According to Demand Metric, content marketing needs on average 62% less in investment than other types of marketing while bringing 3 times as many leads. Growing in popularity, 90% of organizations utilize content in their marketing campaigns, and 80% believe content marketing is essential and should be principal to marketing campaigns. It’s no wonder many companies use content as one of their prime marketing platforms.
Unfortunately, not every topic or niche is accessible to your customers. Some niches are challenging to write engaging pieces about, and many are merely dull.
What can you write about a boring niche?
If your industry is boring, should you give up on using content marketing? Will people read the content if you write it?
Will your content attract attention, social media shares, and increase web traffic?
The answer is yes, all of these are possible. You need to learn the best ways to write engaging content for boring niches and implement them in your work.
What Problems Do Your Customers Have?
The first thing you need to understand is that content is never dull if it answers critical questions and solves a problem. A how-to article about restoring a deleted Microsoft Word document is naturally less exciting than what to do if you win the lottery, but when you’re writing a term paper, and it suddenly disappears, the document article quickly becomes much more interesting.
When your content answers questions and solves problems, the material is valuable and engaging.
Begin by researching your target audience and discovering what their most important questions are related to your product or service. What do they want to know? What do they need to know in an emergency? What is their biggest problem surrounding your industry?
A few brainstorming tips:
- Write down the questions you get every day. If your content creator isn’t customer facing, contact the employees who are and ask them for a list. If you have a call center, have them keep a running list of questions in the department.
- Write down common misconceptions around purchasing your product or service. Are people regularly confused by what you offer?
- Find and read forums and online communities where your target audience is discussing your topic and write down what questions they are asking. Read comments on Twitter.
- Use Answer the Public to research popular questions.
Conduct Original Research
Original research is a great way to create unique content and engage readers. You can start by gathering data on the topic of choice or conducting surveys. Everyone loves original research and data studies. Data content provides new information and support to back up your topic and ideas.
Dragon Search Marketing lists that 61% of customers are more likely to buy products and services from companies that utilize engaging custom content.
Content marketers are looking to develop more research and data-driven content, but many find it challenging to create. According to EMarketer, businesses struggle with data management and data analysis. Original research content also takes longer to develop and uses more resources, which contributes to the difficulty in producing it. Research and data-driven content are harder to build, which makes it harder to find online, increasing its popularity.
When you’re creating original research content, look at your assets. If you have a loyal blog readership, survey them for their input if you can or already have, use customer surveys to gather new metrics on who purchases your product or service and why. Use that data to create unique pieces. You can easily collect data for your original research using Google Surveys:
Interview Industry Leaders
Interviews are one of the simplest ways to gather information for exciting content. They offer numerous advantages. By conducting interviews, you become ingratiated with other industry leaders.
Interviewees often help spread the word of the meeting by sharing the link and engaging with it on social media.
And when your interviewee increases awareness, other industry publications and bloggers might start sharing the interview as well, spreading the word of your content organically.
Expert interviews are incredibly effective for brand building purposes. Use BuzzSumo to find active niche influencers and reach out to them to invite to contribute to your blog:
[Buzzsumo is also a great topic research tool. Select non-boring types of content, like lists and infographics and you’ll discover some cool ideas on any, even most difficult, topic]
Entertain Your Audience
While creating exciting content for a boring niche market is difficult, try focusing on producing content that entertains in a way that pertains to your industry. Entertaining content has a longer reach online, which is ideal for developing your brand and creating web traffic and awareness.
The power of an entertaining piece is so high that many content marketers focus solely on the entertainment factor than education.
Ways to develop entertaining content:
- Go to Reddit and type in a search term used in your industry. Reddit is an inherently entertaining platform, so analyze any search results you receive and let them guide you when writing your content.
- Give your readers a behind-the-scenes look into how your business operates. Everyone enjoys a glimpse behind the curtain.
- If you manufacture your own products, do a content piece on how you make them. Think how popular shows like “How It’s Made” are.
Even boring topics are interesting when you get creative. For example, showing your Residential Duct Cleaning Process is fun when you add exciting music and multiple angles in your shots.
Embrace Visual Marketing
A few years ago, exchanging texts with people thousands of miles away was an effective means of communication. But today, messages in the form of texts feel impersonal, and a more engaging method is needed to express emotions accurately.
Visuals have replaced texts in effective, engaging communication, as it enables the audience or recipient to see and feel the excitement in the message conveyed rather than spend valuable time trying to interpret difficult words.
In today’s world of new technologies, visual , SEO marketing has become one of the most useful strategies to promote your business or product.
Conclusion
Content marketing is not just about throwing content at your target audience but creating truly valuable content that addresses their needs and provides practical solutions.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Engaging and entertaining content is possible. You can write and create fantastic content that increases brand awareness, develops organic web traffic, and increases sales.
Content isn’t boring if you answer a question, solve a problem, or entertain the masses.