Content Marketing in the Cannabis Industry

When you’re thinking about designing your brand, who are you designing it for? To put it simply, if you don't design the brand with your audience in mind, your audience simply won’t resonate with it. That’s why identifying customer personas during your brand’s early development phases is essential to coming up with a brand identity that will stick.

This step takes research because, even if you know the average person who walks into your shop is in their 30s, there’s a lot you don’t know about them, like their education, salary, or media preferences. These are all things customer research will reveal and they can all help inform your branding and marketing from here on out.

The typical customer persona includes:

• Age
• Gender
• Job title
• Salary
• Education
• Family status
• Media preferences

Researching and analyzing your audience may also reveal untapped demographics who you aren’t yet connecting with, or at least not in the right way. Most companies end up identifying a few different personas, and you should draw up a customer persona for each.

For instance, a retail shop may identify “Medicinal Matt” and “After-Work Alice.” The former persona could represent customers who consume your products for their health benefits, while the latter could represent casual users who come in every so often to try out the latest offerings.

Your Next Move: Using a template, identify 2-3 key customer personas and make a profile for them. Give them a name that you can refer to across departments so everyone is on the same page when you’re creating content or advertising for a given persona.

Last, but most certainly not least, the final foundational component of a content marketing strategy is a critical one: keywords. Now that you know who your customers are and, by extension, who your brand wants to be, you have insights that will allow you to start building out a keyword plan.

Using tools like Google Analytics along with keyword analysis and monitoring tools, you should plan to do the following:

• Identify the keywords your competitors rank for.
• Identify the keywords your competitors use for advertising.
• Identify other semantically related keywords your audience searches for.

Assembling a keyword plan requires you to spend some time looking at all the keywords in your niche that your customers (and, therefore, competitors) care about. These include both short-tail and long-tail keywords. It’s paramount that you come up with this keyword plan before moving forward, and as you continue with your analysis, you’ll begin to see how keywords reveal search intent (which will be relevant as we walk through your customers’ journey).

Your Next Move: Using the right tools, explore the keywords your competitors target and find related keywords your audience cares about. Prioritize based on keyword difficulty, relevance, and search volume.

Your prospects enter the “awareness” phase when something first piques their interest about the cannabis industry. This could be driving by your shop, seeing an advertisement online, or hearing about it from a friend. Those in the awareness phase have a lot of questions, and knowing your customer personas will help you answer the right ones.

For instance, “Medicinal Matt” is wondering about the potential health benefits of cannabis products. Meanwhile, “After-Work Alice” is thinking about casually trying them for the first time. Both of them are probably wondering about the side effects and potential risks of use, but they have different motivations and concerns, and their needs should be addressed accordingly.

To reach prospects in the awareness phase, you have to answer their questions. This usually means creating a lot of introductory content, which can be presented in FAQ pages, blog posts, short videos, and many other formats.

In your content, remember that the main purpose is to provide value through thorough, genuine answers. However, you should also provide unbiased background on your various products, discussing the pros and cons openly.

Examples of keywords that point to the “awareness” phase include:

• What is CBD?
• Health benefits of marijuana
• Can you get high on hemp?

Prospects in the consideration phase are absorbing information everywhere they go. They’re hungry for knowledge, and they’ll typically spend a lot of time researching in their own way. Of course, these days, that usually means looking things up online. Your job is to provide optimized, valuable content that will appear as they continue searching for information.

As they become more informed about what’s out there, prospects will begin deciding what's right for them. After-work Alice may very well decide it’s not for her, but the ones that stick around are going to develop preferences based on the information they’re consuming. For instance. Medicinal Matt may come to the conclusion that a CBD capsule is the best product for him.

Beyond potential preferences for products, though, these customers are also going to develop a preference for who they want to work with. For these prospects, your best bet is start introducing them to your brand’s backstory, values, and what sets you apart. You should also show them comparison content between different brands and types of products to help them make an informed decision.

Examples of keywords that point to the “consideration” phase include:

• Best way to consume CBD for anxiety
• What to look for when buying CBD capsules
• Product A vs. Product B

As customers draw conclusions on the options they're considering, they enter the decision phase. This is the phase where prospects are worth the most, because they have real “purchase intent,” meaning they’re ready to place an order, start a product subscription, or reach out to you for a consultation or trial.

