer service, prices are whatever the product wasn’t good. and they didn’t have a really good experience, right.

And typically in terms of reviews, you’re gonna find them polarized, right? You’re gonna find them five star reviews or one star review. So continuing down here, we can see SICE wrote another really good review down here, down here, one star review, right? Five star review, five star review, five star review.

So there’s, a a, not very many things that you can do in terms of, getting more reviews. Right. And I don’t say that in a way that is super simple, but a lot of times the simple things is what’s gonna help you drive more reviews and drive more people coming back to your business. Right? And if this business can help you get 20 can get 28,000 reviews, you for sure can go ahead, and get at least a fraction of this.

Right? So now going to their website, we can see that their website says now accepting curbside and delivery orders online, which is great. I like this a lot because it immediately provides value to the, the, the customer and the customers that are visiting the website. Right. because a lot of times I see dispenser, you just have a big logo.

Boom. of just, their business right here, but it really doesn’t do anything cuz they probably know who you are already just based on them visiting, the website. And you can probably have a logo on the top left right here as well. Right? So this immediately transfers value towards the customer and it’s like, okay, these guys get it.

They know what I want. And they’re here to say that I have it already. Right? So this is great. Not only that they’re call to actions are very bold. So you can see just in this bright, ishish yellow, I would say more gold. they have their call to actions and sometimes people put their call to actions and they put them with like a transparent background, but you want them to stand out, right? You want your visitors to take some sort of action on the website.

And if you don’t have these buttons prominent, they’re just gonna be scrolling aimlessly and then end up scrolling off. Right. Scrolling down here, you can see their website is super, super simple, right? They have the deal section here. They reemphasize the deals. They give you the phone number and then they talk about the curbside pickup.

And then a little bit, a little bit of information about the store and then in-store pickup again, right? So you don’t need to go overboard. Right? These guys have 28,000 reviews. they’re probably doing very, very well. and they don’t have anything too complex on their website, right. Maybe with SEO, they can slowly improve.

But one thing that would definitely mention is this section here is that, you know, if you do have any sort of deals or you have any sort of product available, you need to have it linked towards the thing that you are promoting. So if I want 20% off flour and 10% off everything else, ideally this would then go to, like a, this image would ideally click that takes me to the shop page or they’d be a button that says shop now for discounted products.

Right. because what ends up happening is that I like this offer. And then now I need to go ahead and find the button to do it. And what you also need to take into consideration when optimizing your website is improving conversion. But what does that mean? It means reducing friction for getting like reducing the friction.

It takes for your customers to get what they want. Right. And a lot of times it’s just the contact information and the shopping and they have that all here. So if you want to shop, you can have all these buttons. You can have the contact button here as well. But what does that also mean? It also means that, Hey, if I wanna find the directions, I should be able to find it easily.

If I want to, find your contact form, I should be able, able to find it easily. Right. Another thing is reducing friction in getting trust with your customers, right? cuz a lot of times, if they’re first time buyers, they want to know that your business is good enough, for me in order to give you my money.

Right? So how do you do that? You help improve, social proof and testimonials. There’s different ways you can help improve the authority of your website. But again, you wanna prove the conversions by reducing friction with your customers. That’s all you really want to do. Right? Another thing that I would do is it says now open 24, 7 delivery deliveries will take place from 7:00 AM to midnight daily.

I would also have a clickable section here that says, okay, I wanna do this. Let me click here. And then take me to, the delivery page or the curbside pickup page, whatever it is, right. Overall, very, very simple website, which is what I really wanted to get across. Like you don’t need big blocks of text to do anything.

You just need to get the point of cross so that your customers have what they want in a very easy way. Right? Another dispensary here, located in Los Angeles, they almost have 7,000 reviews. They actually have 6,500 reviews. and then taking a look at some of the reviews down here, let’s see, great face to find everything you need.

This place gets very busy. So be sure to check on the iPad as soon as you walk into secure spot online. so if they have an iPad here to essentially, facilitate the buying experience, right? Because they know that there’s a lot of people that come on it, right? I went, I went twice before I left. and if I could have, I would’ve went to third time, this is great.

