One complaint that I often see business owners making is that their industry is too boring to market. It’s not surprising to hear this when every case study you see about content marketing is about exciting and visually pleasing industries.
Fortunately, it’s not only possible to market in boring industries; it can often be highly effective. Many of your competitors will have given up and decided it just wasn’t possible, which can make ranking incredibly easy.
Content marketing is simply the process of creating an excellent piece of content and then putting it in front of the right people. They will visit your website, share the content, and generate backlinks to your website.
This means traffic, social shares, and links that will help you to rank and generate even more traffic. As you can imagine, content marketing can have a significant impact on the bottom line of your business.
One of the best ways for businesses in boring industries to use content marketing is to lean on industries that aren’t boring. Perhaps you own a cleaning business; you can talk about why cleaning is necessary for allergies in children or how long it would take to clean the White House.
Maybe you build steel girders; you could look at how many are in the biggest buildings in the world or compare your real life experience to building simulation video games.
The idea is to find common ground between your own business and a more attractive and marketable industry, this way you can stay relevant but also create mainstream content.
Many boring industries are boring because they aren’t aimed at consumers, perhaps you work with other businesses or just a small percentage of the population.
Either way, there are thousands of people out there who are trying to DIY in your niche. If you’re a gardener, then you could create guides to teach people how to cut their lawn or look over roses.
This content offers enormous value to the people reading it, and there is a much greater incentive for them to share it with others who might be interested in gardening too.
You might be thinking that this encourages people to DIY rather than paying your business and perhaps a small percentage of people will think this way. However, most people have already decided whether they want to do it or pay someone else. But this content can help you to build links which will improve your rankings and drive more customers.
If you’ve been exclusively creating written content, then you might want to consider branching out into videos and infographics. Writing about steel girders isn't particularly exciting, but lots of people would watch a video about how they are made.
If your business is visually appealing in any way, then videos and photographs can be extremely attractive to people, and it is content that’s easy for them to share.
On the other hand, you could create an infographic that includes loads of data and statistics about your industry.
Don’t be afraid to insert your personality into your content. Too many companies think that they have to be as boring as their largest international competitors. Many customers choose to shop local because they prefer the personal approach.
Write in the same way that you would talk and crack a joke every once in a while. This will make even the most boring topic a little more lighthearted and hopefully more shareable.
If you’re looking to stretch yourself a bit, you could create videos of you talking about the subject and combine that with the article. This also allows you to publish it on YouTube where you can generate extra visibility.
Even if you work in the most boring industry imaginable, you are sure to have a story. You’re a human after all, and funny or interesting things happen to all of us.
You could create a live video of yourself telling the funny story and sharing it with the world. This works incredibly well with builders and other laborers who for some reason seem to have more funny stories than the rest of the world combined.
Of course, it’s important not to say anything that could harm your reputation, but a lighthearted story will strike a personal note and can help to humanize your business.
Where do your materials come from and where do they go after? If you’re a builder, show the home after it is done and think about where they came from. If you clean carpets you could lean onto the chemical creation industry or the housing industry.
You don’t have just to create content about precisely what you do, think about tangential industries.
As you might expect, the key to content marketing in ‘boring’ industries is to be creative and lean onto tangentially relevant industries that are more ‘interesting.'
Thousands of other boring companies have created content that has generated them thousands of hits and just as many links. If they can do it, so can you.
