FAQ Big Ideas, Small Paragraphs
What is it?: HighFrequency amplifies your brand's impact through sound, by leveraging the valuable time you otherwise waste during customer visits. It's a free digital platform of customized "radio stations" specifically developed for cannabis retail. The service enhances the shopping experience and produces a measurable lift at POS by engaging customers through music, cannabis news blips and product messaging. Budtenders and Marketing teams feel supported through continuous customer education on new products and sale items. And after an introductory period, your business is legally protected by covering your retail music licensing fees.
What's Your Audio Strategy: HighFrequency is for cannabis retailers who want to grow their margins, extend their branding, develop more engaged buyers, and strengthen their business against increased consolidation. The world's biggest retailers employ audio to connect with their customers. Some stores use background music (ambience) while others are more foreground (image). HighFrequency represents a third way, playing situationally appropriate music at a conversational level married with relevant spoken content. This technology didn't even exist until a few years ago, we hope we get the chance to show what it can do for you.
Short Breaks: HighFrequency features 5 short breaks an hour with 7 commercial minutes total. That's less than half the commercials of local radio, about the same as free Spotify or Pandora. And the majority of these commercials advertise products already in stock at the dispensary. You've probably had the experience of being lost in thought in your car and you suddenly "wake up" because of something you heard on the radio. That's your mind lowering your perceptual screen, when it hears something relevant to you. The cannabis focused commercials and feature content on HighFrequency work just like that, with your customers.
Why Not Do It Yourself: It's the way it's done in most dispensaries, with an employee playlist, Pandora or Spotify. This route loses your marketing channel and hands your audio strategy to people with no experience engaging listeners. If you've paid for commercial music services, you've already been disappointed. The HighFrequency platform is created by pros who have developed large, continuously measured audiences in cities across the U.S. They're applying the same macro-level scientific and creative principles to producing exceptional, mindful outcomes for dispensaries.
Where It's Going: The HighFrequency Mobile App will feature compelling cannabis digital media, contesting, consumer channel streams, news and industry ads from vendors and dispensaries. As part of the compensation for affiliating, dispensary partners earn an annual budget good for geofenced campaigns on the mobile app. We want to help stores create a lift in store as well as reach new customers around the neighborhood. While the first priority is to build the store network, the mobile app will follow shortly to join the company's ecosystem.
Personalized Radio: The stations are customized with audio content specific to each store. Creative for the channels is developed through a collaborative "sprint" of goal setting and idea development. Typical areas of focus include dispensary specific branding, free ads for house owned product lines, loyalty campaigns, apparel support, store cross-promotion, recurring thematic elements, employee recruitment and cause‑oriented marketing.
How Is HighFrequency Free: The program is a powerful and affordable way for your cannabis vendors to use our ad partner to book and serve audible messaging to customers in store. By advertising products you're already carrying, the program achieves a win/win. Ideally, all of your MIP and flower suppliers will take advantage of the low-rates to get on the air. In order to create meaningful impressions for the ad campaigns, we're focused on working with dispensaries that accommodate a lot of traffic volume (ideally 750+ customers per week). This benchmark isn't a requirement, but the breakeven point for creating content is dependent on the reach of the total network.
Quality Control: Rigorous guidelines steer your vendor's commercial copywriting and production before they can run on the platform. Spots need to be pleasing to the ear with no yelling, condescending tone or disparagement of other products. Their effectiveness is directly tracked against sales, so vendors can optimize their audible campaigns for stores in the same way they would track conversions on websites, social media and mobile. Most importantly, store managers have the final say and if a spot throws off a store's vibe or creates a conflict they can reject it.
The Channels: HighFrequency comes to market with six exciting and diverse music channels. Each target a specific consumer segment and mood, so dispensaries can select the right station to properly engage their changing flow of customers throughout the day. If a store's traffic patterns are predictable, channel changes can also be automated to match that pattern (with the option to manually override). You could start the day playing Flower Power for customers 60+, followed by working women (Indicative and Hybrid) then younger, male skewed customers (Chronic, ChronicG & Resin8).
Tell Me More: Call or email to see if we might be a good fit.