As you may have heard, big money is getting invested into the medical and recreational cannabis industry.  After owning an Internet Marketing Agency for over 15 years and starting software companies, I never saw myself writing about medical marijuana.  But as an Entrepreneur I can’t ignore the signs that this industry is about to explode.  When you see billions in annual sales and significant growth, it is usually worth taking a deeper look into that industry.

The more I research the more opportunity I see to at least offer technology, competitive intelligence or marketing services to all these new businesses.  As I started to do my own competitive analysis and research using Campaign Watch, I found Google doesn’t allow for much keyword advertising but I did find one organization (ProCon.org) who bought 1239 keywords related to cannabis and medical marijuana.

Below you can see the conversion funnel ProCon.org is bringing users through which is purely educational with the ultimate goal to acquire your email address.  In the screen shot below, you can see for the keyword “how medical marijuana helps” they are using an ad that says 100’s of experts on marijuana with a landing page that ask you to sign up for the newsletter to stay informed.

Other companies advertising in this industry are addiction and substance abuse organizations who aim to educate consumers on the dangers of addiction and how to get help.  As you can see, The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse buy the keyword “long term side effects of cannabis”with ads around addiction prevention and treatment.

Outside of competitive intelligence, I get excited thinking about the problems state governments can solve with this surplus of tax and licensing revenue.  Especially when you think about your children and the improvements to Education, Police and Drug Prevention that this new sources of income allows.

As of April 2016, 24 states and Washington D.C. have legalized cannabis for medical use but only Colorado, Alaska, Washington and Oregon made marijuana recreational.  These 4 states are already making millions in tax and license income and growing quickly.  The 2015 Recreational cannabis industry grew over 184% year over year.  In 2015 there was over $5.7 Billion in legal medical marijuana sales and according to this report we could hit over $6.7 billion this year.  Look at all these industries that are less than medical marijuana.

Even if you feel strongly against legal marijuana, you can’t deny there is growth and opportunity to solve real problems with the money.  Please share your comments, thoughts, link to other information or statistics below.