When did you last consider the direction content marketing is going in?
Understanding where the industry is headed is as important as anything else online. Even online cannabiz owners should take these stats to heart before trying their hands at content creation.
Once you know how the market moves, you can adjust your own marketing style for real growth. You may follow your intuition like most people do thinking it’s enough. It’s great you do that, but it probably hurts your results.
Nothing competes against hard factual evidence.
Real stats help will help you make a develop a strategy around your content that you can rely on. Stats are also a great at helping you figure out a budget to stick with for your website’s content marketing.
You never want to go in blindly without first determining how much you can afford to spend.
Sometimes it’s difficult to figure out by yourself, hopefully this post will help you out. Here’s the top 7 content marketing stats for 2022. This small guide is designed to help you start your year off with the right marketing plan.
1. 42% of Marketers Say Content Marketing is There Most Effective Strategy – Sourced from CMI
There are no denying results, they speak for themselves. A website can generate exceptional results with just one simple content marketing campaign.
The difference between stats on a site producing custom content and one that is not, is worlds apart.
Time and dedication are required to produce an effective marketing strategy for your content. Confidence appears to be at an all-time high in the industry. As many as 42% of all marketers believe the content marketing they do is more impactful for business than anything else.
Only 16% find their strategy ineffective. Websites who research the target market demographics are guaranteed to see an increase in leads and sales.
Content marketing for lead generation works because you’re giving away something they want for absolutely nothing. It’s not traditional marketing but is great for improving brand awareness and reputation.
Customers you get through content marketing are proven to be happier with their purchase than others. They also perceive your brand as having a better understanding of who they are.
To get bigtime results from your content, it’s going to take considerable time and effort. Still, it’s a powerful method designed to make the reputation of your brand and customer retention long-term.
Prospects who become customers also tend to show more support for the brand, due to the strong relationship built through your content.
Native advertising is known to produce faster results, it’s true, but content marketing helps the future growth of an online business, guaranteeing it sticks around.
Both B2B and B2 relations are more grounded when a company follows a consistent content strategy based on value.
You may think this topic isn’t relevant to an online cannabis store.
But for an industry where quality is everything and the potential for fraud is extremely high, custom content is a definite factor to consider when it comes to a stores longevity.
Marketing content is very effective as you’re not just about getting visitors to buy something from your site.
You get more focused on the relationship, instead you design your entire culture around content. It can be used to answer a question or solve a problem thereby creating trust and validating a customer’s needs.
After a user digests your content, they start to relate to your brand more. It’s like someone finally gets them. Brands without content simply can’t build relationships or retain customers the same way as content producing brands do.
To effectively market with content, consistency is key. People expect content to be posted regularly and missing just one post can be a disaster. Distribution is also important; it requires you share across multiple channels.
Channels include social media platforms, emails, search engines, apps, and more.
Everything created must be informative, engaging, influential, entertaining, etc. Your focus should be making content that’s better than your competitions.
2. 60% of Successful Websites Create One or More Pieces of Daily Content – Sourced from eMarketer
Like I said, consistency is the real secret behind any successful website. McKinsey & Company, a respected online retail store follows the 3 Cc of customer satisfaction – consistency, consistency, consistency.
Cannabis companies seeking the highest ROI, should set time aside every day to create new content, or hire a team to do it for them.
Websites who fail to do so, will get less traffic, leads and sales. The only way they have a chance to make it without content is through paid advertising.
With no budget or connections there’s not much you can do without content. Content is king, Robbie Richards proved that. After one month using only content, he increased traffic to his site 272% without paid ads.
Companies only doing paid ads on Google or Bing for search rankings use content too. Even PPC on Facebook uses good content for the ads. Content helps ads gains traction without violating Facebook’s terms & conditions.
A recent analytics report on Google showed that the 60% of marketers who create content daily, had an easier time collecting leads than those who don’t.
Even marketers making up the 60% who were guest blogging or using influencers to get traffic still posted every day.
Content can be podcasts, videos, infographics, and surveys. Long form posts are also great at attracting new users and collecting leads. Obviously, creators with the best results make all types of content.
3. Growth with Each Passing Year Shows a 7.8x Higher Increase for Content Marketing Leaders vs. Their Followers – Sourced from Aberdeen
Industry leaders use content marketing constantly. They use it to set the tone everyone else uses. They spend their time developing skills that make them more creative and effective.
Those at the top are constantly in the trenches figuring out changes in the field they influence.
After they learn something new, they implement what they’ve learned, and repeat the process until they get positive results. After the results come in, they teach what they learned to the people following them.
Unfortunately, these days a lot of influencers we consider leaders are burnt out. Their inspiration for training and teaching their followers isn’t what it used to be.