If you consider paid advertising, especially pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for keywords that show purchase intent, you’ll notice that the cost per click is much higher. That’s because these are clicks just waiting to turn into customers, and your job is to provide a frictionless purchasing experience to make sure that happens.

Examples of keywords that point to the “decision” phase include:

• Where to buy CBD capsules online
• Cannabis stores near me
• Best CBD dealers in Canada

You’re ready to jump into the details of your content strategy, but not so fast! Content marketing is often associated with written content, but it doesn’t have to be limited to written content. In fact, your brand can do a lot by diversifying and trying various formats — including video.

Studies actually show that video content can build a reputation very quickly, increasing brand awareness by 54% and helping you cement your place in the niche to grow a following much faster. Of course, depending on how far you want to go, countless brands have also seen success by incorporating weekly podcasts and other creative forms of content into their strategy.

Types of content you might consider include:

Diversifying your content calendar is a good idea, but be realistic about what you can create. It’s best to prioritize the creation of high-quality, keyword-optimized written content. Once you’ve got that going, you can consider expanding to other types of content.

After figuring out what types of content you’re going to post, the next step is to determine which platforms you want to publish on. You should start with your own website’s blog, but you can expand from there.

Consider platforms like:

• Social Media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and SnapChat.
• Communities: Reddit, Discord, and niche forums.
• Blogging Networks: Medium.com and guest posts on niche sites.

There’s no need to be on every platform under the sun. In fact, you’ll get much better ROI if you focus on the platforms where your audience is already hanging out. Of course, in the cannabis industry, you also have to consider platform constraints surrounding certain topics and niches.

Going back to your customer personas, you should review the media preferences of your top ones to see what they use. You can also test out platforms to see your engagement rates. If a platform simply isn’t leading to interaction, cut it out of your strategy and focus your efforts on the platforms where you are seeing results.

Finally, this is the step where you’ll feel like your content strategy is coming together. Fortunately, all of the work and research you’ve done up to this point will make building out your content calendar (and planning the topics in the next step) as easy as can be.

If you’re not familiar with what a content calendar is, it’s a calendar that runs from January through December and shows all of your “content slots.” That is, it shows when you are going to publish what. To setup a content calendar, you need to decide:

• What type of content you’re going to post
• Where you’re going to post content
• How often you’re going to post

For instance, you already know you’re posting an article on your blog, and maybe you decide to do that once a week. In your content calendar, you’ll define what day of the week that article is posted on. Since consistent posting is key to consistent site engagement, your content calendar serves an essential role.

Once you have all of your empty slots in the calendar, being sure to account for seasonal changes and holiday promotions, you can move onto the next and final step: planning out your topics. Luckily, this work is almost entirely done, assuming that you came up with a thorough keyword plan earlier on.

Since content marketing is about giving readers valuable information, a keyword plan basically gives you all of your topics because these keywords tell you exactly what readers want to know.

Aside from question-based keywords, you can also decide what comparisons they're making (i.e., “CBD capsules vs oil”), what concerns they have (i.e., “CBD and weight gain”), and everything else they want to know (i.e., “where is CBD legal?”) to make a purchase.

As Emerald Magazine put it: “Siobhan Danger Darwish and Sloan Reed affectionately known as the Grow Sisters — have combined back-to-the-basics, sustainable farming methods with modern technology to build a brand, and empower others.” Over 90,000 followers on Instagram agree, plus they have a very professional YouTube channel to top off their strategy.

A lifestyle subscription box meets the cannabis industry. The Stoney Babe has marketing down-pat with a very niche audience. They also have their corporate social responsibility plan in order, promoting women-owned businesses in every box. As a result of unique branding, they’ve gained a cult following.

Those seeking manufacturing equipment will be quick to come across the marketing of Ethos Manufacturing, a company specializing in the production of cannabis products. With an interactive website and a thorough overview of their processes and products, Ethos Manufacturing helps move prospects through the sales funnel by using truly informative content.