Blog Content Marketing For Your Dispensary Marketing Strategy
So you’ve opened your dispensary and filled it with CBD products, CBD oils, Indica, Sativa, and hybrid flower, along with many other marijuana products and now you’re ready to start a dispensary marketing strategy.
I’m betting you haven’t even thought about blog content marketing for your dispensary website or considered the huge long-term benefits of regular and relevant content on your website.
Here’s a little secret many new dispensary owners may not know…
Blog content marketing will do the following for your marijuana dispensary:
- Build relevance, authority, and trust for your website with users and search engines.
- Drive highly qualified traffic from search engines, organically and not with paid PPC ads.
- Increased search engine rankings help to build brand awareness and loyalty for your dispensary.
- Helps with ongoing lead generation.
In fact, according to a B2C content marketing report by the Content Marketing Institute, B2C marketers have used content marketing successfully over the last 12 months to create brand awareness, build credibility/trust, educate audiences, build loyalty with existing customers, and more.
Blog content marketing works amazingly well for many B2C companies, and your cannabis retail store is no different.
The article will illustrate why regular blog content published on your dispensary website will help you get the edge on competing cannabis retail stores another marijuana “suppliers”.
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Why a Dispensary Marketing Strategy With Blogging?
So numbers don’t lie. Blogging for B2C companies like marijuana dispensaries is an awesome marketing tactic that will benefit your cannabis business for years to come.
The following are 7 major reasons why you should incorporate regular blogging on your dispensary website.
1. Potential Marijuana Customers Have Questions & You Have Answers
Why did people use search engines like Google and Bing? I think it’s safe to say they search to find answers, solve problems, accomplish tasks, and with a specific intent to find information.
You literally have thousands if not millions of potential customers who have questions about CBD oils and other marijuana products and are actively searching for answers.
Just think how super awesome it would be if your website could deliver the answers to these popular/lucrative questions posed by your potential marijuana customers.
Your dispensary can be seen as an expert in recreational marijuana and CBD products by publishing high-quality content that answers the questions people have about marijuana and/or CBD.
By using content marketing, blogging, and SEO, not only can you provide the answers to popular marijuana-related questions
The key to winning this blog content marketing game is to provide relevant and informational content, without selling. Instead, focus on details, copywriting, and the quality of information you provide.
This is huge for your dispensary marketing strategy because this type of content provides value and builds trust and confidence with potential CBD customers.
More Value = More Confidence. More Confidence = More Trust. More Trust means customers are more likely to do business with your marijuana dispensary.
Focus your dispensary website content and marketing materials around providing useful information, without selling and you’ll see an increase in online engagement, followers, website e-commence and in-store dispensary sales.
2. Blog Content Marketing Increasing Qualified Website Traffic
In order to grow your dispensary business, you need sales.
In order to get sales, you need your target consumers and any potential customers to find your website or retail dispensary so they can buy your marijuana and CBD oils, easily.
If you want to be easily discovered online for relevant cannabis, marijuana, CBD, or dispensary-related searches, it’s time to implement SEO and content marketing into your dispensary marketing strategy.
A recent study clearly showed how important blog content marketing is for businesses:
Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs have:
- 55% more visitors
- 97% more inbound links
- 434% more indexed pages
Why are indexed pages important?
The more pages you have on your site, the better your chances of getting found in search engines.
If your website’s content is optimized for the answers that potential dispensary customers are looking for, your content will show up on page 1 of the search results because it’s indexed with the Google and Bing search engines.
If your website’s pages are not indexed properly by the search engines, your pages won’t show up for these highly popular and lucrative searches.
Every time you publish an SEO optimized blog with a keyword strategy, you provide a path to potential customers searching for that keyword.
The nurturing content you provide over time will determine whether that traffic transforms into readers, then leads, then sales.
3. Dispensary Blogging Can Influence Consumer Behaviour
Remember, just because you don’t read blogs doesn’t mean that other people don’t. Believe it or not, blogs are instrumental in helping potential customers make purchase decisions.
Data from a 2014 survey of consumers in the UK revealed:
- 84 percent bought products based on how they were described in blogs.
- 1 in 4 bought something each month based on blog content they read.
- 46 percent said they read blogs to do initial product investigation.
I feel that a blog content marketing strategy is vital to the long term success of your dispensary marketing plan.
If potential customers are proven to read blogs before making a purchase decision and are actively searching for information on CBD oil, edibles, or smoking weed in general, your high-quality and relevant dispensary content can inspire them to make a purchase from your store.
4. Blogging About Cannabis Builds Trust in Your Dispensary Brand
If you’re concerned about building your dispensary brand it’s important to understand that blog content marketing is the #1 brand building activity.
