7 Tips for Building Your Psychedelic Content Strategy
Building a successful content strategy is no small feat, and requires an understanding of many factors. In this blog, we'll focus on two key components of a content strategy: SEO and AEO, and 7 tips for building out your content strategy. Here's what you need to know.
Understanding the difference between SEO and AEO
What is SEO?
Google defines SEO as "helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine."
Key elements of SEO include:
Technical: Ensuring your website is properly structured, loads quickly, works well on mobile devices and can be effectively crawled and indexed by search engines (basically: do search engines know WTF you're talking about?)
On-page: Optimizing individual web pages through relevant keywords, high-quality content, optimized titles and meta descriptions, header tags, internal linking, and user-friendly design. This requires some in-depth research into the relevant keywords your audience and competitors are using.
Off-page: Building authority through backlinks from reputable websites, social signals, and other external factors that indicate your site's credibility. This includes sites you reference within your content and other sites that mention you.
Content relevance: Creating content that matches user intent and thoroughly answers the questions searchers are asking. Do the searches made where your pages come up align with your ideal audience?
User experience: Ensuring visitors have a positive experience on your site with easy navigation, clear information, and fast loading times. No one wants to wait even 2 minutes for a page to load - you have mere seconds to make an impression.
Local Optimizing for location-based searches if you have a physical business location. Searches for "Psychedelics near me" will rise.
Old SEO tactics included on-page keyword stuffing and backlink buying - but no more. Search engines including Google use sophisticated algorithms with hundreds of ranking factors to determine which content best serves user needs - and update these regularly. A major recent update? AEO.
What is AEO?
Key elements of AEO include:
Structuring content around specific questions users might ask
Providing clear, concise, and direct answers
Using natural, conversational language that matches how people verbally ask questions
Creating content that thoroughly addresses follow-up questions
Implementing schema markup to help AI systems understand your content
Focusing on featured snippets and "position zero" placements
As more people begin to rely on voice searches through devices like Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, or AI chatbots, content must be optimized to give those answers as quickly as possible. Love them or loathe them, AI assistants and voice search aren't going anywhere, so your content must evolve.
7 Steps for Building a Psychedelic Content Strategy
1. Define Your Audience
The psychedelic space encompasses diverse audience segments and you need to know who you're marketing to. Is your ideal audience:
Medical professionals seeking research and clinical applications
Mental health advocates interested in therapeutic potential
Investors researching market opportunities
Regulatory stakeholders monitoring industry developments
Wellness consumers exploring alternative approaches
Each segment requires tailored content addressing their specific questions, concerns, and knowledge level. This is what a brand voice guide is for, as well as audience personas. Knowledge of your target demographics will tailor your content strategy.
2. Establish Clear Brand Positioning
What value does your company bring to your audience? Clear brand positioning is key in a rapidly crowding marketplace.
Define your specific niche within the psychedelic ecosystem, be is therapy, manufacturing, cultivation, packaging, or ancillary services.
Articulate your unique perspective and values. This is an internal guide for external actions.
Establish consistent messaging that reflects your brand voice in your brand voice guide
Determine boundaries for topics you will and won't address. What's off limits? What's not?
Strong positioning helps audiences immediately understand what your brand stands for and builds recognition in a crowded market. For instance, if you only work with indigenous communities with a history of a certain substance, have a fully domestic supply chain, or make regular donations to charitable organizations, your audience wants to know this.
3. Develop Educational Content Pillars
Structure your content strategy around key pillars. What your key pillars is unique to your brand, your voice, and your mission, but education should always be a major pillar for psychedelic companies, as decades of prohibition have spread lies, half-truths, and fear mongering.
Educational topics may include:
Science & Research: Evidence-based content on clinical studies and therapeutic applications
Regulatory Landscape: Updates on changing legislation and compliance requirements
Harm Reduction: Responsible use guidelines and safety protocols
Industry Trends: Market developments and emerging applications
Cultural Context: Historical and indigenous contexts of psychedelic use
These pillars provide the foundation for a comprehensive content library that addresses your audience's primary information needs. Don't leave your only pillar as education - it should be one of a few main pillars that drive your content.
4. Optimize for Search and AI Discovery
Modern content strategy must account for both traditional SEO and emerging AI-driven discovery, both of which require their own strategies.
SEO in 2025:
Focus on search intent rather than keyword density
Create comprehensive resources that fully address user questions
Develop topic clusters connecting related content pieces
Build authoritative backlinks from trusted industry sources
Prioritize user experience metrics like engagement time and interaction
Implement structured data markup to enhance SERP features
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization):
Structure content to directly answer specific questions
Use clear headings and concise definitions
Incorporate conversational phrases that mirror voice queries
Create FAQ sections optimized for featured snippets and AI responses
Develop content that addresses the "why" behind questions
Provide contextual information that helps AI understand topic relationships
By optimizing for both traditional search and AI discovery, psychedelic companies can capture visibility across growing search terms and digital traffic. While regular algorithmic updates can shake up search engine ranking, those who rank well early often establish an insurmountable lead.
5. Choose Strategic Content Formats
Diversify your content formats to engage different audience preferences. Your content should be related - a blog post can repurposed into a social media video or combined with others into a downloadable e-book. A thoughtful content strategy piggybacks off each type of content to create a web.
Types of content formats:
Long-form articles establish authority and comprehensive coverage
Expert interviews build credibility through association
Infographics simplify complex concepts for easier sharing
Podcasts create intimate connections with thought leaders
Webinars facilitate deeper engagement with professional audiences
Research summaries make scientific findings accessible
Case studies demonstrate real-world applications and outcomes
Videos to summarize information on the most-consumed medium on the planet
Each format serves different purposes within your content ecosystem, creating multiple pathways for audience engagement and reaching different segments.
6. Leverage Community Platforms
While mainstream social platforms present challenges and restrictions to reach , alternative channels offer viable opportunities:
LinkedIn for professional and investor audiences
Reddit communities focused on psychedelic research and applications
Substack newsletters for direct audience relationships
Discord or Telegram groups for community building
Industry-specific forums for targeted professional engagement
These platforms often have more nuanced content policies and attract engaged audiences actively seeking psychedelic-related information. Don't be afraid to get creative in your approach - this is a benefit of building the airplane while flying it - anything might work.
7. Measure What Matters
No efforts are worthy without data to back it. Measurement helps you refine and tailor your content strategy based on what works and what doesn't.
Track metrics that demonstrate real business impact:
Organic traffic growth to specific content pillars
Email list building as a measure of audience relationship development
Content engagement time indicating information value
Resource downloads showing deeper interest
Event registrations demonstrating commitment
Media mentions reflect growing industry authority
Qualified lead generation connecting content to business outcomes
Getting Started Early with Psychedelic Content Marketing
The psychedelics market is a niche sector of health and wellness that is growing rapidly. As fast as cannabis was legalized, expect to see psilocybin move faster. Companies that act early and aggressively in content strategy will establish a lead in digital footprints that carries benefits for years to come. No marketing strategy for psychedelics is complete without content marketing. If you need help executing your psychedelic content marketing strategy, let's chat about it.
