Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters

Originally Posted On: https://www.thehoth.com/blog/boring-niche-content/

 

According to Demand Metric, content marketing cost 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3 times as many leads. It’s no surprise that 90% of organizations use content marketing as part of their marketing efforts and that it continues to grow in popularity.

But what do you do if you are in a boring niche?

Does content marketing work for boring industries?

And will people actually read your content if you write it?

Will it attract links, social shares and boost long term traffic and sales?

The good news is that if you follow the ideas presented in this blog post, the answer is a resounding YES!

Let me show you a few ways you can create content for boring niches for great marketing results!

What Problems Do Your Customers Have?

The first, underlying important thing to remember is that content isn’t boring if it solves a problem for a specific audience.

For example, an article about cleaning your pool might be less exciting than “How to make a zillion dollars,” but when you have friends coming over to your pool party on Friday, and the pool is really dirty, that article becomes REALLY interesting, REAL fast.

When you write informational content that solves the problems or answers the questions of your prospects, your content becomes valuable.

Start by defining your customer avatar and thinking about what type of information your customer might be looking for.

Here are a few ways to get content ideas:

• Write a list of questions you get asked every day.
• Write a list of common misconceptions that people have about buying your product or service.
• Visit forums and communities where people are asking about your topic and see what questions are being asked.
• Use Answer The Public to find questions that are popular.

Turn all these ideas into a piece of content!

Help Them Achieve A Result

Another way to look at creating content is to find out what end result customers want and show them how to get it.

“Lawn care” sounds pretty boring right?

Lawn care brand Toro has racked up a nice 2.2 MILLION views with this video on lawn striping.

Toro understood that customers wanted their lawns to look amazing, so they produced this video showing how to achieve that result, and gained millions of views in the process.

Conduct Original Research

One type of content that performs well in any niche is original research, which can be created by gathering and analyzing data on a topic or conducting surveys. People love research and data studies because they provide strong support to back up ideas.

In fact, according to Dragon Search Marketing, 61% of customers said they were more likely to buy from a company that created interesting custom content.

Although many content marketers want to create more data-driven content, many businesses struggle with this type of content. EMarketer presented several studies which showed that businesses have difficulty with data management and performing data analysis.

Research and data-driven content can also take longer and require more resources to produce. Due to the resources required, research and data-driven content is scarcer and thus more popular among readers.

Before creating data-driven content, also ask yourself if you have access to content assets that your competitors lack. For example, if you have built up a blog readership that is interested in your niche topic, you could survey them to create original content. Or you may be able to analyze your customer data to find unique insights into your market.

Moz has been very successful with this tactic and one example is their Local Search Rankings Factors survey. In this study, they interview industry experts about the local search ranking factors. They release a new survey each year so that they can continue creating content and providing up to date information.

Another example of original research is Orbit Media’s annual blogger survey. Andy Crestodina sends a survey to over 1,000 bloggers to find useful data like how often bloggers write and promote their content. According to our Backlink Checker, the page has over 3,700 backlinks from over 1,000 domains.

Add A Story

Another way to create content for a boring niche is to create content that entertains. Entertainment related content can result in much larger reach in some cases, which can be great for branding and driving awareness to your business.

Alex Turnbull ran an experiment where he created a blog post and added a story to the beginning of it.

He split tested the version with the story at the beginning against a version with no story and the version with the story had around 300% more readers and over 500% more time on page than the version without the story.

Stories are so powerful that one of Twitter’s co-founders started Medium, a blogging platform for people to share their stories. The platform grew to 25 million users and had an estimated $400 million net worth in 2015.

Here are a couple of stories that did really well on the platform…

Stephanie St Claire, a business coach, wrote this blog post sharing 11 things she wished she had learned before starting her business. She starts off with her entrepreneur story and then shares lessons she learned. The post got upvoted over 17,000 times.

Another story that did well was Naoki Hiroshima’s story about how he lost his $50,000 Twitter name to scammers in 2014. Even though he only published one blog post on Medium, that post gained him 2.7k followers on the platform.

Stories are a powerful tool for making content more engaging, even in boring niches.

Focus on entertaining your audience

Entertainment is so powerful that some businesses choose to focus their content on creating entertainment value rather than education. Here are some examples of boring products that got massive results by getting creative.

• Blendtec created a powerful blender for kitchen use, but had poor brand awareness in 2005 until it launched its “Will It Blend” YouTube series. In these videos, the blenders were used to blend up different items including marbles, a rake, and a camcorder. The videos went viral and so did Blendtec’s revenues, which grew to over $40 million in 2006.
• The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is another example of a successful campaign based on entertainment. The campaign encouraged people to dump buckets of ice on their heads to build awareness for Lou Gehrig’s Disease and generated over $115 million in donations in 2014.
• Thai Life Insurance is known worldwide for their short 2-3 minute commercials that share important life messages, including videos like Unsung Hero which accumulated over 40 million views. Their commercials are more like video short films that share a story and make people cry. Their videos have accumulated millions of views worldwide, resulting in massive brand awareness.

Notice that in all of the above examples, the focus was more on using entertainment value to bring attention and awareness, versus just promoting the product itself.

Hire An Expert

Still can’t figure out a way to make content interesting?

Try hiring an expert to do it for you!

Often times “getting out of your own head” and hiring someone can help get the train rolling.

When you hire an expert, you can drastically improve your content because the expert can weave together insights that you may have not considered!

Need some help with this? We got you.

Conclusion

Even if you’re in an industry that’s typically considered boring, you can still write killer content that is effective in getting traffic.

Remember that content is not boring for people who are looking for solutions to their problem, informs, or entertains them.

If you’d like some help creating great content for your brand, you might be interested in our HOTH Blogger service!

Have any examples of great “boring industry” content? Let us know in the comments!