Sometimes they get lazy and the exceptional content that once fueled their business takes a back seat to their recognition or social media status.
The few leaders who still put out valuable content are far and few between. Those who still do get more leads and sales, generally they do better than the ones who don’t.
Their success proves how important content creation is if you want to stay at the top.
Cannabis website owners are no different, there are countless ways to give value to your colleagues and customers. The websites that create custom content will attract and retain more customers than the others do.
Check out Search Engine Journal, it’s a high-quality SEO and IM website packed full of informative content. They are continually at the forefront of the industry with over one million monthly unique visitors.
Even if getting one million monthly visitors isn’t your goal, it shows you the power of content marketing. On the other hand, if that number gets you excited, here’s how you do the same:
- Limit your time reading blogs, instead focus on writing your own.
- Use every blog post you write strategically.
- Follow the leaders, success leaves clues –
- leaders learn, implement, adjust, and implement.
- Once they have consistent results, they teach what they’ve learned.
- They set industry standards.
- Always push yourself to create better content then everyone else.
- Make your content the type of content that is impossible to find.
- Build relationships with your followers, influencers, and other leaders.
For you in the cannabis industry, you have plenty of things to teach others. Once you begin the pattern of learning and teaching you become a leader.
Tips, tricks, and any strategies that makes work easy are ideal.
4. 57% of All Marketers Prioritize Custom Content Creation Over Everything – Sourced from Altimeter
Numbers indicate that a whopping 78% of customers are more likely to trust your brand when your content is unique and consistent.
Connecting through engaging content is the simplest way to encourage customers to like trust you.
Custom content is a way to build a connection with your audience. By creating engaging content unique to your field, you strengthen brand image and effectively show the consumer the value of your product.
Usually, custom content is made for people who trust you and have already made a purchase.
Simple content marketing is used for building a new audience. Custom content is for developing audience relationships, eventually converting them to customers.
Dragon Search Marketing is another successful IM team with a great blog. They released a report indicating 61% of consumers are more likely to spend money after viewing or listening to unique content.
Membership or subscription-based sites do best when custom content is used to strengthen customer bonds with the company. For many cannabis website owners, this is how you’re going to retain subscriptions.
Use content to give details on your strains, for example. Unique content helps provide clarity for customers on difficult concepts.
A unique piece offers a logical path to follow, complete with steps and reasons to trust your brand. Customers who’ve completed the process are more likely to buy from you instead of another website. Content also makes it easy to identify with your brand.
You can create unique, informative podcast, or educate through video. No rules are set in stone, be creative to stand out.
Once posted, remember to read any comments left by readers. Your audience will always leave insights on what matters to them, this is a great way to figure out your next topic. This is a vital tip, memorize it and never forget it.
5. Custom Content Marketing is 62% Less Costly than Traditional Marketing and Produces 3x the Leads – Sourced from DemandMetric
Devoting a portion of your resources to content marketing is smart business. It’s less expensive than paid advertising or SEO.
And unlike PPC on Facebook where a post is only seen one time buy a user, a single piece of content posted is there for good.
Not only will you reduce your overhead when spending money on content marketing, but you will also produce around 3 times more leads then with traditional marketing strategies.
Make no mistake, traditional marketing is needed.
But your efforts must be balanced with content marketing. It works good for getting new leads, but content marketing works best to nurture them into customers.
Any good marketer will tell you content is the easiest way to reach company milestones. These milestones could include hitting numbers in brand visibility, lead generation, monthly unique visitors and more.
Never stick to one path, a successful marketer knows it’s best to spread your efforts across multiple platforms. Basically, don’t completely forget traditional marketing, it’s great for fast sales but not for long term customer retention.
Even if traditional methods are your go to for collecting new leads, nothing should come before the creation of informative or engaging content.
Cannabis sites who follow this rule without exception will always stick around longer than those who don’t. They’ll have a stronger connection with customers of a higher lifetime value.
6. 93% of All B2B Marketers Use Content Marketing – Sourced from CMI
For the most part, B2B and B2C marketers accept that content marketing is more effective than traditional advertising. Maybe it’s because communicating with a new audience is much easier through high-quality content.
It could be that customers acquired through content are always more viable. Or possibly it’s because the individuals who create superior content are always viewed as leaders.
In any case, by giving content away instead of immediately pushing for a sale, your brand gains trust. Higher trust levels produce more supportive customers who identify with your brand. Anyone who identifies with your brand, is almost guaranteed to become a repeat customer.
Well organized custom content creates the trust your company needs to convert a lead into a sale. If trust doesn’t exist between you and your prospects, then there’s no turning them into a customer.
Look at Amazon, people repeatedly shop there because they trust the brand. They know when they order a product, the delivery will be on time.
