In the wide world of cannabis marketing, it’s not enough to run a few ads and hope they encourage customers to try your products.

Today’s brands, including cannabis brands, must build connections and bonds with people if they want to convert them—and keep them—as customers.

Connecting emotionally with customers is vital to promote sales and foster brand loyalty. In an industry as competitive as cannabis, this emotional engagement is even more crucial. A key part of this emotional connection comes through effective storytelling.

Storytelling has been a means for people to connect and engage with each other, entertain, and convey a familiar story and important information. Doing so with an intent to connect, followed by a sales pitch, can be key.

Storyselling or storytelling? Well, one is part of the other.

You’ve probably heard the term storytelling mentioned several times. It is important to differentiate that not all storytelling is storyselling. You can still tell stories without the purpose of selling.

But using storyselling, as storytelling with a concrete sales objective, is a very useful marketing tool. Read it again: storyselling is leveraging storytelling to make sales.

Using storytelling to connect consumers with the brand or product, and with the intention of converting them into sales, is a way of combining storytelling with storyselling. They are not worlds apart. On the contrary, there would be no sales without the story that generates the connection.

Creating stories involving products or services is the first step. It can be a challenge, but it is feasible to evoke situations where products or services exist because the reality is that they are part of our lives.

As a cannabis brand creating a blog or strong social networks where you tell your story is a good start, plus it contributes to SEO positioning. It’s a win-win.

Remember that you are talking to your target audience, so first, you need to identify them and then understand them. To do that, you need to know their perspective intimately:

• What problems do they need to solve?
• How can you make their lives easier?
• What kind of language do they use?
• What makes them laugh?
• What inspires them?
• When are they ready to make a purchase?

Once you have identified your ideal audience, the choice of words is critical to empathizing and building a bond. To guide them to the right products or services for their needs or desires, you have to use the right words. This is where SEO and keyword placement come into play.

When it comes to writing a blog, long texts are better punctuated by search engines than short ones, but it is about more than just talking for the sake of talking. You have to write for search engines, but also for people.

If what you have to say is concise, be concise. But, if you need to explain something well in detail, do it. Remember that we are combining storytelling with the objective of sales. You have to be very careful with the wording because the general public does not like to be misled or to have advertising forced on them.

Storyselling requires a great deal of creativity and discipline. Storyselling also requires consistency.

For storytelling, you can have different ideas, such as telling the story of the brand, where the idea came from, what challenges have been presented, and how they have been solved. Always think about the link you want to create with real people, with their feelings, that identify with your cannabis brand in one way or another and believe in what you propose.

Impacting the audience at the moment when they are most receptive or have the best predisposition to receive your message is a big part of the job.

• Understand The Potential Customer’s Buying Journey: understand your customer, their feelings and desires, as well as their frustrations and fears.
• Capture What They Need: Once you’ve demonstrated that you understand where the potential customer is, it’s time to describe what you have for them. What is your product? What does it do? Who is it for?
• Know What You Can Offer: This is where we talk about the big benefits of taking the action you want the reader to take. What’s better in life with your product?
• Know Who You Are & How The Brand Speaks: Now it’s time to unpack the rest of what the product or service is about and build trust.
• Call To Action: The potential client needs to know specifically what to do next after getting the message. To follow through with the sale, tell the reader what to do next. Be specific and meticulously clear.

Selling stories is not just about exchanging money. It’s about motivating specific, well-defined behavior.

Headlines capture attention. They are the most important part of storytelling.

Why? Because without a magnetic headline, no matter how many brilliant details you tell the reader, they will abandon your page (web or otherwise) if your headline doesn’t give them a reason to stay.

• It must convince the prospect to read the rest
• It needs to attract attention and stand out from the rest
• It must reflect that you know the reader
• Leave a good impression
• The more you know your target audience, the better you’ll know how to use the right language to keep them reading.

Writing great headlines is an absolutely vital part of success in the art of storyselling. Always make sure you leave enough time to write and experiment with headlines.