Content Marketing

Content marketing

Content marketing is a strategy focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to entice and engage a defined audience — and drive profitable customer actions. As opposed to selling your product or service, content marketing allows you to educate your prospects with relevant and useful content to provide value. Here are the strategies that our cannabis content marketing agency uses to increase awareness and instill trust with your customers.

Why Content Marketing?

According to a report by Nielsen’s Global Trust In Advertising, medium people trust editorial content over ads on television, radio, billboards, newspapers and magazines. The term content marketing may have gained popularity with the rise of the Internet, but B2B marketers have been employing it for years through white papers and reports to pull in a target audience. Content marketing is an inbound tactic that focuses on raising customer awareness, nurturing their engagement, and funneling them through an honest and meaningful conversation. It also helps with your SEO. To determine why content marketing is important to your business, let’s explore the four steps of the buying cycle.

01. Awareness

Customer identifies a problem, but is unaware there is a solution.

02. Research

Customer will perform research to educate them.

03. Consideration

Customer begins comparing products or services from different vendors to ensure they’re getting a high-quality product at a fair price.

04. Buy

Customer decides on a solution, and moves forward with the transaction.

Content marketing focuses on the first two steps of the buying cycle by raising awareness and educating consumers about a product or service. Traditional marketing focuses on the second two steps.

Types of Content Marketing

Articles or Blog Posts

Every dispensary should be creating fresh content for their corporate site. Company updates and tips can be short and sweet at 400-600 words, while in-depth, informative pieces can be lengthy at 1000-2000 words. Creativity and diversity are key when writing articles for your blog, let’s take a look at different post styles you can use to keep your audience engaged.

01. How-to

Write an instructional article that provides a simple fix to a problem your customers have with actionable deliverables to engage your customer.

02. Lists

Write an article that breaks down a topic into a more digestible form, a list. Whether it’s a list of brands, products, or strains or something else entirely, this is a fun article style.

03. Interviews

Strike up a conversation that your audience would like to listen in on and transcribe an interview. You could interview a colleague on the current legal landscape for consumers or interview a brand whose products you carry in your shop.

04. Reviews

Guide your customers in choosing products that would benefit them by writing product or strain reviews. These are invaluable educational pieces to build trust with your customers.

05. Tips

In a community that’s so new, there are a variety of tips and tricks we can share with new and long-time consumers to inspire and engage them in your products and community.

Case Studies or Brand Profiles

We spoke above about possibly interviewing the brands you carry to further educate and gain trust from your customers, but this could also live on your website as a brand profile. Write in-depth content on the products, brands, and their manufacturing, sourcing, etc. This content will provide more context to the products on your shelves and shows the consumers you care and have done your homework.

Ebooks

Why not take all that content you’re producing on a regular basis, and merge that into a white paper or ebook? Ebooks make perfect lead magnets for harvesting new leads and reinforce the authority of the author and brand. For example, we use our “Beginner’s Guide to SEO for your Cannabis Dispensary” as a way to spark interest with dispensary owners.

Email Newsletters

When building out your content marketing plan, it’s important to distribute this content into different channels. Email marketing is one of these channels. Have you written a few new blog posts? Send snippets of this content out to your email list to entice them click through to read more. Use email newsletters to write a letter from the founder, talk about the local community, educate your followers, or inspire them with valuable, engaging content.

Social Media Posts

We said it before; creativity is key to content marketing. Why not use visually interpret data to appeal to visual learners? Turn that boring data into a beautiful piece of artwork, and integrate these infographics into your in-store marketing materials, flyers, and billboards. Consumers may find it easier to digest your content in picture format, as opposed to reading.

Testimonials

People love hearing about what others have to say about your dispensary, your customer service and really about the experience you offer. Testimonials are shared across multiple user-generated networks. Repurpose this content and distribute it through your channels to build credibility among your customer base.

Videos

Keep your content fresh by using video. With the rise of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Youtube, rich media dominates the news feeds. Create a video and spread your message through your blog, email, and social media accounts. Live video has also taken the world by storm. Leveraging live video on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook is a great way to engage with our audience on the fly.

Memes

Memes are a popular and fun way to create captioned images that humorous in nature. This content is highly shareable and does well on social media.

Podcasts

Your audience is diverse and how they choose to digest content varies. Offering audible content, like podcasts is yet another great form of communicating with your customers.

Web Pages

Whether it’s a product page or a product category – Make sure you also recognize this as a content marketing opportunity. You can add a great deal of relevant content for customers perusing through your website.

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Content Distribution Channels

So, now that you’ve created your content… how and where do you distribute it? To better understand how to implement this strategy, let’s divide your channels into 3 main categories.

01. Earned

Capture the attention of your local media or industry-related publications to earn coverage about what you are doing or offering. This is where being active in the community and giving back can benefit your greatly.

02. Owned

These channels are any platforms that you own such as your website, email list, or any brand pages you have on social media websites. Share your content here and work to get is shared (see below) in other networks.

03. Shared

Networking, collaborations, and aligning yourself with other cannabis-related influencers, publications, and organizations will help you do well in building your shared channels. Sharing your content on your own platforms is great, but being able to distribute that out to other relevant networks will extend its reach.

What Makes a Piece of Content Effective?

Every day, your consumer is more than likely being bombarded with numerous pieces of content across their social platforms and mobile devices. So, how do you differentiate yourself from the ‘noise’? How do you ensure that your content is effective and engaging? With our dedicated cannabis content marketing agency, we make sure that your content fulfills at least one of the following.