See, all the staff were extremely helpful and friendly, right? Don’t buy marijuana from anyone or any place on this trip. They have a shuttle from all the hotels to them and back 24 hours a day. So this is really, really good, right? This is a key note to that. If this is ant on their website already, and I’m gonna take a look, this is something that this customer liked, right? So by showcasing that you do have a shuttle, this will help bring in a little bit more customers right down here.

Okay. I’ve been in a lot of pot shops being from Washington. This one is awesome, right? So again, I’m big on naturally grown, zero pesticide, et cetera. And they have a great selection for that. Right? Secondly, our bud tender unfortunately forgot her name. She’s pregnant. I know my Bud’s pretty good.

So I went with her recommendations of why we love it and want it more, right? So it, you, the investment you make in the bud tenders that you hire will directly translate to that buying experience and that customer service experience, which will then directly translate to you getting more sales, to getting more loyal customers and to making more money.

Right? Cause a lot of these people say, they’re gonna come back again. So, taking a look at their website, super simple again, right? Call to action here, shop cannabis here, scroll down here. and what I do like about this is you can say, you can see here that they put verbs next to their buttons. So it says, shop cannabis here.

Doesn’t just say cannabis. And it says online ordering now available click to begin your order. So ideally what you want with your buttons is you want a verb that prompts your visitors to take an action on the website, click shop, order, call, whatever it is. because verbs tell somebody to do, do something it’s like jump right, run, sprint, click, shop, all of these things subconsciously get your customer to doing the things that you want them to do on your website.

Right. Which is shopping, down here, super simple little about section. And then they have the deals, questions ready to order local 24, 7 Las Vegas dispensary. One thing that I would potentially do is that like it’s, you know, I’ve, I’ve done a few, you know, a little bit of research on just giving, dispensary websites to my friends.

I’m like, Hey, what are you looking at this website? What do you see? Cuz they’re the customer ultimately. Right? and a lot of times they’re looking for the deals, but if we can see here, the only section they have is right here, I’m just gonna scroll down quickly. They, they don’t really have anything else to do with deals.

Right? So in order for me to get these deals, I need to click here. And then I go to this section and then the deals pop up. Right? And this isn’t some crazy section on a website. You can probably put this on the homepage. Right. and get people coming in through the door, cuz you know that if anybody visits your website, they’re going to visit the homepage for sure.

And that’s the most important piece of real estate on your site. So why not put some of your daily discounts on the homepage so that you can get more people coming through the door, which I think would be pretty important. Another one is, we, I mentioned that there was the person that spoke about the shuttles, right? in order for me to find the shuttles, I need to now scroll down, go to shuttle service and same thing with deals.

Right? So maybe highlighting that up here, you know, as a customer. Right. I know that this is all in the, the, the dropdown section, but I may just dismiss this. I may not even see it. but knowing that you have a shuttle service and knowing that there’s a deal section, you can have this here, right.

And you don’t need to have a big section about, you don’t need to have all this information here. All you need to do is say, you know, if you’re looking for shuttle services, schedule pickup, or get more information here, right. Or even have this, on the homepage of the website, because this is something that, you know, brings in customers through the door.

So this is something that you should definitely at least trying AB tests and to see if this improves, your chances of bringing in, more customers through the door. Right. So if you don’t have a shuttle, don’t have to worry about that. But the key takeaway is that I want you to go ahead, take a look at all of your reviews.

If you haven’t already and see, okay, what have these businesses done? Well, what have they not done well? And how do I, apply some of the strategies and the techniques that these big businesses are doing with their million dollar marketing budget and apply that to my own business, right? And the scale is just gonna be slightly lower, but you know that these guys have, you hope that these guys have done the research, to help better their business.

So then you can apply that for your own store as well. this business Jardi is six. They have 6,000 reviews. And then, you know, I won’t continue looking at the reviews. You get it. But the takeaway is that you need to have good customer service, good buying experience, good quality products, and then good quality, good pricing products, right? So down here you can say, you can see love, love, love this place.

Before coming to Vegas, I researched several dispensaries and knew I had to come to this one. Okay. So this person is a person that does a lot of research on visiting dispensaries and seeing which one’s the best, right? Can’t say enough about this, the best dispensary in Vegas, hands down, the best bud tenderer I’ve ever had Kira.

