It isn’t always easy to keep your blog updated with interesting and relevant content that doesn’t get stale or repetitive. One of the biggest challenges for dispensary owners (and dispensary marketers!) is figuring out what to write about. Have no fear though, we’re going to go in depth on the types of blogs you should be publishing to your dispensary’s website, and then we’ll throw you a couple good topics that you can start writing about today!
What is a blog?
Everyone knows what a blog is, but many are unaware of what a blog is supposed to do and what a blog is not supposed to do. This is just a little refresher to help you get your expectations in check.
Blogging is the number one content marketing tactic according to over 65% of marketers. It’s such a fundamental part of any online marketing strategy. A blog allows you to showcase the things that make your business unique from your competitors and share what makes you interesting. Blogging also builds trust between you and your customers and does so much for organic SEO.
Blogging is all about building trust between your brand and the people who visit your website. Building credibility with your audience leads to sales, and if you provide content that holds value for your customers, they’ll keep coming back.
A blog is NOT a place for you to promote your business every single day, however. When you focus too hard on self-promotion, you tend to neglect your readers and their interests. It’s like having a friend who only ever talks about themselves. It gets old after a while! If you’re constantly grasping for that sale post after post, your content is going to get old, stale, and start getting ignored completely.
The 80/20 Rule of Blogging
Remember the 80/20 rule of content marketing, and apply it to your blog!
80% of the posts you share to your dispensary blog should be solving a problem or a point of pain for your customers (AKA, any pothead within a 10-mile radius!). That could be a weekly grow guide that helps your patients grow your clones for example or just any content that’s full of tips and tricks, hacks, strategies, and guides to help them with their biggest problems.
Up to 20% of your blog posts can be self-promotion when appropriate. Good self-promotion blogs are timely and relevant, meaning it’s only a good idea to share a promotion piece when it’s relevant to your customers. Good promotion pieces typically feature new products or features, store events, or events that your team will be attending. Their purpose is to make your customers aware of what you’ve got going on without being overbearing on your sales.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some engaging blog post ideas!
Engaging Dispensary Blog Content Ideas
- Highlight some causes your dispensary supports.
- Introduce your staff and budtenders with a meet the team mini-series.
- Share a funny story from your day at the dispensary.
- Showcase a few cannabis industry myths and debunk them.
- Answer some of your most FAQs.
- Create a “best of” blog series for cannabis products and accessories. Include one or two of your own.
- Tour your grow area and share a video of the tour on your blog.
- Create new and improved cannabis recipes
- Educate your readers with interesting cannabis facts as they come about
- Write tutorials on relevant topics, like how to roll joints or the best way to clean a bong.
- Have your budtenders pick out their favorite products every week and share a post on them.
- Publish your dispensary’s origin story.
- Create handy cheat sheets that your customers can bookmark and refer to later, like the difference between Sativa’s and Indica’s, or which terpenes are responsible for which flavors.
- Go behind the scenes and share a list of your vendors and discuss how you do business with them.
- Tease your audience by sharing a sneak peek of a new vendor or product
- Share a customer story. An example would be how medical marijuana has helped your patients, or it could be an interesting story about how they relate to cannabis.
- Try something new, like trying a new smoking device or rolling a rose blunt, and share your results in a blog post.
- Create cornerstone content
- Interview a prevalent member of the cannabis industry or a cannabis influencer and publish to the blog.
- Create multiple top-10 lists comparing popular products or accessories.
- Publish an interactive timeline showcasing how your dispensary has evolved over the years.
- Create a hashtag for your products on social media and share user-generated content about how your products can be used (or have been used).
- Compare your products to other products
- Share a full series on your vendors that includes their process, their packaging, their top products, etc.
Final thoughts
These are all great pieces of content that your customers can use and find value in. You can also share content about your dispensary’s internal affairs 20% of the time. If you still feel stuck in the blogging rut or if you’d just like to walk away from it entirely, the cannabis marketing experts at Team Maryjane have been creating and running engaging blogs for our clients, and we’d be more than happy to assist you.