How to Build a Cannabis Brand with the Lore Strategy

Photo by Carlo Manabat of Pushr and Supply

Knowing how to build a brand for your cannabis business is necessary. The industry isn’t slowing down any time soon, and I’m sure you’ve heard again and again about the need to differentiate.

Most importantly, branding for your target audience. Because you can’t completely control your reputation, focus must be given to what can be. What’s within your control is how you intentionally shape your cannabis brand and build a trusting relationship with your customers.

The major step is getting in front of them. And perhaps before that, finding the right ones to attract to your brand. How do you build that pipeline? Brand lore!

Brand Lore is an expansive strategy that I’m refining. It helps my clients get seen and make a lasting impression. Cannabis brand building is a long game, so… why not build a world that’s willfully inescapable for your brand’s ideal customer?

Keep reading to learn what I mean and start applying it.

The Lore Strategy and How it Relates to Cannabis Brand Building

Branding is about storytelling. And if you’re familiar with Game of Thrones (GOT) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), you may have found yourself immersed in those worlds and enjoyed what those experiences brought you. I propose that cannabis and hemp companies can do similar with their branding and content creation with a marketing twist.

Give or take you being a fan of GOT or MCU, you’ve heard of them beyond your TV or movie screen. You’ve seen the characters on cups when making 7-Eleven stop. Respective portions of each world were transformed into board games and video games. And let’s not forget that these are adaptations of books and comics with stories dating back decades.

If you’re a fan, it’s an obsession–you’re willingly staying within these fictional, fantastical worlds.So then where does “lore” fall into this?

Lore is the storytelling of world building. There’s no boring voice telling you what the world is about and what’s in it. The expansiveness is shown to you within the story so that you’re fully engaged as if you were a part of it, it brings life to the environment. Watching GOT, you can feel the warmth of King’s Landing or the blistering cold of Winterfell thanks to the visuals and the characters who were shaped by their homes.

MCU took us to Wakanda, South Korea, and into the deep outreaches of space with a sense of wonder and danger. This is what you want for your cannabis business: to immerse your customers in your brand’s microcosm. So what’s involved?

Cannabis Content Stacking / Cannabis Content Repurposing / Cannabis Content Refreshing with Lore Strategy

My Brand Lore strategy isn’t particularly new. It’s a brand-focused technique like content stacking or content repurposing or content refreshing. What that entails is taking core content you’ve invested into heavily like blog posts, podcasts, or video content, and transforming it into other formats.

You see, the life of your cannabis content isn’t complete once it goes live. It has much more to give, especially if you notice that certain content is performing well. This is especially true of evergreen pieces. So what’s the additional benefit?

To start, it’s a growing marketing trend that your competitors are probably slow to invest in. If you already have a solid content library, chill, and switch up your production to focus on content repurposing. Because the overall benefit is expanding to new platforms to attract more customers, thus increasing your brand recognition and spreading your story!

Considering social media, let’s say you have a blog post and you want to get more eyes on it. Sure, you could take a static image from the blog and post an excerpt on your business Instagram and Twitter accounts. That’s a functional distribution strategy.

A better choice? Tease your blog post as an Instagram Reel because it’s native to the platform and it’s a feature IG wants you to use (helping the post perform better). Then on Twitter, create a Tweet that features 4 images (of the correct size of the platform) that cover key points of your blog post. For extra push, download your IG Reel and upload it as a Fleet on Twitter.

There are countless ways to make this work building a cannabis brand and getting your cannabis content seen.

How the Branding Your Cannabis Company with Lore Strategy Works

If you want to see how it’s done, you can watch me do it with my company FADED’s content every Monday on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. In under 10 minutes, I document my process and talk about the results of repurposing and refreshing work I’ve produced over the past 2 years.

And if you want help executing this strategy instead of spending your time and energy on the task, get on my calendar and let’s talk about how I can craft your cannabis brand’s microcosm.

Alaina Dorsey is a professional draftswoman, freelance Creative Strategist and owner of Creative Ether, LLC, an artmaking and social media marketing company. Bud Biz Creativ is the cannabis, hemp and ecommerce side: she crafts brand lore-driven social content campaigns that are daring, distinct and experiential. It’s a brilliant amalgam of branding, strategy, social media and content marketing

Written by: Alaina Dorsey

Edited by: Veronica Castillo