So, or Kira, I’m not sure, but anyways, you can see here that he even had an update second day in a row. I’ve been in shout out to the whole crew from making customers feel like family. I rarely feel like the staff at any retail shopping appreciates their customers, but not here. This is insane because we know that we need to give a good customer experience.

But a lot of times we just drop the ball on the simple things, right? We want to go ahead and see if there’s some sort of secret marketing technique, secret marketing strategy to help grow your business. But no, it’s very much in the simple things and what you can do and what you can control are these things you don’t need to spend millions of dollars on making sure that you hire the right people.

You just need to pay enough attention to make sure that they’re doing the right job. That’s all you need to do. And these reviews say the exact same thing. If we’re talking about sample size, that’s 6,000 people who are emotionally polarized in what they like and what they dislike. And all you need to do for your retail location is do, is do the exact same thing.

Going to their website, is there’s a lot going on. but there’s a few strategies in here that I want to mention and you don’t need to apply all of these things, but I just want to make sure that you know, that they exist in the first place. First things first, you can see the call to action here. Great.

Another thing is they have this live chat widget, which I really, really like. It’s just another way for your customers to get in and contact you because if your customers contact you, they ask you what your hours are. They ask you. If you have a product in stock, all these different things, the percentage chance that they’re gonna come in and now start working with your BI, not working, sorry.

Start purchasing from your business is a lot higher cuz you don’t go in and just randomly ask businesses when they’re open and what products do they have in stock? You don’t do that, right? You only do it if you’re interested. So if you can unlock another customer channel to speak with people you’re gonna like immediately see an increase in customers because a lot of people just have the contact form on their website and you know, as well that I do that, nobody’s filling out that contact form.

All right, what else are they doing? Very well? They’re adding the social proof and testimonial. So when I was talking about reducing, friction, they immediately have, a high authority badges and awards on their website so that customers can immediately trust what they do. Best dispensary, dispensary of the year, best budtender, best cannabis company to work for like insane stuff.

Like it would be almost unreasonable for me not to think that this dispensary is a good one because of all these reviews that they have, these awards that they have. And then all of these awards that they have down here as well. Right. What else do they do? They have the product categories, which people shop for, they have, the branding about social media.

They have more branding about YouTube channel with influencers and they have some press, right? So again, nothing too complicated. But one thing that I do wanna point out is again, when you promote a deal, when you promote anything, you want to make sure that in order for me to get the thing that you’re promoting is just to click away.

So here it says, receive a penny, one eighth with your university ID. That’s fine. But here it says daily specials. I’m clicking here. We’re the daily specials. Like, you know, I, I want to be able to see what daily specials and deals that you have available. And even if I scroll up here, maybe I go through products, let’s see if there’s anything here.

Um, nothing really. Right. So they have, you’ll, they’re gonna be implementing a $5 delivery fee. Okay, great. they have some offers here, which is really, really good. let me see. So are these offers part of the daily offers? Do they have, does this change out every single time? Do I need to make sure I grab this offer now? Or does this, is it the same offer Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, like, you know, what are the deals? What are the offers, right? What are you offering me as a customer that I can come in and purchase from your business? Right.

Loyalty. I think this is probably just, yeah, just like a wallet. So you can sign up for SMS stuff, but overall, these guys are doing a really good job in establishing social proof and establishing why their business should earn your trust and why you should purchase from them. Let’s see Herber, we dispensary Los Angeles marijuana.

So, you know, if you know a little bit about the SEO stuff, this, is, is, you know, it, it helps ’em out a little bit. let’s see scrolling down. So they’re at 4.3 reviews. So let’s dive on in and see what type of reviews that they are getting. So not as high as everyone else, but let’s see. So I can see here, this is something to, to, to take into consideration.

It says scammers spam, karma. So there’s a lot of things to, to explore. And let’s see what they’re saying. This product was not received scammers. It seems we’re getting attacked by some illegal entities in the industry. We’ve been getting attacked for a long time. These illegals are getting more and more desperate green corner and some name of their illegal entities.

