For B2B companies in the cannabis industry, the importance of educating prospects and sharing informative content cannot be understated. But perhaps even more importantly, it’s important that people actually see and interact with that content.

It’s a tale as old as time: a newly-digital brand starts creating content, but never finds an audience to share that content with.

One retweet from a spam account later, and that thoughtfully prepared blog has hardly reached a single soul. You put it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even on Pinterest, but no one clicked! There’s got to be a better way!

Developing and Delivering a Content Strategy

After a full quarter with nothing to show for yourself, you might start asking yourself, “Is it us?” “Is it the content?” “Are we not using enough hashtags?” Chances are, it isn’t just any one of those things.

In reality, you probably aren’t sending the right content to the right places, or even to the right people. In order to reach an audience, drive engagement, and achieve ROI, you must first establish an effective content distribution strategy.

Before you draft even one more infographic, ask yourself these four questions:

• Who is my target audience?
• What am I trying to achieve through my content?
• Which social media channels does my audience use regularly?
• How can I divide my audience along their customer journey?

Once you have answers to these essential questions, you can start using marketing automation platforms to put your content to work for you.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation tools are used to segment, schedule, and distribute your content to the right people at the right time, so that you can focus more on overall strategy and client outreach.

Perhaps most importantly, automation platforms can be used to measure and analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns.

How Does Automation Help My Business?

When you combine the right tool(s) with the right content, automation can add up to far more than the sum of its parts. When used properly, marketing automation can help you:

• Generate/Optimize New Leads: Asking people to exchange their name and email address is an increasingly popular strategy in content marketing. In addition to expanding your email list, the people joining are more likely to be warm leads given their interest in your content. Marketing automation tools can help you segment these new leads drawn through your content, and track them all the way from capture to closure.
• Maximize Social Media: Writing, designing and planning social content is already time consuming enough. Having to constantly queue up posts and monitor the results firsthand is just too much without enough guaranteed return. Automation platforms make it easy to schedule out your content and monitor its performance along meaningful KPIs, allowing you to make fast adjustments. They are also useful for monitoring trends, hashtags, and communities that could be useful for building your cannabis brand’s social presence.
• Strengthen Your Sales Team: Put simply, marketing automation helps remove frustrating guesswork and cold calling from your sales process. By streamlining your content distribution and your lead collection, your sales team can sort through warmer, more qualified leads with ease, making sure they are primed for direct content before any actual outreach. Automation platforms can also analyze when a prospect is engaging with your content, making it easier to time your follow-up.
• Outpace Your Competition: Automation platforms don’t just help you monitor the social landscape and schedule out content. Platforms like RivalIQ also provide you with detailed reports on competing pages, and show you how your account is doing in relation. This information makes it easier to quantify how well your social media efforts are working, and how you might need to improve to get where you want to be.