Every cannabis and cannabis-related brand needs publicity to spread the word, boost awareness, and motivate people to buy its products and services. The challenge for businesses working in and with the cannabis industry is determining how to invest their time and marketing budgets to get publicity that actually drives the type of engagement that leads to sales.

Fortunately, you don’t have to try to figure it all out on your own. Publicity experts have shared the top communications strategies that are known to work well today. Recently, Cision and PR Week released the 2021 Global Comms Report: Paying – and Earning – Attention, which reveals the top U.S. communications strategies according to senior-level public relations (PR), communications, and marketing professionals.

1. Data and the Right Metrics

According to the experts, publicity is no longer about impressions. It’s about engaging target audiences and end users. In fact, 79% of publicity pros say engagement and relationship-building are the goals of their PR campaigns while just 21% say getting as many stories placed as possible is the goal. That’s a big shift from just a few years ago, and the reason for the shift is data.

Today, businesses want to dig deeper than impressions. Fortunately, new tools and tracking mechanisms make it possible to collect data that goes beyond basic impressions to track engagement and the depth of audience members’ relationships with the brand.

Bottom-line, publicity investments today have to be data-driven, so be sure you have tools and expertise in place to effectively track results and make appropriate decisions based on the data you’re able to gather and analyze.

2. Social Listening

The days of guessing what consumers want from your brand are over. Today, you can stay on the pulse of your target audience’s preferences, interests, and more using social listening tools. In other words, by keeping track of what people are posting and sharing across social media channels, you can develop more effective communications.

Among publicity experts surveyed by Cision and PR Week, 81% of them are using social listening to inform their PR campaigns. For example, brands use social listening to identify the themes and conversations audiences are interested in, and they create PR-driven storytelling content to become part of those conversations in a more organic way. You can do the same for your cannabis or cannabis-related brand.

3. Content Creation

Content creation is the top priority among communications pros according to the research data. When asked to rank eight types of content by the influence they have on consumers, PR pros ranked social media posts as the most persuasive for U.S. audiences. Interestingly, social media posts rank at the bottom for all other countries included in the Cision and PR Week study (Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Sweden, and China).

Below is the full breakdown of eight types of content ranked by most influential to least influential based on the percent of publicity experts who ranked each as influential or not:

Social media post: 70% Online feature: 68% Brand video: 56% Brand website: 54% Broadcast feature: 45% Print feature: 41% Advertisement: 39% Blog post: 27%

Keep in mind, none of these types of content should be evaluated as a stand-alone investment. An effective communications strategy uses an integrated approach where one piece of content is the foundation and is repurposed and spread across various platforms and channels.

For example, a blog post can turn into a social media post, an online feature, a brand video, and more. Don’t analyze their impacts to your results in silos or you won’t have the best data to make the right decisions.

4. Social Media Channel

For years, Facebook and Instagram have been the top social media channels that communications experts used for publishing and sharing content to generate brand publicity in the United States. That hasn’t changed, but there are some interesting rankings based on which channels communications experts are investing their budget dollars in today. The rankings are below:

Facebook: 85% Instagram: 72% LinkedIn: 71% Twitter: 71% YouTube: 69% TikTok: 14% Pinterest: 7% Reddit: 4% Snapchat: 4% WhatsApp: 4%

Based on the data, PR pros believe Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube are the best social media platforms to invest their publicity budgets and time. However, that doesn’t mean you should ignore TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, and WhatsApp. If your target audience is active on those platforms, there could be a significant opportunity for your brand to stand out and connect with them on those channels without a lot of noise from other brands.

5. Influencers

Connecting with influencers who have the attention of your brand’s target audience can be a great way to share content that motivates people to notice and buy your products or services. However, according to the research, only 25% of publicity pros are always able to identify the right journalists and influencers to pitch their stories to. This is despite the fact that 42% of the survey respondents said media outreach is one of the top three PR priorities for brands.

Even with the challenges, PR experts know that influencer outreach – to traditional and new media journalists as well as to influential online personalities – works when you find the right partners for your brand.

Respondents to the Cision and PR Week research study were asked which U.S. influencers are the most persuasive and the best partners to work with for brand publicity. Here are the results:

Mainstream journalists: 80% Everyday consumers: 69% Micro-influencers: 58% Employees: 52% Bloggers: 52% Celebrities: 45% Corporate executives: 45%

When planning your social media outreach, working with the right partners is the key to success, so focus your efforts on finding them and choosing the most influential partners to publicize your brand stories.

Key Takeaways about Top Communications Strategies Today

Today, publicity experts in the United States are splitting their communications budgets nearly evenly between paid media (30%), owned media (35%), and earned media (35%). In the past year, nearly one in three publicity experts (31%) have increased engagement with their audience and one in five (20%) have experimented much more with new platforms, and so should you.

The ultimate goal is to meet consumers where they are with content that they actually want, and the key to do it is two-fold: data and an agile communications strategy. You need to have a process in place to track relevant engagement metrics beyond impressions, and you need to have people in place who can interpret that data in real-time in order to provide reliable recommendations for improvement – recommendations that you’re able to leverage quickly. Without the right tools, technology, and people, you won’t be able to maximize the returns on your publicity investments.

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