With federal prohibition still in full effect and mixed signals from officials at all levels of government, more cannabis brands are seeing their growth stunted as each one encounters the same issue: restrictions on content marketing for your cannabis business. Find out how you can use content marketing for your cannabis business to drive growth and brand awareness.
Crafting Compliant Content Marketing for Your Cannabis Business
As the cannabis industry rushes to legitimize, businesses must leverage their cannabis branding into a cohesive and dynamic web content marketing and promotions strategy. Carving out a brand identity before launching your cannabis marketing campaign will help your audience connect authentically with your business or brand.
If branding is your playbook, content marketing is your gameplan
Content marketing is a marketing strategy aimed at creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content that entices and engages with your audience. The goal of content marketing is to drive profitable customer actions by providing them with relevant and useful content.
While traditional marketing techniques focus more on ‘hard-selling’ a product or service, content marketing allows businesses and brands to educate their consumers through blogs, articles, newsletters, and other valuable content pieces. Content marketing, particularly in the cannabis space, is where education and advocacy are fundamental to growth and progress of the industry as a whole.
Why cannabis content marketing works
Although the internet has undoubtedly made content marketing a more accessible and viable strategy, the reason it works is relatively simple. The creation of valuable content initiates customer awareness, nurtures their engagement, and encourages an authentic connection to your brand by engaging them in an honest and meaningful conversation.
Content marketing for your cannabis brand will allow you to connect authentically with a cannabis brand by raising awareness and educating patients about your products or services.
Content Marketing Your Way around Advertising Restrictions
Although more than half of the country enjoys legalized access to medical or adult-use cannabis, it is still federally illegal for cannabis brands to run advertisements in newspapers, magazines, handbills, and other kinds of printed publications. In addition to content marketing for your cannabis business limitations imposed by federal prohibition, marijuana marketing campaigns in states with legalized recreational cannabis are subject to even more scrutiny.
For example, Nevada implemented emergency advertising regulations in the wake of recreational sales this past July to ensure cannabis products aren’t marketed in a way that would appeal to children.
Alternately, in Colorado outdoor advertising for cannabis storefronts or products is illegal. Further, the state requires that advertisements for marijuana are shown in mediums where 70% of the audience will be 21 or older.
3 Ways Content Boosts Cannabis Marketing
Dive into the data to understand what your audience’s needs are
What is your ideal customer looking for? What kind of device are they looking from? How old are they? Where is your audience? Knowing the answers to these kinds of questions is one of the best tools in your arsenal when it comes to knowing what your audience is looking to purchase, ideally from you.
Start by analyzing the search results for your cannabis brand, service, business, or product. Because federal laws prohibit marijuana advertisements, people are still searching for cannabis-related terms. Ideally, your medical marijuana consulting firm or web developer conducted an in-depth keyword and search analysis so that you can use it to identify keyword phrases that will guide and inform your content marketing strategy.
Use data insights to guide your content marketing for your cannabis business strategy
Now that you know what your audience needs and what they’re looking for to answer their needs, you should work with a content marketing firm to develop a content strategy that differentiates your brand’s voice from the rest.
While marijuana advertising is a veritable minefield, creating content about marijuana is perfectly legal. And any cannabis marketing consultant will tell you: Google rewards high-quality, optimized keyword content, meaning marijuana brands will need to create informative and engaging content on a consistent basis if they wish to be found.
MaJor Ignite Tip: Creating a data-driven content marketing campaign that emphasizes searchable keywords, will create the space and opportunity to divert a user’s attention to what you have to offer based on what they searched for to get to your content piece.
Track your data to keep your strategy responsive
Creating quality content once isn’t enough. The content marketing for your cannabis business strategy will need to evolve in relation to your keyword strategy. For example, once you’ve established your initial strategy, you or your content marketing firm will need to review it again at various intervals. Analyzing your content strategy is especially useful when isolating what parts of your content marketing campaign are connecting with your audience best.
MaJor Ignite Your content marketing for your cannabis business
While the fight to federal prohibition sweeps through the country, make sure the content marketing for your cannabis business campaign is looking to the future by leaning on data-driven content marketing. Work with a cannabis marketing firm whose innovative approach is MaJor Igniting cannabis brands across the country.