Social Media Marketing Strategy for your Cannabusiness Site

Creating a social media marketing strategy for your dispensary or farm

Anyone who runs a website for their own business, a client’s site, or other commerce-gateway oriented website knows that the content machine is always hungry. If it isn’t constantly fed, your social media presence, your user engagement, and your rankings can all suffer the consequences. What’s a small to medium business to do?

What to know about cannabis marketing before you get started.

Many social media sites still view cannabis as a grey area. This will likely remain true until marijuana is legalized at the federal level or legalized at the state level by a majority. You have to remember that the vast portion of social media site revenue comes from Ad and Data sales. Sites that refuse cannabis advertising and dispensary accounts are facing greater monetary losses by violating Federal statutes than they would make by freely allowing cannabis advertising.

What are the most cannabis-friendly social media sites?

Twitter – Does not have a reputation for removing cannabis-industry social accounts.

Youtube – Frequently leaves cannabis-related videos and actual usage videos alone.

Which websites frequently remove cannabis-industry related accounts?

Instagram – The CEO of Massroots has had their instagram account removed three times

Facebook – Restricts advertisements because cannabis is categorized as an illicit substance.

Use your own website for content marketing. You can freely put up content that may be restricted on privately-owned social media sites. You can then link to this content via social media. This cannabis website marketing method provides multiple benefits. Traffic to your website increases and you don’t have to risk posting risky content directly onto your social media account.

Content strategy goals: What do you want to accomplish?

Cannabis-related businesses may differ in what they sell, but the end goal is still the same. Every business wants to achieve three basic goals.

Increase your website traffic – This can be accomplished directly by linking posts to your website. You may also see a secondary boost in Organic or MAP Rankings due to increased traffic from social media sources.

Raise your brand awareness – A customer isn’t going to buy a product that they’ve never heard of. Just like soda, alcohol, and even soup-establishing brand trust with consumers and making your brand a name brand is critical to success.

Turn leads into conversions – The hotter the lead, the more likely the conversion. Content is all about establishing trust and growing a relationship with your customer. Maintaining that relationship once you’ve converted a lead is always going to provide a return.

37%

Of businesses have a content marketing strategy in place

make it manageable: Setting up your cannabusiness content strategy

Companies use content to market their businesses in a variety of formats. They produce new pages, engage on social media using Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and create videos. These media types can all provide backlinks to a primary site or ancillary pages they are trying to rank, but even if you have a dedicated social media or content manager you may not be getting everything you can out of your marketing strategy.

Twitter

Twitter has a character limit of 280 and uses photographs. It’s a great way to expand on the lifestyle of your brand. Focus on imagery that evokes the personality and style of your brand. This is also a great place for local shots where you can tag your brand and local hotspots.

Facebook

Facebook has become strict when policing content Make sure you read and follow all of their user agreement rules. It’s a good platform for creating a dialogue between your company and your customers. Use it as an announcement platform, and a way to share additional content like Youtube Videos, mentions of your brand, or links to non-Facebook blog posts.

Instagram

Instagram is a must use, just make sure to follow their user guidelines to the letter. Because it only focuses on photographs, this is the perfect medium to get your entire staff involved in social media marketing. Have employees take pictures around the city with your merchandise, making sure to tag your products and the location.

Who should create your cannabusiness content?

Find out what your staff like to do!

If you’re new to the term SME, it stands for subject-matter expert. In the world of content, a subject matter expert is the cornerstone of interesting and relevant content production.

For the majority of content writers, reaching out to SME’s is a crucial part of the writing process. A writer can get great quotes, clarification on important issues, and answers to complex questions from the professionals who know them best.

Who knows your brand, store, merchandise, and customers better than anyone else? Your employees.

Choose the right person for the job.

Talk to your staff about your content needs and find out how they’re interested in contributing. The best content comes from passionate creators. Use the individual strengths and knowledge of your staff to your advantage.

In the world of marketing, an employee obsessed with the latest cannabis gadgetry, terpene profiles, or cutting-edge CBD/THC science is an asset.

Allow your staff to work on content they are interested in. There are some golden rules every business should follow if your hourly staff is producing content.