Amazon’s customers also know they’re protected. If their package doesn’t arrive on time, they know Amazon will solve the problem.
The reliability of Amazon makes it the best ecommerce company in the world. Customers have a sense of security so strong, Amazon is trusted more than any company in the world.
One study by Forrester determined Amazon had more influence over their consumers than Google had over its users.
Building trust through content is much easier than through advertising. It’s like TV commercials, they’re not very effective on today’s market. On the other hand, a single piece of custom content can get millions of visitors to a website. Websites using articles or videos to provide a solution for a problem build trust. This is the most important to consider when designing new pieces of content for your customers.
7. 78% of High Level CMOs View Unique Content as the Way of the Future
As the internet evolves so do the users on it. Social media has become so noisy, it’s almost unbearable. Marketers constantly try new things to break people’s distraction from it.
To keep up with the changing times, online cannabis stores must evolve too. Evolution is the only way to stay on par or possibly surpass the competition.
A CMO evolves as well, they must fully understand and appreciate the audience of the brand. Therefore, market research is essential for you to speak directly to your audience. It’s also essential to evolve with a constantly changing world. When the customer is fully understood, a brand’s voice will be congruent with its customers and better able to meet their needs.
Not everyone will be a customer though, many users will remain a follower indefinitely. The 80/20 rule is real, 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. Figure out which 20% of your subscribers is producing your results, then spend more time nurturing them.
That simple truth is why it’s important to segment subscribers into groups. By segmenting your email list into specific groups, followers and buyers can be distinguished from each other when sending out messages. You can even go a step further and segment your list into multiple groups.
Followers, subscribers, new leads, prospects, customers, repeat customers, old leads and unwanted followers can all be segmented into different groups.
Segmentation allows you to speak differently to each group. Each group has its own needs to consider when nurturing them. This also helps with open and click through rates.
As you gain understanding of a specific group, communicating with them gets easier. You’ll be able to build trust quicker and better understand each group.
Fresh leads for example will require you speak differently to them than prospects who’ve already been warmed up. Regardless, to gain their trust, you’re going to provide them value through content you create.
After you segment your list, the next step is to create a different piece of content for each group. It’s why it’s called custom, because each piece is designed to meet the needs or solve a problem in a specific group.
Top 7 Content Marketing Stats in Conclusion
It’s a crazy world online, new content marketing ideas are tested every day. Marketers have no guarantee what idea will work. New ideas potentially alter the way content is delivered and perceived. We see more uniquely creative pieces of content today than ever.
These new pieces are often so over the top, they give users a radically new experience. Those are the content creations that stick best because they bring so much to the table. The customization on some content is so intricate, it can’t be expressed in words.
Creators use visually stimulating images, intense sounds, and they’re often interactive. The effects they can produce on a user is fascinating to watch. They can be so strong they illicit an intense emotional response in the user.
Customers who tie emotions to a brand’s product or service are proven to have a higher lifetime value then individuals who are trying to solve a problem.
Experienced content marketers know this, understand when a piece has a ‘POP’ it becomes memorable and invaluable. When content is executed so well it becomes unforgettable, it is more valuable than a hundred mediocre blog posts. Leaders considered expert content creators will spend as much time as needed to produce a better piece of content than anyone in their field.
Prospects can be found across the web. Billions of active users hold space on endless platforms and social media sites.
Figuring out where new potential customers are is not the problem. In fact, they can’t be avoided, that’s how many there are. Social media platforms, search engines, apps, SMS, even walking down the street – no matter where you go, there they are.
The important thing to ask yourself is, “How can I give them a memorable, engaging experience with my content?”
Not only must a piece content be creatively designed, but it must also express the concept of trust. Whether it’s a blog post, meme, or video newsletter, take your time and do it right. Do the research, put forth effort and let the work speak for itself.
It’s the only way you’ll be able to encourage them your brand is worthy. Once your brand is trusted, traffic is constant, subscribers come easy and leads naturally become customers.
Creating trust strong enough to make people act is done through exceptional content that gives a lasting experience.
My best piece of advice is to take each stat into consideration the next time you create a new piece. Be it a blog post, a video, or infographic, each stat must be considered when producing content. If you’re serious about getting more traffic, leads and sales to your website, you’ll make sure you do.
And yes, online cannabis stores who are smart will listen to this advice. The longevity of your store relies on several factors, many of which are given in this article. It’ll take time to learn everything, that’s just the way it goes. Either figure it out yourself or find someone else to do it for you.
One last thing, do any of these stats seam important enough to deserve its own unique blog post?
I’m curious about your experience as well?
What kind of content marketing have you tried? Out of what you’ve tried, what gave you the best results? Let me know in the comments below, thank you for reading.