If you are a cannabis business or any business for that matter, a content marketing strategy is of critical importance. Content marketing is a way for businesses to create, publish, and distribute content to a selected target audience. It is a way for you to control what your target customers consume about your brand, how you create brand awareness for your business, and ultimately drive sales. Here are a few tips on crafting an effective, memorable cannabis content marketing strategy.
What is Your Goal with Cannabis Content Marketing?
Your content marketing strategy always needs to line up with your goals. Is your goal to drive sales? Consider using email marketing with exclusive content and discount codes. Is the goal to build a reputation and brand awareness? A video campaign could achieve this. It can be difficult to measure ROI but knowing your goals is a great start.
Perform a Content Audit
A content audit is when a business analyzes the type and effectiveness of past content. A content audit will help you see what’s working, what needs to be changed, and if your current content is helping you achieve your goals. After a content audit is performed, you can decide to keep content, update it, or remove it all together. You can also measure the amount of user engagement between consumers and your brand and what kind of sentiments your audience holds towards you. Look at user engagement, comments, likes, shares and anything else you can keep track of. More information is always better than less.
Who is Your Target Audience?
It is always necessary in any business to know exactly who your target market is. This way you can carefully craft your content so that it is appealing to your target audience. As the cannabis industry continues to expand, so does its consumers. In business, the most successful products and services are those that satisfy a need within their target audience. Market research can help you discover your target audience and the insights they seek. Consider hiring a market research company to do this for you, as this process can be very complicated.
Consumer Personas
After you’ve conducted your market research, you can create a consumer persona. According to HubSpot, a consumer persona is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” Your persona should include demographics, goals, attitudes, behaviors and frustrations. Name your consumer persona and keep them in mind when marketing your cannabis business. Below is an example of a consumer persona used by a car company.
Source: Hubspot
Create Your Cannabis Content Marketing Calendar
Once you’ve decided who your audience is and how you should be marketing to them, it is time to create your content and decide when to release it. A content calendar will keep content regularly flowing and keep those responsible for its creation and publishing on time. An effective content calendar will have no large lapse in posting, but always keep consumers anticipating your company’s next post.
There are just a few tips that will help you create an effective, unique content strategy for your business.
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