It’s Social Currency

As humans, we are always looking for something new, shocking, or cool to share with those around us. It could be educational or inspiring, but where the value really lies is in its currency. If you are creating content that your reader can share with their friends, it’s a success.

It’s an Emotional Connection

This is content that initiates that knee-jerk reaction for your reader to act and act now! Create content that strikes a chord with your audience in a powerful, profound way and give them a way to get involved.

It Adds Practical Value

Create value and add context where it’s needed to your brand and the products you offer. It may not be inspiring, but adding practical value builds a solid relationship with your followers.

It’s Telling a Story No One Else Can

This is content that is unique to your dispensary – It’s a story that no one else can tell. It’s not a news article, it’s content comprised of your unique perspective and insight.

Let’s take an in-depth look at each digital marketing channel.

Given the unique position of the cannabis industry, we’re only covering the digital marketing channels that are permitted to use by ancillary businesses, brands, dispensary owners, mobile applications, producers, processors, and websites. There is a legal gray area when marketing cannabis companies, and you should regularly reference the laws within your state before starting any campaign.

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How to Calculate the ROI of Content Marketing

It’s estimated that, on average, nearly a third of B2B and B2C marketing dollars are spent on generating content; and many experts believe that this trend will only continue. By the end of this year (2020), experts and analysts believe that the content marketing industry could be worth as much as $300 billion annually.

Content Marketing

For brands, the promises of content marketing are especially tempting. High-quality content that’s effectively distributed can drive brand awareness, engage customers, capture leads, and boost sales. This has lead many in the marketing industry to proclaim that “content is king” when it comes to SEO, and it doesn’t look like it will be stepping down anytime soon.

But how much should your dispensary really be investing in content? And how do you know that your content marketing efforts are actually effective? Keep reading to find out how you can calculate the ROI of content.

Is Content Marketing Profitable?

High-quality content looks great. But marketing is not about producing interesting content, it is about driving traffic and boosting sales. If your content isn’t helping you improve the key performance indicators (KPIs) you care about, then it can’t be very valuable, no matter how good it looks.

So, is content marketing actually profitable?

For most brands, yes.

Content is believed to generate nearly 3 times more leads than traditional marketing methods while costing less to execute.

But just because other marketers are finding success with content marketing doesn’t necessarily mean you will. How can you know if your content marketing efforts are actually profitable? By calculating their ROI.

Why Is Calculating the ROI of Content so Difficult?

Measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns is one of the things that marketers struggle with the most. That’s understandable, since they aren’t mathematicians, after all. However, calculating the ROI of content is difficult for reasons beyond the math skills of the marketers in question.

Most significantly, content marketing is a long-term strategy with long-term results. So, calculating short-term results that impress people is difficult and unreliable.

Plus, there is no specific formula for measuring the ROI of content, leaving marketers to their own devices. As a result, it can be easy to get lost by measuring the wrong KPIs, or to get confused by measuring too many or too few of them.

Calculating the ROI of Content

The most common way of calculating the ROI of a content campaign is to calculate the total amount of dollars spent on the campaign and then subtract it from the total revenue generated by content-driven conversions.

In order to figure out the value of those content-driven conversions, you will have to determine the value of each individual conversion. If you’re working with a mix of online and retail sales, defining a monthly/weekly/whatever average for each sale/conversion should be enough.

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Next, to determine how many of these conversions are content-driven, you will have to determine the number of leads that your content is actually capturing. How much traffic is your content actually generating? Check out your incoming numbers from organic searches on Google and social media shares. Assuming your site features a well-developed blog, the overwhelming majority of these visitors will be clicking-thru directly to your ranking blog content, making them easy to keep track of.

Once you have a general idea of how much organic traffic your content is capturing and what the value of that traffic is, you can begin to get a sense of what your content is actually worth. Simply subtract the total cost of your content from your conversion revenue for the time period being measured to find your total ROI.

If your calculated return is low, it may not actually be the fault of the content itself but rather a lack of on-site and on-page CTAs that drive action. If you are failing to drive users further down the funnel (towards converting) with actionable calls-to-action, your conversions will naturally suffer. Blog articles are prime territory for lead capture signup forms and CTAs that push users to convert, so make sure to push customers towards your menu or your text opt-in.

The Intangible Benefits of Content Marketing

Despite all this talk of calculating direct returns on content marketing, content also has numerous intangible benefits that are worth noting.

For instance, high-quality content has been found to inspire positive brand perceptions among viewers. Quality content that entertains and engages viewers can rub off on brands, leading audiences to associate them with the creativity, sincerity, and value demonstrated in that content. Best of all, these positive mentions and perceptions have been detected across several different platforms, including social media, where they can be shared with others.

Content has also been found to influence customer purchasing decisions. Many customers will visit a brand’s website in order to find out more about it before committing to a purchase. Because of this, the content present on the site will directly influence purchasing decisions. Moreover, content that is shared externally can drive interest in a certain product or service, without a potential customer ever having to visit the site at all.

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Content marketing is also believed to improve customer loyalty. This is crucial because retaining current customers is much cheaper than finding new ones. Interesting and engaging content builds stronger bonds between brands and their customers. A brand that provides knowledge and expertise alongside its products and services is more likely to be seen as valuable and trustworthy.

Because high-quality content often brings other benefits that are intangible and incalculable, measuring the impact of your content on these and other factors is nearly impossible. Nevertheless, that does not mean there is no impact. Your content is boosting your brand’s reputation and authority over time.

Want to learn more? Let’s talk about how we can launch your next content campaign. Give us a call at 925-393-0444.