Project Description

How a Collaborative Marketing and Advertising Plan Helped Drive Arkansas’s Largest First-Year Cannabis Expo

Bud Agency x River Valley Cannabis and Wellness Expo | June 6, 2026 | Fort Smith, Arkansas

The Challenge

A brand-new, first-year event needed to build awareness from scratch across a regulated industry with strict advertising limitations — no cannabis-specific ad targeting, no guaranteed reach on traditional platforms, and a target audience (medical cannabis patients) that’s inherently harder to reach through conventional means. Bud Agency and The Greenery’s team partnered to build demand across the Arkansas River Valley region in time for a single-day event, despite these constraints.

The Approach

This was a true team effort between Bud Agency and The Greenery. Rather than leaning on one channel, the combined marketing plan put event messaging in front of prospective attendees wherever they were — on social media, in their inboxes and text threads, on the radio, on billboards, in the dispensary, and on the street. Bud Agency led the digital advertising, organic social, radio, and grassroots community outreach, while The Greenery’s team drove billboard advertising and direct in-store engagement (staff conversations, email, and text outreach to existing and lapsed patients) — two of the channels most responsible for converting people who already knew and trusted the brand.

• Paid social advertising (Meta) for awareness, traffic, and retargeting — led by Bud Agency
• Organic social media content across Facebook and Instagram — led by Bud Agency
• Supplemental programmatic advertising (GroundTruth) to test reach beyond social platforms — led by Bud Agency
• Local radio advertising (KKBD-FM and KMAG-FM, Fort Smith) — led by Bud Agency
• Grassroots outreach: flyer distribution, poster placement, street team activation, and in-store dispensary promotion — led by Bud Agency
• Billboard advertising — led by The Greenery
• In-store promotion, staff conversations, email, and text outreach to current, expiring, and lapsed patients — led by The Greenery’s team
• A partner marketing toolkit distributed to exhibitors, physicians, and wellness providers so they could promote the event to their own audiences
• Community calendar and local event listing placements

Paid Media Performance

Meta served as the primary paid channel, running awareness, traffic, and retargeting campaigns in parallel:

A supplemental GroundTruth programmatic campaign was also tested to explore reach beyond social platforms. While delivery volume was modest (22 reach, 496 impressions, 7 clicks), it confirmed that Meta is currently the strongest paid digital channel for this audience, and surfaced valuable learnings about audience-targeting limitations in regulated industries for future optimization.

Organic Social Media Performance

Organic content — event announcements, educational posts, countdown campaigns, vendor and physician spotlights, and Reels — ran alongside the paid campaign to build sustained visibility and community engagement at no incremental media cost:

Combined, organic Facebook and Instagram content generated nearly 470,000 views and added over 300 new followers across both platforms — demonstrating that the content strategy didn’t just support the paid push, it built a lasting, owned audience for future events.

Local Radio

To reach audiences outside of digital channels, Bud Agency placed a 144-spot radio buy across two Fort Smith stations (KKBD-FM and KMAG-FM) in the week leading up to the event, for a combined spend of $1,850 — adding consistent local reach and reinforcing the campaign’s other channels.

Grassroots and Partner Outreach

Recognizing that digital and broadcast alone wouldn’t reach every prospective attendee, the team layered in on-the-ground tactics: flyers and posters placed at dispensaries, coffee shops, and community gathering spaces; a street team distributing materials directly in target communities; and a partner marketing toolkit (ready-made social posts, graphics, and messaging) distributed to exhibitors, physicians, and wellness providers so they could promote the event to their own audiences. This significantly expanded reach beyond Bud Agency’s owned channels.

The Results

Nearly half of all patient consultations came from walk-in registrations — a strong signal of event-day awareness built across the full marketing plan, not any single channel. Attendees traveled from more than 60 communities across Arkansas and into Oklahoma, with 61% from Sebastian County and over 90% from the core River Valley region.

Why It Worked

• Multiple touchpoints, multiple teams: prospective attendees encountered the event across social media, paid ads, radio, billboards, in-store conversations, email, text, and local partners — not just one channel or one team.
• Bud Agency’s organic and paid social worked together: paid drove reach and retargeting, while organic built sustained engagement and an owned audience for future events.
• The Greenery’s in-store and direct-to-patient outreach (staff conversations, email, text, billboards) reached the brand’s existing and lapsed patients — an audience that’s hardest to reach through advertising alone, and likely a major driver of the strong walk-in conversion.
• Grassroots and partner outreach reached audiences that digital advertising alone could not, particularly in a regulated industry with targeting restrictions.
• A first-year event still achieved strong attendance despite heavy rain on event day — a real-world stress test of how well the combined marketing efforts built advance demand.

Looking Ahead

With a strong first-year foundation in place, future opportunities include expanded media partnerships, earlier campaign launch timelines, additional regional outreach, and enhanced attendee data collection — building on a marketing and advertising plan that’s already proven it can drive results in a highly regulated industry.