So Cowe so, I’m not sure if this is again, I, I don’t know. I don’t know who’s telling the truth. Right. But do dispensaries scam people, like what does that mean? Right. You know, stop scamming people, fake review, spot cash, only scammers fake review spot. So we can see it’s the exact same thing. So they probably are getting attacked.

Now that I’m looking at it from my own marketing professional, opinion. It does look like these reviews are probably thing, but they’re doing the right thing. Right. They’re responding to the reviews and addressing the reviews themselves. Cuz you can see here, the reason why they’re scammers, it says a Google user, a Google user, right? like by having, by it saying a Google user, not the person’s name, you can tell that this person’s account probably got deleted.

So again, all you can really do is keep reporting them and then reply to the messages to say, Hey, okay. Like, you know, we are getting attacked. Like there’s nothing you can really do. but you do also have some really good reviews that you can go ahead and say, Hey, you know, there’s, this is a really, I’m not gonna read the entire thing, but this is a really good review for the people that are, looking are actually looking at the reviews, right? So they’re getting some good, reviews, but again, great customer service experience plus great deals all around will definitely be back.

Right? So they have some really, really good stuff going on. So absolutely love this place 20% off your first time as you continue to purchase items, you gain deals and rewards. So far I received three rewards and I’ve only been three times. I definitely recommend ask for Angelina, right? So the deals, the discounts, customer service, same stuff.

I’m gonna say the same thing over and over again. let’s take a look at their website. So, looking at their website, this is what I was talking about. The transparent button. you can see here, like, you know that you know that this button is like the button to click. Whereas here, if I’m just quickly scrolling and trying to figure out what’s going on, I may BI I may bypass this button.

What else? here, the featured products is cool. a higher level strategy is you can start partnering with brands to unlock another revenue channel. I, you know, if you have any questions about that, definitely let me know. But this is a really cool way. You can start incorporating brands to not only get more money, if you do brand partnerships and brand deals, because like your website is now an advertising platform or you can sell your higher margin products or your slightly expiring products, whatever you can do.

I I’m, I am a fan of having featured products here, recommended products or customer favorites, just whatever it is because people are gonna see this. Now what we want to do is we wanna make sure that each of the product links to the actual product, right. Cuz that’s something I see quite often. So let’s see, I’m gonna click here.

Checking if this site connection is secure, let see, sorry. We couldn’t find the page you were looking for. Okay. So it looks like the featured products and this is interesting because the Fe the top featured products on their website. Yeah. So it says it doesn’t look like it’s available. Right. I’m just check this pre-roll page.

Okay. The pre-roll page works. Right. But it looks like they have some deals and they don’t have these products anymore. Right. So what does this mean? It means that people are gonna click here, see that there’s no product and immediately leave cuz you’re increasing friction for your customers to get what they want.

Not only did they were in, not only were they interested in this product, but they, you don’t even sell this product anymore. Right? So these are the small foundational things that are easily overlooked. And that’s why you need like a company like, like us, you know, if you wanna, start working with Canada and marketing is like, we will make sure we will take a look at your website to make sure that all these links are working and to make sure that the foundational things of your business are working.

Right. Cause these are the things that you, as a business owner are easily gonna overlook. Right? you’re gonna leave a featured products page up there and then you’re gonna completely forget about it. And then boom, next thing you know, the product links aren’t there and you’re losing customers, right? customer reviews.

Again, I like the customer reviews, but you can tell that these pictures are, are tidy. I’m not saying that these reviews are, are, are wrong in any sense, but in most cases when you see reviews, right? It’s not like a, a fancy picture, right. It is just, you know, a picture that works well. That’s great. but typically in terms of reviews, you don’t see reviews being like LinkedIn quality, reviews in terms of like the picture itself right down here.

This is Alpine IQ. If I’m not mistaken. Yep. you know, one thing that I would recommend is that don’t just say, sign up for text and email blast. I am giving you my phone number. I’m giving you my email and you need to provide me some sort of value in exchange. Right? Sure. It says promotion events and merge tailored to you.

