In this day and age, it’s not wise to waste your money. You have to budget consciously if you want to keep your dispensary competitive in such a booming cannabis industry. If you follow our dispensary marketing blog, you know we can’t stop preaching the content marketing evangel. Quality content is fuel for any successful marketing engine, so if the content you create is used in the right way, you can earn a return on your investment for just a few cents per persuasion, and here’s how:
Let’s break it down.
The content you put on your website or blog needs to go above and beyond. Your brand needs to be present and your voice needs to be clear throughout everything you create. All of your posts or pages should be visually attractive or attention-grabbing and thought-provoking or intellectually engaging. The point of your content is to help your prospects (and customers!) learn more about your brand, your store, the people that run it, and the quality of your products so that they will ultimately end up shopping in your dispensary.
After you’ve developed awesome, useful content you need to find some ways to spread it around and repurpose it so that you can reach more people than your regular readers. Another reason content marketing is so cheap is that there are a lot of ways to spread your content without paying to do so. Put your content on your website, share it in a tweet or facebook post, link to the content from your blog, upload it to SlideShare, etc.
Creating that “awesome, useful content”
If you want the most bang for your buck with content marketing, that awesome useful content we brought up before should be evergreen content. Evergreen content is any content you create that can be used, reused, and repackaged without becoming outdated and irrelevant. It stands the test of time.
Evergreen content should cover cannabis concepts that are factual, or have a long shelf life. Instead of writing about what you have on special in your dispensary this week try writing about something people can find relevant and useful for much longer than that week. A good example would be a piece that showcases how your dispensary grows its weed since that won’t be changing for a while and people will find it useful.
Your evergreen content should also refer to time loosely or not at all. You should avoid referencing specific events that can be dated. You should also use very general terms when describing time. For example, instead of saying “a study published 3 days ago…” You should write “A study published recently…”. Not specifying time can keep your reader more immersed. Some people will even stop reading an article if the information appears too dated!
Additionally, repurposing your evergreen content is important so that you have the potential to reach more people by sharing the same content in a variety of ways. Some people prefer to digest information in the form of short videos or infographics and ignore long-winded text posts altogether! By repackaging that useful information, you can interact with more potential customers without really doing anything.
The lifetime cost of content marketing for cannabis brands (is shockingly affordable)
Content marketing is always basically free when you do everything from researching and writing to publishing and sharing by yourself. However, that isn’t always practical. So say you hire a freelancer or you work with an agency, and for all the perfect highly engaging and influential evergreen cannabis content they create, they charge you $500. While that can be a lot for a small dispensary owner or another small cannabis brand to shell out, consider that that content influences 100 people to come to your store. If that’s the case, you spent about $5 per lead, which is minimal in comparison to how much it could’ve cost you to run an ad campaign (if your business even could, of course).
Even with the initial ROI, you’ll see that as your content will continue to resonate with people (which it should since it’s evergreen) and you’ve earned 500 new leads. That puts you down to $1/lead. If your content is perfect, it will continue to earn customers throughout its lifetime. So if that content that you paid $500 for ends up earning you 1000 leads, you only spent about 50 cents on each lead. The leads that turn into customers will cover the cost of that content over and over again.
If you think about it and look at it in terms of lifetime cost versus value, you’ll be happy to make the switch.
The cannabis marketing professionals at Team MaryJane help our cannabis clients all over the country develop strong, effective content marketing strategies and optimize all aspects of their marketing, including fine-tuning content, providing input on social media campaigns, creating content, and even helping you build your brand from the ground up. As one of the top dispensary marketing firms in Denver, we know we’ve got the tools to help you achieve all of your objectives. Get in touch with us today for a FREE no-risk consultation, or check out our Dispensary in a Box program, which is our most affordable (and most valuable!) full-service marketing package.