How to Create Engaging Content in the “Boring” Industries

One of the strategies that you can implement when preparing a marketing strategy is content marketing. Many marketers are stuck on the phase of developing an editorial plan because they cannot come up with any topic that wouldn’t bore the readers to death.

This article gives you a way out of this situation.

What are the Boring Industries?

First things first, let’s define what boring industries are. Accounting, insurance, banking, and law almost certainly fall under this category. Plumbing, roofing, real estate and many others do as well. 

In fact, most industries can be called boring because the content they can produce is not newsworthy. What are the interesting industries then? Eco-friendly shopping bags or hipster shoes? They’re not interesting, they’re trendy. CarbonClick is one site you can see list of sustainable and ethical fashion brands.

If you continue to describe industries as interesting and boring, think of crab fishing. It is an industry, where lots of bearded men sail the sea in gloomy weather and perform a series of boring and repetitive tasks to get some crabs out the water and sell them. Yet it has its own Discovery Channel documentary that millions of people enjoyed. 

It is not about the industry itself. Rather, it is about your ability to show the most interesting things in the industry. If the oil industry could do it, as a case study in Forbes suggests, you can do it too. 

Main Principles of Writing for “Boring” Industries

Don’t Sell 

Number one reason why people think of a particular industry as boring is that they can only associate it with badly written pitches.  Think of your typical wedding photography article. It may be something like this. 

Are you looking for a wedding photography studio in LA? You found it! Our LA wedding photography studio will provide you with wedding video and photography of the best quality. The prices are low!

Yuck. When people try too to sell you something too hard it never looks good. Surely you won’t be as bad as this exaggerated example, but still, don’t try to sell people something. 

Here’s what you should do instead. 

Help People

At the core of every business is helping people solve their problems. It doesn’t matter whether you are a cafe helping office workers get their fix in the morning, or a roofing contractor helping people live in warmth and comfort. In any case, there are people out there seeking your services. 

They want your advice too. Make this the center of your content plan. 

Answer Questions 

If you have a particular area of expertise, you will certainly receive tons of questions. Focus on the quality, and you’ll get a lot of people on your site. 

This may be something general like “What is the Cool Roof law”, or something very specific like “How do I know what is the problem with my HP PageWide Color 755dn”. Whatever the question is, people are going to Google it before asking businesses for help. Make sure you answer their questions better than others. 

Be Specific in Problem-Solving 

When you do answer questions, be very specific. Provide all information that a user might need, and your content will be shared. For instance, if you are writing an article comparing types of paint one can use to decorate the walls of their apartment, don’t stop where everybody else does. Go over the top. Don’t just tell basic paint characteristics, including information on ways of applying paint, latest trends in home decoration, provide pictures that illustrate the differences. 

Take a look at what Rentberry does with their apartment rentals page. They don’t just include apartments available for rent, they tell users information on local climate, cuisine, interesting places and even show employment statistics, learn more from posts at the Lehi recruiting agency website. 

Talk in Plain Language 

This one may be an easy thing to do for business owners who took on blogging, and quite a challenge to SEO experts and copywriters. If you are a business owner who blogs, don’t try to sound professional. You are. Answer the questions that your users want to be answered as if you are talking face to face with them. Don’t forget about integrity and readability of the text, though. 

If you are a digital marketing professional, you’ll have to learn a lot of things about the industry and the business you are promoting. Below you’ll find a couple of tips on how to come up with content ideas for industries you might have considered boring before. 

Think About Content Promotion 

Content is a king, but disregarding content promotion leaves the king alone in his royal chambers. You should not only create useful content for your target audience but also think about getting backlinks. 

Engage Your Audience 

Let your readers know about your content and share it. Create clear calls to action, make your content shareable with different widgets, and use email automation to tell more people about new content that you post.

Where to Look for Post Ideas for “Boring” Industries

Brainstorm is always a good idea, but you can’t get into other people’s heads by merely thinking about what questions do they need to be answered. Here are a couple of methods that work better. 

Talk to the Business Owner or Their Clients 

Number one method of getting into people’s heads is asking them directly. Talk to the owner of the business you are promoting and ask them what are the top ten problems people come to them with. Their problems can give you ideas for generic posts. 

You can also conduct user interviews with the business’s customers, or collect information from them via questionnaires. It might give you a much-needed insight, or leave you with nothing. It depends on the industry, and you’ll have to make the decision yourself. 

For example, if the company you’re promoting is selling software, it might be worth asking users what kind of troubles are they having with the product. If they describe them, you’ll know that you might write an in-depth guide on using a particular feature of the product. That’ll make for a great piece of bottom-funnel content. 

Google It 

If you have a general idea of what people might be looking for in the industry, google it to get to know more. Look for the related searches on the bottom of the page. Follow the links and you may end up with some great ideas. 

Here’s what a quick search on types of plumbing looks like. 

Reddit 

Reddit is a site where people ask question and share content on any topic, interesting and boring alike. Search the site, or enter “your key site:reddit.com” in Google. If we follow the example with plumbing, here’s one of the result reddit shows. 

This question can be a basis of a whole post on your site. 

Quora 

On Quora, people ask professionals or experts. This is a direct source of questions from real people that you can use as content ideas. Let’s move on to another boring industry, real estate, and see how it works out. 

There are great! Change the geographic locations, and you have a never-ending series of posts. If you didn’t find anything interesting at first, you can subscribe and get email alerts, if a topic that interests you pops up in the new questions. 

Forums 

People don’t use forums that much nowadays, but you can still find worthy topics there. We looked for real estate forums in Philadelphia, and here’s what we ended up with.

There were a lot of themes we had to browse through that were useless. The one in the middle, however, can be a good post idea.

Ideas Need Verification 

When you have a list of ideas that can become posts you have to check them. Google the question first. Are the search results show plenty of relevant posts? Can you be better than the top article in the search results? 

If you answered yes to either question, go ahead and add this topic to the content plan. 

A more advanced method would be utilizing Google Keyword Planner and figuring out whether the keyword that is compatible with the headline of your post has a lot of traffic. Questions like “how do I evict a tenant” will have significantly less traffic than “rent a flat”, but you still need that information. 

If the topic you came up with has little to no traffic volume, it might be because people are not interested in it at all. In this case, you’ll have to reject the idea, as it won’t be worth the effort. 

If the competition indicator is too high, you may have hard times getting into the top 10 search results. If that is the case, google the keyword and check the content that Google shows you. Improve on it, or discard the idea. 

Outtakes 

No time to read? Here is the article condensed to the main points. There are no boring industries, only boring content. The thing of the ways you can give value to your customers.

To write for so-called boring industries better:

• Don’t sell
• Help people
• Answer questions
• Be specific in problem-solving
• Talk in plain language
• The thing about content promotion
• Engage your audience
  

To get content ideas:Brainstorm

• Talk to the business owner to get general ideas
• Google it
• Use Reddit
• Use Quora
• Look up industry-related forums
  

Don’t forget to verify your ideas before adding them to the content plan. It may sound cool, but at the end of the day, content marketing is about efficiency, not just cool ideas.

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Shirley Lowe

Shirley Lowe is a pro real estate marketer and blogger from Burbank, CA, currently working as a content marketer for Landlord's Tips. She's fond of innovative approaches to marketing and loves working with PropTech.

Latest posts by Shirley Lowe (see all)

• How to Create Engaging Content in the “Boring” Industries - November 7, 2018