Why Your Dispensary NEEDS Marketing
We live in a digital age where customers expect substantial and consistent content from every brand they interact with regularly. As a result, content marketing is fundamental to the success of any business. Nearly 80% of the companies that utilize content marketing witness a return on investment. Here’s what effective content marketing can do for your business.
Understanding Content
Content is information or experiences aimed at a group of audiences. Content can be anything. However, content must serve a purpose for the audience. Content in today’s digital age includes blogs, videos, social media blurbs, podcasts, and many others. Virtually everything a user encounters on social media and the internet as a whole is a type of content marketing.
Let Stickyleaf handle your marketing
Identifying content for your dispensary
Content comes in all shapes and sizes. For our sake, we will focus on cannabis content. The former has been prevalent for decades; Prior to the dot com bubble of the early 2000s, cannabis content was tailored to appeal to a unique populace. During this time, cannabis content was prevalent in bohemian, counterculture channels. Today, cannabis content is virtually everywhere.
Cannabis and counterculture naturally have gone hand-in-hand since the early days of cannabis prohibition of the late 1800s. Today, the best marketing practices are primarily digital; cannabis content includes articles, videos, eye-popping photos, blogs, and much more. High-def photos of cannabis and breaking news related to furthering the cannabis industry are the most popular forms of cannabis-related content.
Dispensary customers demand content.
Nearly 95% of Fortune 500 companies apply a steady and uniform content marketing strategy. Channels such as blogs, ‘vlogs,’ and social media microblogs and blurbs (i.e., tweets, witty captions, etc.) are conventional in successful businesses. Psychologically, customers are drawn to consistent and self-aware brands. People enjoy when the company they choose to interact with provides more than a product. Content begets new life into businesses, their brands, and the awareness of their goods. In the social media age, customers are paying more attention than they ever have before and have never been so in tune with marketing until now. Content marketing allows a business to build trust among consumers and customer loyalty. It is a necessity for small to medium-sized dispensaries.
Get more from your marketing budget
Consistency is key.
Approximately 65% of the most consumed content is constructed in written and video format. Customers virtually live on their phones (pun intended.) The level of accessibility to essentially any brand is uncanny. Right now, you can get on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram and have a realistic chance of interacting directly with brands. Studies confirm that if a brand is to generate organic traffic, a content marketing strategy of 3-5 blogs (or 2-3 video blogs) per week is necessary. Companies looking solely to increase brand awareness aim for 1-4 blogs weekly. Nevertheless, a healthy and consistent content schedule is the key to success for promoting dispensaries.
Marketing IS sustainability.
Another reason why dispensaries employ consistent content marketing is thanks to the sustainability it provides. As mentioned earlier, content marketing allows customers to interact directly with their favorite brands and companies. In the absence of in-house marketing and advertising, digital content marketing is accessible and deployable around the clock.
Cannabis marketing doesn’t have to be so hard
How much is TOO much?
Most dispensaries are not aware of how much they ought to spend on marketing and for their business. Typically, dispensaries ought to spend 8%-20% of their annual revenue on content marketing. The ‘sweet spot’ is usually identified as 15% of a company’s yearly revenue. However, there is no ‘magic dollar amount’ of marketing for cannabis companies. Instead, marketing should be goal-driven and financially responsible. Spending more than the aforementioned amount can oversaturate your brand and ultimately is not fiscally sound.
Successful models of content marketing
Not all content is created equal. Content must be driven by intent, and its success must be measured by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which are well-defined and quantifiable goals. Most content marketing in the cannabis industry is crafted for one of the following reasons:
- Generate sales
- Increase brand awareness
- Magnetize/retain new and recurring customers
- Improve brand credibility and trustworthiness
- Increase customer loyalty
- Educate future customers
- Increase market share