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This week, Dan Mondello, co-founder and CEO of Rank Really High joins the Cannabis Equipment News podcast to discuss advertising that works, AI budtenders, and the astounding lack of professionalism in the industry.
Dan Mondello was running a pair of digital advertising businesses in Minneapolis when Massachusetts legalized recreational-use cannabis. He looked up a couple of dispensary websites, saw that they needed a lot of help and registered the Rank Really High domain the same day.
Mondello had developed a digital marketing playbook that was successful in the automotive and home services industries, and he thought he could do the same in cannabis. He soon realized the errors of his way as he immediately ran into challenges, like advertising restrictions on Google, Facebook and Instagram. While he dove right into the industry, he found the pool to be really shallow. But instead of walking away, he built a new playbook as well as a digital marketing platform for dispensaries.
Mondello built a comprehensive web platform that serves as a hub for all online retail marketing for dispensaries, and it integrates directly into a dispensary's website—so, no more iframes.
Jump around:
- Advertising that works for cannabis. (5:01)
- How digital marketing is different in cannabis. (5:57)
- Launching Rank's e-commerce hub for online retail marketing for dispensaries. (7:38)
- The one thing he would tell every cannabis operator about digital marketing. (12:08)
- What cannabis dispensaries should be doing on their homepages. (19:08)
- How cannabis operators are falling down on data. (20:27)
- His love/hate relationship with blogs. (21:10)
- Why most info in your point-of-sale system is bad. (26:10)
- The low-hanging fruit for SEO and digital marketing. (28:29)
- Why Massachusetts just declared war on the words "special" and "deal." (33:01)
- Why Green Wednesday will surpass 4/20 as the top cannabis holiday. (37:12)
- The AI budtender. (42:24)
- The current state of e-commerce in cannabis. (45:19)
- The astounding lack of professionalism in the cannabis industry. (50:00)
