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Most cannabis businesses know the importance of having good quality online content. Your website is your digital storefront. In many cases, it’s your customer’s first (or only) introduction to your brand. Good content is important not only for getting the right customers to your site, but also crucial for getting them to stick around long enough to make a purchase. Developing a comprehensive content strategy that takes into account each of your target audiences as well as your own business objectives can be challenging, but it’s not impossible. The following are three examples of content strategies I would suggest you avoid.
We’ve all heard it, “content is king, you need to be producing more content, you need to be blogging, you need to be posting on Facebook, content, content, content.” And while I agree with all of that, the problem arises when businesses ”just do it”, but don’t think about why, or about the end goal it is supporting. When there are no measurable goals for your content in place, it’s impossible to understand whether or not your efforts were worthwhile.
The three tenets of the “Just Do It” strategy that drive me the most bonkers are:
I. Publish content before it’s ready, because of an artificially imposed deadline – How is your audience going to trust you as an expert if you’re rushing to publish content that is riddled with typos and unfinished sen
II. Endlessly promote your own products and/or services – There is a time and a place for shameless promotion, but not every interaction with your audience is appropriate. It would be like me dropping a random link to our services page in the middle of this blog post. Just, tacky.
III. Create content for content’s sake – This approach often results in treating a company blog like a personal online diary. By the way, can I just tell you right now how truly therapeutic it’s been writing this post?
Good, strategic content development requires defining your target audiences, setting specific goals, and establishing appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs), so that you can more accurately analyze your content’s performance. Once you do that then feel free to throw your own razzle dazzle on top.
You can blame this mentality in large part on those SEO companies you still see popping up everywhere promising to get you “ranked #1 in search!” Keywords are important, yes, and if you don’t have any budget to put behind promoting your content right now, then you should at the very least make sure you are optimizing your content for search. However, let’s be clear: keywords alone do not a comprehensive content strategy make.
First, you need to understand who your audience is, and what motivates them. When you truly understand that, it will be much easier to identify the types of content they need as well as the specific keywords they’re using to look for it.
We hear it time and time again, “Well, we don’t want to limit our audience, because really our content is for everyone.”
Sorry, no, it’s not. I have a feeling a large percentage of you already know this well. The entire world is not your target audience. I mean, feel free to think it internally, and write like the world’s watching, but in reality, you have a very specific audience that is truly engaged, and if you treat them right by creating content specifically for them, you will see a much greater return on your investment than you would trying to create content that appeals to everyone everywhere. So that’s my advice, I would be remiss not to mention how important it is to listen to the direct feedback your audience is giving you, and on that note please leave a comment if you agree with the above, or if you don’t… that’s cool too. I guess.
