Ultimate Guide to Creating a Social Media Content Plan for Cannabis and Cannabis Businesses

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With proper planning and a thorough understanding of what cannabis and cannabis-related companies are allowed to post and share on social media platforms, you can develop a social media content plan that will increase brand awareness, increase brand loyalty, and leads to sales.

The first step in investing in an effective social media content plan is to prepare for success by completing the necessary groundwork. Below are the three main steps to get there.

1. Check the footprints of your competitors and your social media

The first step in leveraging the reach of social media for your brand is to conduct a review of your current social media presence. For B2B marketing, you should definitely have an active presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. For B2C marketing, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are likely to come first. This of course depends on your unique business and your specific target audiences.

With that in mind, do your research and find out where your target audience is already spending time. The platforms they actively engage on are the places your brand needs to be.

Check your social media profiles and pages and ask yourself the following questions:

• Are your biographies current and comprehensive with keywords whenever possible?
• Do all of your avatar and header images match, or at least contain consistent branding elements?
• How many people are following your brand on each platform?
• How often do you publish content?
• What kind of content do you publish?
• Do you share other people’s content?
• How engaged are people with your brand (i.e., comment on your posts, share your posts, like your posts, etc.)?

Next, do the same for your main competitors and ask the same questions. Also, check out the type of content they post, how often they post, and what their followers interact with.

Look for loopholes and opportunities where you can gain a foothold by posting more content that is over-relevant to your target audience.

2. Define your goals, target audience and strategy

After completing your audits, you will know where to invest more time and energy in the future. Next, you need to define goals, your target audience (s), and your strategy to achieve those goals.

Define your target audience

Who is your ideal customer? Who is your most valuable customer? How do your products or services benefit from different people? You need to know the answers to these questions and more before you can create marketing goals and social media marketing plans to help you achieve those goals.

That means you need to take some time creating buyer personalities for your key audiences. Without filled in buyer personalities, you could post and share the wrong type of content and not achieve your goals.

In other words, your time and budget investments could be wasted if you don’t target your social media promotions to the right audience. You may even spend time on social media platforms that your target audience spends little or no time on.

You don’t want this to happen. So create your buyer personalities first!

MATERIAL READING: How to create B2B buyer personas

Set your social media marketing goals

Given that cannabis and cannabis-related brands have to be so careful about what they post and share on social media platforms, your content-related goals are likely to be slightly different from the goals brands set in other industries.

For example, a goal related to generating sales directly from your social media activity would be far less realistic than a goal related to increasing brand awareness or word-of-mouth marketing for the simple reason that the cannabis industry doesn’t Advertise products or sell products can be social media platforms. Direct advertising and sales are against the terms of use of most social media platforms.

So, consider setting goals like the following, which can be specific to each social media platform:

• The number of engaged followers has increased by X% by the X date.
• Increase the number of releases of our content by X% by the X date.
• Increase website traffic from social media platform by X% by X date.

MATERIAL READING: How to use social media marketing to promote a cannabis or cannabis-related business

Create your social media content strategy and plan

In order to create a social media content strategy and a plan to bring that strategy to life, you need to identify the following three critical points:

• What kind of content are you going to post?
• What types of content will you share?
• Where you post content (i.e. social media platforms)
• When you publish or share content
• How often you post or share content
• Who you post or share content with
• Why you publish or share content

Using a strategy based on each of the bullet points above, you can create a plan and calendar for social media content. Your plan should include answers to the following questions:

• Which topics are important for our target group that are relevant for our brand and industry?
• What kind of original content are we going to create to post on social media?
• What kind of content produced by others will we share?
• When and how often will we post and share content on each social media platform that we want to use?
• How will we adapt our content to our target groups?

Note that original content can be created specifically for each social media channel, or your social media posts can share links to your recent blog posts, videos, etc.

Additionally, cross-posting between platforms is usually fine as long as your social media profiles and pages aren’t exact duplicates of each other. The reason you don’t want to duplicate everything from one platform to another is simple. People use different social platforms for different reasons. Cross-posting without adapting the content therefore does not produce optimal results.

MATERIAL READING:

3. Develop your social media content calendar

With your social media content plan in place, it’s time to create your social media content calendar. A simple table works well for this purpose. Divide the sheet by day and indicate lines of how often each day you post on each social media channel.

For example, if you plan to post content three times a day on Twitter and once a day on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you need three lines per day for Twitter and one line per day for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

For columns, add a column for each piece of information you want to keep track of. Some recommendations include:

• platform: The social media platform on which the post will be published.
• date: The exact date the post will be published.
• time: The exact time the post will be published.
• Type of content: For example, advertising, link to blog posts, shared posts, company news, etc.
• theme: What is the post about?
• target group: If you have more than one target group, which target group is the post intended for?
• Embassy: What copy will be included in the mail?
• Link included: If there is a link in the post, where does it go?
• Url: Add a link to the live post after it is published.
• gate: If there is a specific goal for the post, add it here.
• Remarks: Add any additional notes you want to include before or after posting.

The picture below shows you what this content calendar could look like for a period of two days.

Important information about creating a social media content calendar for cannabis and cannabis companies

Think about how social media publishing fits into your complete digital marketing strategy, including blog, email marketing, advertising, content marketing, etc. Each of these marketing opportunities are more successful when they work together rather than separately Silos.

Follow the steps above to conduct an audit, identify your target audience, define your goals, create your plan, and create your social media content calendar. Once you have a written plan, it will be a lot easier to implement and get measurable results from your social media investments.