But what does that actually mean? If you go to any of the, the fashion websites and you go to, like, let’s say ULO or H and M they all say get $5 off of your order. If you off your next order, if you, you know, sign up with SMS or get 15%, whatever, they give you a discount, but they give you a quantitative measurement of the value you’re getting.

And then why you’re giving me why you’re giving them your text message, your, your, your phone number. Right? Cause again, I don’t want to continually get a bunch of emails and text message is sent to me, right? Like that already happens way too much already. So we need to make sure that you can provide enough value, to your customers in order to get the information they want.

Right. and I think that’s about it. One interesting thing here is they say select location and then I have to click here, but they, it looks like they only have one location anyways. So just something that you need to consider, right? So they are getting a lot of reviews in the LA area. They are ranking well, but you can see that there’s some things that they can do to optimize their website, to help improve the chances that people will come in and purchase from them.

Right. Cause there’s a lot of things that they can do. And I, you know, I wanted to bring up this website, cuz like I said, not all these websites are perfect. Right? there are different things that you can do to improve and you don’t need to go ahead and try and do a billboard campaign or buy some super bowl commercials.

All you really need to do is like your foundation, look at your principles and make sure those are all working well. Right. same thing here, right? Have a click herbarium offering LA delivery then like why as well might as well make this a button that’s says shop now because you never know who goes there.

Right. Let’s see what else we have this exclusive Ann Arbor, marijuana and cannabis dispensary with almost 3000 reviews. I won’t go through their reviews again. You, you get the point, but you can see, efficient, efficient is one of the words that this tender’s hell efficient and kept me well informed this place is so easy, efficient and has high quality products, right? Efficient is a word that is being used a lot convenient drive through pickup.

All of these different things contribute to the buying experience of your business. And you need to make sure you provide the best buying experience as possible going to their website, very simple order online, call us directions down here. They have the hours address, email, and then they have a map right about, they have the reviews here too, which is really awesome.

So, I don’t need to go there. The reviews are great because again increases social proof and you can see these come from Google. So as opposed to these reviews, you can see, you know, which one do you think is slightly higher and more authoritative? Probably these ones. Cuz you can see that they come directly from Google, right? 4.6 rating out of 2,830 for reviews.

Absolutely crushing it down here, working with the top cannabis brands. So again, increasing authority and then order exclusive now order online, same thing here. I would want to provide some sort of tangible benefit of me providing my email. and then maybe the buttons, this is pink, a bright pink.

So if there this, this, this brand is not afraid to use pink and sort in, in their branding, you know, might as well make these buttons bright pink so that they can stick out a little bit more. I potentially make the, the argument that they can have a live chat widget down here. And then one thing that I would probably mention is, making your menu sticky because when you scroll down, you never know when your customers, you know, want, you know, want to, to, to come in and buy product from you.

So, having the sticky menu, it always has those prompts. So you always have maybe a phone number directions and then like a shot button so that people can always, you know, find the button that, that they want to, to go to. Right. Always about improving conversions. So, you know, taking a look at all these websites, again, PSOs with 28,000 reviews all the way down to exclusive having almost 3000 reviews like the market data is there.

Right. You just need to go ahead and put in a little bit of work, put in a little bit of effort in order to help you, get more customers. Right. So, let me, let me bring myself essential over here. I’ll make myself a little bit bigger. So, you know, I, this was probably a lot, right? you know, there’s conversions to think about there’s testimonials to think about there’s social proof.

There’s taking a look at Google reviews. There’s a lot of things, right. But you know, if you want me to go through your website to maybe do a deep dive on all the things I did on this client’s website, feel free to shoot me a message. you can go to my website. It’s can bud marketing, I’ll show you right here.

Can bud marketing, all you really need to do is either, you know, you can either, schedule a chat down here in the bottom right corner, or you can schedule a strategy session right here. And then, you know, we can figure out the best time and date that works. Right. and that’s pretty much it, like I said, day in and day out, all I’m doing is looking to see how dispensaries can help grow and how they can be better.

And that’s exactly what I do for my clients. So if that’s something that you’re interested in and you wanna work with us, I can about marketing, feel free to, schedule a strategy session, or, just shoot me a quick text, text message down here, but that’s all there is for me. And I’ll see you guys on the next episode.

Thanks. Bye.