6 Content Marketing Tips for Non-Sexy Industries If you define your industry as 'boring,' here are some ways to spice up your marketing strategy and get noticed.
By Samuel Edwards Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
As a marketer or entrepreneur, it's your job to make the products and services you sell look, feel, sound and appear as attractive as possible. In certain industries this is really easy. However, what are you supposed to do when the industry you operate in is bland, boring and simply not sexy? This is a question that many people struggle with, so let's unpack the answer in a straightforward manner.
What is a boring industry?
When you say your industry is "boring," what do you actually mean? It's not uncommon to hear someone say, "Yeah, my industry is pretty bland, so marketing doesn't really work for me." That's not true - if marketing didn't work in boring industries, "boring" industries wouldn't exist. Effective marketing is what produces sales.
The reality is that you're misinformed about your industry. It doesn't matter whether you're selling trash bags, state of the art smartphones or hearing aids, your industry doesn't have to be boring.
It is just that some industries will definitely appear less interesting on the surface. The company selling trash bags is going to have to get a lot more creative than the business selling smartphones. That's just the simple truth of the matter. Bu, if you're willing to get creative and invest in the right strategies, you'll soon discover that your "boring" industry can be sexy, too.
In traditionally non-sexy industries, one of the best tools for making your products interesting is content marketing. With the right content strategies, you can spice up your industry and engage your target market like never before. Just make sure you keep the following tips in mind:
Related: Stay Ahead of the Competition With These 6 Content-Marketing Trends
1. Maximize your opportunities
As a business that operates in a "boring" industry, you have a distinct advantage. Your competition likely feels the same way and probably doesn't invest much into content marketing. For this reason, you'll face less competition for topics and keywords. This makes it affordable to compete and gives you a chance to carve out a niche. That's an opportunity businesses in sexy industries would pay lots of money to have.
2. Focus on relevancy
The problem businesses have in unattractive industries is they can't easily brainstorm topics. It's challenging to develop engaging content that centers on things like office chairs, hearing aids or insurance. As such, the temptation can be to create unrelated content just for the sake of gaining backlinks and traffic. Don't do this.
It's far more valuable to focus on relevant content, even if it doesn't have link bait qualities. While it may not provide the same SEO boost as link bait articles, do you really want to build a faulty foundation of users who don't make up your target market?
3. Make people feel informed
If you want to make your products interesting, you need to make people feel informed. Consumers love data and insights -- particularly if they come in visual form. Charts, infographics and images should always be used to frame data in an attractive manner. This also makes your content more shareable, which drives traffic and spikes interest.
4. Write like you speak
If you feel like writing about your products is more boring than talking about your products, then something's off. Your writing style likely differs from your speaking style. There's a big difference between effective content marketing and academic writing. It's okay to write like you speak. You want to inject personality, humor and emotion. In fact, your target market is much likelier to connect with your products if they feel like you're having a conversation with them.
Related: 4 Content Marketing Tips to Boost Your Personal Brand
5. Break up your content
Readers can't consume endless streams of content without losing focus. The key to successful content marketing is breaking up your content into bite-size chunks that are easily digestible. If you want your content to truly sell, then you have to make it easy on your readers. Subheadings, bold words, images, captions and videos can all be used to break up content and make it appear more interesting.
6. Leverage visual mediums
This year, the emphasis on visual content marketing will continue to grow. If you want to make your products more interesting to your target market, then you need to align your brand with this trend.
Consider the fact that tweets with images receive 18 percent more clicks, 89 percent more likes and 150 percent more retweets. The reason is that people relate more to content when imagery is involved. Moving forward, you need to invest in different visual mediums such as video, as well as social media platforms like Vine, Instagram and Periscope.
Bring your products to life
Is it harder to market products that aren't seen as sexy? It definitely can be. However, there are plenty of ways to make your products interesting to your target market. One of the best strategies is to heavily invest in content marketing.
In today's age of Internet marketing, no medium has the ability to transform your sales efforts quite like quality and relevant content. Leverage the tips mentioned in this article and begin developing a content strategy that will bring your products to life in a non-sexy industry.
Related: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Content Marketing Strategy
