Useful Tools and Tips for Creating Relevant and Engaging Cannabis Content

We know deep down that quality organic content is the most effective way to educate, engage, and delight our audience, but it’s difficult to get right and can be really time intensive. In 2020, people around the world created 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day and sent 306.4 billion emails. Creating algorithm-beating content that doesn’t violate community guidelines can feel like an uphill treadmill on which as soon as you’ve finished editing the video you spent hours bringing to life, you’re onto the next. 

If it seems like other small cannabis businesses are cranking out content faster than you can fathom, try these tips and tools. 

Educate

It’s easy to forget how little even regular cannabis users understand about the plant. Educational content marketing has the dual benefit of placing us as experts in the market and also lifting the fog on a sometimes maligned product.

Answer the Public
Get instant, raw search insights, direct from the minds of your customers by using Answer the Public, a listening tool that tunes into autocomplete data from search engines like Google then outputs the questions that people are asking about your keywords. Try, ‘cannabis tinctures’, or ‘delta-8’ and tailor your content to the queries in your audience’s minds.

Biteable
Biteable helps you to make informative explainer videos that, “are guaranteed to make your viewers feel smart”. Use your own footage, stock footage, or graphics and animation to create an educational video with little to no experience.

Jitter + Mojo
Create custom motion graphics easily with the Jitter Platform or use Mojo to animate Instagram stories. Animate text, images, or charts and figures to breathe life into your explainer content. 

Engage

How do we define engaging? Top digital influencer, Neil Patel, suggests that it’s content that triggers a measurable response in people, as it relates to what you’re doing. To achieve engaging content, he suggests: 

• Create with intent (Know what want to accomplish with this particular piece of content) 

• Make it too valuable (In content marketing, we’re encouraged to offer as much value with as little resource as possible. Patel asks, “What if you created a piece of content that was in-depth, heavily researched, time-intensive, and genuinely valuable to your audience and then just gave it away?”)

• Stay creative (Trying new styles of content will provide you with more data and a stronger understanding of what your audience responds to. But from a purely personal perspective, it gives you more opportunities to connect with your audience) 

• Lean into your strengths and passions (Your audience can only ever be as excited about a topic as you allow them to be) 

• Create action-oriented content (If you don’t give your audience something to do, it’s likely that they won’t do anything) 

DaVinci Resolve or VideoShow
TikTok and YouTube shorts have forced other social media to embrace short form video, which has quickly become the most engaged-with content cross-platforms. Even Instagram has confirmed that its platform is no longer for static photos. If you have basic video editing skills or the time to learn, DaVinci Resolve is an advanced free tool for creating content that pops. If you want to use a more templated approach, VideoShow is a great all-in-one option for making catchy loopable videos.

Semrush
To offer something unique, you need to understand where you are in the marketplace. Semrush can support your brand with SEO, content marketing, competitor research, and social media marketing. The content marketing tool can both audit your current content, and also help find topics that resonate with your audience.

Content Row
Keep your cornerstone content (those pages that are the nucleus of your site — the ‘how-tos’ or the ‘101’s) fresh with text analyzer, Content Row. Much more than a grammar checker, it’ll tell you if your sentences are boring, the grade level of your writing, and even if your content is gendered. 

Delight

People will find delight in unexpected or funny content that breaks up a wearisome scroll. From independent or SME businesses, people enjoy authenticity, charmingly lo-fi Lives, and transparency. Use these tools to inject some personality into your content. 

Creative Market + Gravit Designer
Canva has changed the game for social media content. Design novices around the world can now create cohesive and pleasing graphics in under 10 minutes. However, it’s become such a runaway success that we see the same templates from different brands over and over. Find lesser-used but beautifully impactful templates on Creative Market, or download fonts and graphics to create your own in an intuitive design tool like Gravit Designer. 

Yarn.co
Not everything has to be a highly produced masterpiece. When you want to express something quickly, use Yarn.co to make memes from TV shows and movies by searching any phrase. 

Inkscape
Use free tool Inkscape to turn doodles on a napkin, a sketched mindmap, or a photo of a memorable object into a polished graphic.