Less Focus on Social Shareability
Sharing an article on social media is a quick way to amplify your site traffic, but it’s not nearly effective as it used to be. As cannabis business social networks like Facebook and Twitter have grown their user bases, individual users have become less likely to share content with their followers — analysts have pointed to a 50% decrease in social sharing since 2015, with the top 10% of a sample of 100 million posts receiving only 62 shares.
What does this mean for your content? In short, don’t spend too much time worrying about writing a catchy, teasing headline. Because users are less likely to share your articles, previously effective clickbait titles — for example, “You Won’t Believe This New Link Between Cannabis and Alzheimer’s” — are now less likely to convert traffic to your dispensary blog. In fact, this possibly misleading tactic might actually be a turn off that leads to negative associations with your brand. Rather, focus on relevant content that will help you build a reliable audience.
Build Backlinks
One way that search engines measure a site’s overall popularity is through linking — both links away from your site and links from other sites back to yours. While the former should be a crucial part of every piece that you publish, the latter is even more important. A link back to your business, whether it’s to your dispensary blog or to one of your landing pages, is a vote of confidence in your brand.
Focus on building and encouraging backlinks to your content. Aggressive PR is one option, but you can also invite a guest blogger from a site with a bigger following than your own; if they’ll agree to link back to your site from theirs, you’ve built a powerful bridge. Finally, if you have the hiring budget and reach the right talent, you can even pull in backlinks with buzzy, original reporting!
Quality Above All
Despite all the hand wringing out there about technology shortening people’s’ attention spans, media trends point to longer content outperforming short, listicle-like pieces. Length matters. Strive to make all your dispensary blog posts at least 1,500 words.
And of course, invest in hiring good writers. However long your posts are, they won’t have much value if they’re poorly written, disorganized, or not search engine-optimized. If content is king, good content writers are your best bet to serve as the king’s advisors.
Stay Engaged
MediaJel is a prime resource for digital dispensary marketing. Get started by checking out our guides on everything from managing your online reputation to newsletter strategy.