Referencing back to the 2019 Content Marketing Institute report, they report that content marketing and blogging specifically are among the major ways most marketers are building customer loyalty.
81% of B2C marketers surveyed agree their organizations are concerned with creating content that builds loyalty with existing clients/customers. Of that group, 52% agreed “strongly” and 29% agreed “somewhat.”
The report also goes on to show that 57% of B2C marketers surveyed expect their content marketing budget to increase in 2019 compared with 2018. Of that group, 29% expect it to increase by more than 9%.
As mentioned earlier, more trust leads to more sales. If you want to develop trust with potential marijuana customers consider publishing regular content that informs and educates them on your marijuana and CBD products.
Chances are, your target is actively searching for specific information and you can develop trust with these potential customers with an effective and strategic blog content marketing plan.
Can you see how SEO optimized blog content that ranks in search engines for relevant search queries can help grow your dispensary?
5. Cannabis Blogs Offer Insight Into Your Potential Customers
Dispensary marketing 101 should state that the more you know about your potential marijuana customers, the better you serve their needs and appeal to their wants.
Our cannabis content marketing team uses free tools like Google Analytics (GA) to get real time and historical feedback on all of our client’s blog content. If you have GA installed on your dispensary website you can do the same.
To measure the success of your dispensary’s blog content stratgey look at the following key performance indicators (KPI) in GA for each blog article:
- Total visits
- Average time spent on page (most important KPI)
- Average number of pages viewed
- Bounce rate
If you’re not using website analytic tools like GA, Google Search Console, and others, you should get started right away. It’s free and simple to implement.
If you need help with this, contact me directly.
Other channels you can use outside of your website to get insight on your dispensary’s blog content stratgey are social media engagement rates.
You can analyze the engagement points on each of your dispensary’s social media posts that link to your blog content. Look for high engagement for reactions, comments, shares/retweets.
If you’re generating triple-digit engagement on social media, your content strategy is probably right on point.
If engagement rates are low, you need to create a new content strategy that focuses on the types of questions your target has about your marijuana and CBD products.
The insight gleaned from your blog content marketing strategy will prove to be valuable in other areas of your dispensary business including retail operations, inventory management, and product selection.
6. Blog Content Provides Relevant Social Media Content
Part of the content marketing plan for your cannabis retail store will obviously include organic social media. Anyone that has managed any social media profiles knows that content is key.
By implementing regular blog articles in your dispensary marketing plan you’re able to increase your visibility in search engines (organic rankings of your content) as well as on social media.
Your dispensary’s blog articles can be shared multiple times each week on social media profiles like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for sure. The idea is to repurpose the article by sharing the same link but using different copy and images in your social media post.
This allows you to post highly relevant content on social media that answers the questions your followers have about marijuana and CBD products.
This type of strategy will lead to increased engagement rates on all your social media profiles which increases the over-all online visibility of your dispensary.
7. Posting Cannabis Content on Your Website Improves SEO
It should be abundantly clear why a blog content marketing strategy can improve your Dispensary’s SEO and search rankings. It all lies within Google 3 main ranking factors: Relevance, Authority, and Trust.
As we’ve seen with the benefits of blogging for your dispensary listed above, relevant content from an authoritative source creates trust with readers/potential customers, which leads to sales.
Therefore, if you populate your website with SEO optimized, keyword rich blog content, regularly, and users find that content in search engines and click to spend 1:30-5:00+ on your website, you’re showing Google and Bing that your website is relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy for the search terms that brought users to your website.
This is how Google determines search engine rankings when deciding what websites get what positions in organic search results. The more relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy the site, the higher the ranking positions.
Search engines reward websites that regularly produce fresh, relevant content that uses semantically related phrases of popular cannabis and CBD related search queries.
Publishing cannabis related blog content on your website helps your website build its authority as a cannabis dispensary.
We Can Help Implement a Blog Strategy For Your Dispensary
SEO optimized blog content writing is an effective plan that should be included in your dispensary marketing strategy.
Blog writing without SEO, or search engine optimization, is really only a half baked strategy for dispensary marketing.
You’ve written the content but is it high-quality compared to what else is out there?
Does it actually answer the popular questions your target market has about your marijuana and CBD products?
If you need help with implementing a blog content writing strategy in your dispensary marketing plan, we can help you, now!
Our professional and experienced cannabis content writers and SEO professionals will use keyword research to identify the most popular and profitable topics for your dispensary to write about.
Our team will write all your blog content copy and SEO optimize each article prior to publishing live. Once live, we’ll submit the new blog’s URL to Google and Bing for indexing.
Please reach out and tell us about your dispensary project using the form below.
We’re ready to help you grow!
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