You Have To Educate People Why - Unscripted Cannabis

Guest: Dan Serard, Chief Revenue Officer of Cannabis Creative Group · Host: Mr Gudwudz (Just J) · Unscripted Cannabis

Dan Serard is Chief Revenue Officer of Cannabis Creative Group, a US-based in-house agency that has served over 600 clients across 36 states since 2018. He came to it from running fitness clubs in downtown Boston and Santa Monica, which shows in how he talks about marketing — as relationship-building and education rather than the hard sell.

This episode turns into a live consulting session on host Mr Gudwudz’s own brand, which makes the advice unusually concrete.

The Kiss Of Death For A Cannabis Brand

“Yeah, that’s the kiss of death. I think if you build it they will come — because you might have a great friend network, a great product, and you think everyone wants it? Well, you gotta educate people why. You gotta get your brand out there, right? Maybe they do and maybe it is a good opportunity, but in your circle, you might…” — Dan Serard

The trap he is naming is specific and it is not general overconfidence. It is the friend network. A good product plus enthusiastic early feedback from people who know you produces exactly the evidence needed to skip marketing entirely — and none of that evidence is about strangers.

“You gotta educate people why” is the correction. Not tell people about it — explain the reason it should matter to someone with no prior relationship to you. In a category where the product’s purpose is frequently misunderstood, that gap is wider than in most industries.

SEO Is Always Going To Be King

Asked what a brand with no budget should do first, Dan is unequivocal:

“Well first, organic SEO. So making sure your website’s built out and you’re being found in the search engines. Because that’s really a proof of concept too, right? People see you, they go right to your website, make sure you’re legit. So making sure your website is fundamentally sound, it’s indexed in the search engines, your Google business profile is set up. SEO is always gonna be king when it comes to searching products online.” — Dan Serard

Note the qualifier he attaches — “when it comes to searching products online.” He is not making a universal claim about marketing channels. And the reason he leads with it is not traffic; it is verification. “People see you, they go right to your website, make sure you’re legit.” The site is where the trust decision happens after awareness has already occurred somewhere else.

Second on his list, and second for a reason:

“The second is email marketing. Email marketing still works, it’s tried and true. There’s a lot of revenue driven from it, but you got to build that list, right? So that’s why I put it as second, because those are people who have opted in… but you gotta build that list first.” — Dan Serard

He frames the whole thing as two jobs: “when we look at marketing, there’s really customer acquisition and customer retention. Customer acquisition and getting new people through the door, that’s where we talk about SEO, advertising, that sort of brand awareness… Retention side is how can they buy more and how can I keep them with me as a loyal customer. That’s email, that’s SMS, that’s loyalty.”

His recommendation for a small brand is to pick one channel from each column: “organic search and then CRM marketing.” That is a real budget instruction, not a channel list.

Educating Before You Sell

The practical version of “educate people why” came out of critiquing the host’s own site, and it is a useful demonstration of the difference:

“What’s the education around your products, showing some lifestyle? It’s hard to show how the product’s used with yours and some other ancillary businesses, but it’s finding that craft and creative strategy behind it. I’m looking at your website right now and you have a beautiful picture of your product on a table along with some other accessories and, like, what’s that? Talk about more of the educational component instead of showing that smoke.” — Dan Serard

“What’s that?” is the entire critique. A beautiful product photograph that leaves a first-time visitor unable to say what the thing is or why it is better has performed an aesthetic function and no commercial one.

There is also a compliance dividend, which is the clever part. Educational content is what the ad platforms will actually carry, so the same shift that helps a confused buyer also keeps the account alive.

Marketing When The Platforms Are Against You

Mr Gudwudz set the problem up from lived experience — he sells books with no difficulty, but “the second a product touches cannabis or anything related to smoking in particular, those doors slam shut. The algorithms start blocking you. Facebook won’t recommend your page to people.”

Dan’s account of the actual rule is more precise than most people assume, and the precision is where the workable space is:

“Meta and Google and these platforms, essentially what their regulations are — their terminology is, we don’t allow for the promotion of sales of cannabis products or ancillary products. So when you start talking about price, $30, buy one get one free — that’s gonna get you flagged and shut down too. So there’s a lot of rules and there’s a lot of research that our team has done to kind of walk that fine line, right? And we run ads on Meta, we run ads on Google. It can be done.” — Dan Serard

The prohibition is on promoting the sale — price, offer, discount. That is why the educational pivot is not a consolation prize but the compliant form of the same campaign.

His advice for the founder with a few thousand dollars rather than a hundred thousand is geographic: “look at your immediate area that you’re located in. Start expanding from there and building those networks out and advertising those networks, and then grow as you see business relationships expand.”

And the reason he frames the whole industry as relationship work: “that building of relationships is something the cannabis industry needed and still needs dramatically, where it’s still a small group. It’s still a small industry compared to others. We’re dealing with a ton of stuff right now. It’s not an easy route by any means when you look at marketing or legalization or rescheduling.”