Minnesota's patient program growing 120% per year since 2015

Analysis of zip code level patient statistics

Take a real-live look at the growth of the cannabis industry over time – using zip code-level patient statistics, we’ve been able to understand how quickly Minnesota's Medical Cannabis program has developed and which areas have seen the highest demand. 

Minnesota’s program grew from around just 900 patients in July 2015 to nearly 15,000 in January 2019 (the beginning of this year). That represents an impressive 120% year-over-year growth (or 7% month-over-month). The distinction of highest-demand zip code goes to Apple Valley (zip code 55124), a suburb of Minneapolis, with 168 patients located there alone. This is unsurprising: as the figure below shows, patient growth has been fastest in and around major metropolitan areas.

Growth of Minnesota Medical Patients

Ultimately, our data allows clients to answer their most important business questions in a fast-changing industry, using a detailed understanding of demand to optimize store locations and to select new markets to enter.

Looking to use data to supercharge your growth? Check out CannaRadar, our proprietary sales software, or get in touch to discuss bespoke analytics solutions for your business.

Reaching Qualified Leads with CannaRadar

Qualifying Your Leads

Effective email marketing requires narrowing down the universe of potential customers to those who are most likely to purchase your product. Spammy-sounding cold emails are unlikely to receive a lot of engagement from the busy decision makers you’re trying to reach and can threaten your marketing campaign if they are reported by recipients. Conversely, when you know the characteristics of your target customer, you can create content tailored to their business that seems more personal and genuine.

Higher Data’s cannabis license database, CannaRadar, makes it easy to figure out qualified leads is for your business and helps you find fresh qualified leads each month. CannaRadar contains ~35,000 licensed cannabis businesses, with sales intelligence about each company. Subscribers are able to search through the data and mark current customers. From this, you can start to identify characteristics of current customers that might be indicative of your target customer archetype.

For example, if you sell to dispensaries, you may see in CannaRadar that you currently supply dispensaries that are, on average, in the 50-75th percentile in terms of price, in highly competitive regions, and not stocking products from your competitors. From these characteristics you can hone your message to focus on what likely customers care about (e.g., differentiation from competitors, getting a good deal, or stocking the best products). Or, if you sell to cultivators or growers, you can find all the largest growers in terms of square footage / number of plants in just recreational states on the West Coast.

Once you have a good understanding of who your target customers are, you can use the pre-set filters in CannaRadar to generate a list of high-potential qualified leads for your company.

CannaRadar by License Type (approx.)

• Dispensaries and Delivery
• Manufacturers
• Distributors
• Growers
• Other

• Dispensaries and Delivery
• Manufacturers
• Distributors
• Growers
• Other

CannaRadar Top 10 Brands by Store Coverage

1. Stiiizy
2. Raw Garden
3. BAREWOODS
4. Select
5. Smashed
6. Pure Vape
7. Flav
8. Heavy Hitters
9. Golden Leaf Scientifics
10. Kiva Confections

Contacting Your Leads

CannaRadar goes the final mile and provides you with the tools to get in touch with your focused list of qualified leads. To start, you can use business and owner emails and phone numbers to create campaigns and schedule meetings to discuss how your product can help meet the specific needs of the identified customer type. CannaRadar also offers alternative ways to reach out to businesses like links to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook profiles so that you can easily Direct Message future customers. Finally, you also get access to business websites for further research for for you to reach out through contact forms directly.

A great product or service only leads to a great business if you’re able to make customers aware of how it will help their company. CannaRadar makes this easier so that you can focus on delivering a great experience for your customers.

To download a free CannaRadar data sample or subscribe today, click here.

Are my prices too high or too low? Using zip code level data to beat the competition

While many cannabis businesses are using data for market research, few dispensaries in competitive markets analyze local data to understand how their business stacks up against their peers.

In this first installment of our public research blog, we break down the cutthroat market for marijuana flower in Los Angeles by investigating prices at the zip code level. This post will draw on Higher Data’s proprietary retail price data that aggregates real-time prices from dispensary menus across the United States and Canada. 

How can dispensaries set better prices?

The average price of a gram of cannabis in California does little to inform how a dispensary manager should set prices. Customers shopping for cannabis near the popular Venice Boardwalk in Los Angeles will expect to pay higher prices than customers on the outskirts of town. To make more informed pricing decisions, managers need more granular local data that can show market conditions in their town or even their zip code. Similarly, this data can help growing businesses decide the most profitable areas to open new dispensary branches. 

Our analysis shows how powerful local data can be using the example of Los Angeles County. To analyze how prices vary across the county, one type of product is selected: one gram of marijuana flower. Cannabis extracts and edibles as well as high end flower products like moon rocks and lower end products like trim and stems are excluded to create a consistent, unbiased price index. Higher Data’s retail price data covers 1,562 dispensary storefronts in Los Angeles county. Each dispensary is given equal weight by first calculating the mean price of one gram of flower in each store and then calculating the mean price for all dispensaries in each zip code. 

Average flower prices, by zip code

The above map shows that the beach communities of Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice, and Long Beach all pay relatively high prices. Similarly, dispensaries Hollywood, Burbank, and Downtown have higher prices. The lowest prices for a gram of flower can be found in Southern Los Angeles and some zip codes in the northern hills. There is still price variation within these communities, which demonstrates the need to analyze smaller geographic units than even a county or community. The range of prices between zip codes is quite broad. Dispensaries in the most expensive zip codes are charging nearly double the price those in the least expensive zip codes. 

What drives price differences across a county like Los Angeles?

Local demand certainly plays a factor, but so do other price drivers like competition and operation costs. A dispensary located in a neighborhood with several other dispensaries may have to charge lower prices to attract customers. To test this hypothesis, average prices of a zip code can be compared to the number of dispensaries operating in a zip code. As shown below, there appears to be some correlation between dispensary density and retail prices. For example, zip codes in southern Los Angeles that have lower average prices also have a greater number of dispensaries. Conversely, eastern zip codes with higher average prices have fewer dispensaries per zip code.

Average flower prices vs. dispensary density, by zip code

Higher Data’s advanced analytics can also produce a quantitative answer to this question by using algorithms that factor in the impact of new dispensaries in nearby zip codes to calculate the competitive effects of each additional dispensary in a given area. 

Other sources of price variation can arise from other sources of competition, such as delivery services, and operating costs that are passed onto customers. Businesses on the coastal west side of LA can expect to pay about double what their peers in Southern Los Angeles pay in rent. Downtown rents are similarly high and rents decline starting in Northern LA with the lowest costs seen in the east in the San Gabriel Valley. Taking into account all of these factors can help companies make more strategic location decisions and allow managers to set better, more competitive prices. 

Interested in learning how Higher Data can break down the competitive landscape in your market?

Contact us to learn more about how our comprehensive data can help your business make more informed decisions and out-compete your peers. You can reach us at team@higher-data.com or set up a free analytics consultation here.

Improving understanding of the cannabis industry

We’re excited to announce that we’ll soon begin sharing some of the proprietary research, and showcasing some unique data assets, that we’ve been producing with researchers and for our clients, as part of our broader mission to improve public understanding of the cannabis industry.

One of our core beliefs is that high-quality, data-driven research can greatly further this goal, in large part due to the piecemeal legalization of medical and recreational marijuana at the state level that has created fairly complex markets.

Our sincere hope is that you’ll find this information both interesting and useful, and we would welcome any questions or feedback you may have. If you are an investor, business owner, or researcher and would be interested in working more closely with us, we would also love to hear from you. Please feel free to reach out to us at team@higher-data.com.

- The Higher Data Team