1. Employees only produce content while they are on the clock.
2. Content creation work does not go home with employees.
3. Carve out time for each employee to make their contribution.
4. Proof and review each piece of content before you release it.
5. Attribute any content to the employee who authored it when they are speaking as themselves.

Pride and accomplishment are built into the creation process. You want to attribute employees work to them whenever they aren’t using a company voice or profile. This develops a sense of ownership, humanizes your company brand, and provides a variety of voices your customers can get to know, follow, and identify with.

How will you deliver your content?

Short-form content through Social Media

Social media updates

Post deals, articles that relate to your industry, local happenings surrounding your business, and don’t be afraid to let the personality of your business and staff shine through. Our Facebook marijuana marketing guide can get you started. Keep posted images on-brand, unique, and within the site guidelines.

Video content

Are you getting in new merchandise? Do a video review of it. Do you have a customer who loves your store and doesn’t mind being online? Post a “Customer shout-out video”. Record interesting happenings outside of the store. If your staff is attending an event and representing your business, have them take a video diary of their experience.

Blog posts

Whether it’s a single author or pieces by everyone in the store, a blog increases your site keyterm portfolio. Add in relevant links, and interlink to your landing and high-conversion pages. Let the author decide the topic as long as it is industry and/or location relevant. Use unique images when you can. You can even make them pull double marketing duty by posting your best cannabis images on Instagram.

What makes a good blog topic?

Blog Post Options:

• Q & A Pieces – Blogs are a great place to answer some of your users’ most common questions. These can be gathered online, or in-store. It’s a great way to alleviate some of the strain on your budtenders and capture local long-tail keyterm traffic when users ask the questions on a search engine.
• Local Happenings – If your business is active in the local community, blog about it. Local signals are incredibly important for marijuana dispensary SEO, especially when it comes to getting in the MAP Pack. Highlighting your relationship to the businesses and area surrounding you is great, especially when you can get a backlink to your website.
• Informational Blogs – When it comes to keyterm portfolio expansion, nothing beats an informational blog. There are already lots of posts about the basics regarding strains and cannabis genealogy, so if you do choose this route, you want to do it better than anyone else.

How do continual site content updates affect your website rankings?

Continually updating your site provides Google with relevance signals you wouldn’t have otherwise. It sends the message that this site is continually in use, being worked on, and has new content that should get in front of users.

• Google shuffles new site pages in the search results to compare them to existing pages of a similar nature. This gets new site visitors onto your site. Analyzing your new page performance is the best way to increase it.
• After a page is crawled by Google it adds to your overall site size, breadth, and knowledge base. New content increases the number of terms, short-tail, and long-tail search queries and questions your site may come up for.
• Having a good link portfolio both internally and externally helps your site to rank. New content means new links and a chance to strengthen internal content clusters on top of the addition of outbound links to local geo-relevant event, government, and business sites.
• New content on different platforms that link back to your website is a great way to get immediate backlinks. It also spreads your branding across multiple platforms which signals a healthy overall web presence to Google search crawlers.

How does your content schedule influence Google search rankings?

1. How often you add new content to your website.
2. The rate of new inbound links coming into your website.
3. Incoming links from sites with high fresh value ratings.
4. User metrics like time-on-page, click-through rate, and return rates.

What’s a good cannabis content release schedule for your site?

Firstly, don’t overdo it. You want a content schedule you can stick with, and that works within the framework your business and employee schedule provides. If you can’t maintain it, a content release schedule isn’t worth the time. Gauge initial interest for each content type, see when it makes the most sense to carve out employee time for content work, and revise your schedule if you need to.

Social media updates

Consider posting at the minimum 2 – 3 times a week. You can always post over your scheduled limit if you have breaking new, events, or specials to share. Twitter marketing is great for cannabis business owners. The short-form content limits make it easy to post regularly.

Video content

Are you getting in new merchandise? Do a video review of it. Do you have a customer who loves your store and doesn’t mind being online? Post a “Customer shout-out video”. Record interesting happenings outside of the store. If your staff is attending an event and representing your business, have them take a video diary of their experience.

Blog posts

Once a week at the minimum. A monthly post will not gain you followers or traction, and you’ll want to post at the same time each week. That way readers can know when to expect new content and have a time to check back regularly.