9 Tips To Take The Boring Out of Your Content Marketing

Do you feel like you work in a boring industry, or think your product or service isn’t interesting enough, to be able to create compelling content that won’t bore people to death and will get them talking about your brand?

Sure, under normal circumstances real estate services may sound pretty snooze-worthy. But when you’re looking to buy or sell a property or to make an investment, real estate services will be one of the topics you’re going to Google and look into first.

The key to creating interesting content is to understand what pain points your customers have and what information they are looking for, then providing valuable content that will address those needs in a creative and consumable way.

Here are 9 tips from digital marketing entrepreneur Matt Janaway to inspire you and help turn your boring content into eye-catching content that will engage and convert your customers.

1. Understand Your Customers

Before you create any content, spend as much time as you can to really get to know your customers. Learn about their needs, behaviors, motivation drivers, triggers, opinions, interests and demographics. The more you know about your customers, the more value you can add through the content you create.

By understanding your consumer pain points, challenges and needs, you can identify the content topics to cover as well as related topics that your target customers may be interested in reading about. This makes your content more interesting, fresh and original to keep your audience engaged and entertained.

2. Learn About Their Media Behaviors

To reach your customers, you need to know which channels where they spend time and which media formats they prefer. Do they like to read blogs, watch videos, listen to podcasts or attend webinars? Once you know your audience’s media habits and behaviors, you need to create the content they prefer and share through the platforms where they “hang out.”

There are many ways to do this. You can use web analytics tools like Google Analytics and other free or paid online tracking tools like Alexa, Compete and SimilarWeb to gain insights into where your customers read and share content. You can also track your audience’s media habits through their social media profiles, such as their Twitter lists, LinkedIn groups, blogs and any other places that will help you learn more about their media preferences and behaviors.

3. Brainstorm Content Ideas

Beyond researching your target audience, you should also talk to your current customers and find out what content they would consider valuable and interesting to read.

Also brainstorm content ideas with your sales and marketing teams, and even ask for suggestions from your family, friends and social media contacts.

As well, content search tools like BuzzSumo can help you find out what content your competitors are publishing and what is resonating with your target audience.

4. Develop Your Brand Voice And Story

Now that you have a clear understanding of your customer pain points and triggers, media preferences and behaviors as well as content ideas to engage them, it’s time to put your insights into action.

Matt recommends using elements of emotion, urgency and visualization to make your brand story and content more compelling and interesting. You need an irresistible story that brings your brand and voice to life in all your content marketing. The most powerful brand stories surprise, delight and still meet a customer’s needs by giving the information they want.

5. Create Visual Content

Today’s consumers prefer some degree of visual content over plain text. People can remember 80% of what they see, but only 20% of what they read. So think about how you can use relevant visuals, such as images, videos, infographics and data visualizations, to spice up your content and make a lasting impression on your audience.

Take GE, for example, you’d wonder how the company could do anything interesting with electrical and industrial equipment, medical devices or energy management services. But creatively, using Pinterest, the company posts fun, inspiring and stunning pictures that, as Matt points out, showcase innovation, achievement, eco-friendliness, love and personality, while effectively communicating what the company does.

Think beyond your product or service, and instead think about how your business relates to the world and the everyday problems or challenges your target audience faces. This will help you create compelling visual content that not only empathize and relate with your customers, but also communicate your brand message and story.

Here are 8 best practices from Content Marketing Institute to help you create powerful visuals to make your content more engaging and interesting. Here are also some of my top picks for free and paid visual content creation tools.

6. Break Down Complexity

If your business needs to communicate a lot of complex data in order to build credibility and authority in your industry, try to simplify the information into digestible pieces of information that your customers can easily consume and understand.

Here’s a great example from Matt: Intercom, a CRM solution provider that helps businesses simplify the way they communicate and engage their customers through the Intercom platform, can sound like pretty boring and complex idea for an average person. But to simplify this information for their target audience, Intercom uses colloquial language and simple illustrations, graphs and data visualizations to make their content more accessible and interesting to read.

7. Provide Answers And Solutions

As you research the content that’s trending with your customers and competitors, you may find that a lot is around burning questions, issues and problems in your industry. So find out what topics are trending and what questions or challenges your customers are searching, then think about how you can provide solutions and answers to help them in an engaging way.

8. Show, Don’t Tell

Share case studies, expert and customer interviews, testimonials, customer success stories and other content that shows instead of telling what your business or product can do for customers. Bombarding your readers with product features and benefits makes your content snooze-worthy, no matter how great or interesting your product is. Think about how you can tell stories about your products that customers can relate to and how your business can help improve their lives.

9. Measure Content Effectiveness

Content marketing success does not happen overnight. You need to regularly monitor and evaluate how your content is performing to be able to identify what is working (and isn’t) and readjust your content marketing strategy accordingly.

Focus more of your time and resources on the types of content that is resonating with your audience, and continue to monitor and learn from what your competitors and brands in other industries are doing well, to create compelling, engaging content your customers will love.

What other tips and best practices do you use to make your content more interesting? Please share your ideas below!

Are you interested in engaging and converting new customers for your business? Contact me here and let’s talk about how we can help. Or follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and if you like what you see, Subscribe here for regular updates.

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