How to Create Engaging Content for a Boring Business?

In digital marketing, you don’t always get the ideal client. It would be fun to promote a hipster coffee brand that everyone wants to buy. In most cases, you won’t get to do that. What you’ll have to promote instead is a plumber, a car insurance company, or a real estate agency. How do you create engaging content for such a boring industry?

This is exactly what this article explores. SEO is way better than a paid advertisement for long-term success. You’ll have to adopt a positive mindset and use a set of forms of organizing content to attract more readers. Read on and you’ll find out how to do that.

Adopting a non-boring mindset

Remember your school days? You think that chemistry or mathematics is the most boring thing on Earth, right till the day a new teacher comes. When they start explaining the subject, it becomes so interesting that you actually read the textbook at home.

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There are no boring industries

Boring is a form of presentation, not a characteristic of a subject. Anything can be boring, anything can be presented to become interesting.

You may be thinking that the industry you are promoting is boring because you associate it with something boring. Boring white collar workers in finance, boring work in plumbing, or a boring sales pitch in the insurance business.

These are just stereotypes. You’ll have to get rid of them before you start writing.

Content is king, especially for millennials. This means you have to come up with the content your audience needs. What it takes is thinking like your audience.

Think like a client

Do you find the inner workings of a toaster interesting? Probably not. What you find interesting on an average day is a Buzzfeed article or a WSJ op-ed.

What about the day your toaster stops working? Then the information on how it functions becomes important to you. You start googling how to fix it, are you still able to make a warranty exchange, or where can you get it fixed.

The clients of your business are going to look for this kind of information. It may not be an emergency type situation, like a broken toaster, but there is a pragmatic reason people want to visit your page.

Let’s say, you want to reach people who are looking for apartments for rent. Think what these people can be interested in, apart from the obvious keywords “rent a room in Chicago.”

A two minutes brainstorm may leave you with questions like this. How do I persuade my landlord to let me have a cat? What are the best neighborhoods for a young family in New York? Are there waste sorting bins in Indianapolis?

Each of these can be a topic for a long article. It probably won’t be the direct reason for a purchase, but it is a good start of a sales funnel.

Talk to your experts

The people in the business you are promoting are a great source of ideas and information.

If they know anything about their business, they will be able to give you a tip. Are there some commonly asked questions that their competition gets wrong? Is there a hot topic in the industry that begs a good op-ed? Maybe there is a new tool that few people know how to use?

All of these can be a great addition to your content plan.

The best thing about it is that the experts you are working with will give both idea and the material for an article.

Browse the web

People ask a lot of questions on the Internet. Some of them get asked way more than the others. Look for these questions, and you can generate a lot of content ideas.

Start from these places:

Good ideas become better when they are verified. Use SEO tools to understand do keywords associated with these topics generate any traffic. If they do, go ahead.

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Types of content that increase user engagement

Not all types of content are created equal. Some have proven to attract more visitors than the others. Here are content types that will drive more traffic to your website.

1. Data

We live in a society where having the right information means everything. Whether it is a Wall Street insider tip or the latest trend in digital marketing, those who fail to acquire it, lose.

Give your readers exclusive information and they will appreciate your efforts. It can be a case study, an interview with an expert, or an explanation of a research that few people read.

Get a good collection of data and present it in one of the forms below, and you can be pretty sure people are going to engage.

2. Numbered lists

People structure the world to understand it better. What is a better way to structure information than a numbered list?

They are so popular that even entertainment websites and news agencies use this format to attract more readers. Whether it is “5 main reasons your toaster doesn’t work” or “134 tips on how to decorate your home on Halloween”, numbered lists work.

There is no magic number. Short or long, odd or even, numbers just attract us. If you are thinking about writing a post headlined “Best places to visit in Washington DC”, try adding a number to it. You may end up with a bit more traffic.

3. Visuals

In today’s fast-moving world we want ideas to be as easy to understand as possible. This is why presenting information with visual cues is so popular.

Consider investing in a video, or an infographic, and the number of people sharing your posts can increase.

However, infographics are not the magic viral thing they used to be. Everybody is making infographics now, and you have to stand out to get noticed.

You’ll also have to pay quite a hefty sum for a quality infographic. Up to $1,000. Videos can be even more expensive.

4. Guides and how-tos

Despite people prefer short content nowadays, long reads are not the thing of the past just yet. If you gather a whole lot of information on one topic in one place, people will definitely like it.

You have probably read the complete guide to inbound marketing or something of the sort. Why not create the complete guide to choosing a rental, or a complete guide to Christmas home decoration?

This type of content will take a tremendous amount of time and effort to create, but it is evergreen. In-depth guides are not going to be useless in half a year. The odds are they will be driving new traffic to your website for years.

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Final thoughts

Creating engaging content when everybody else is trying to do this is hard. Creating content for an industry you think is boring is hard and frustrating.

This attitude will lead you to bad results in traffic and a complete disappointment with your job.

What you should do is understand that your business is not boring at all. Millions of people are googling their questions right now, and you are the one with the answers.

Use the tips mentioned in this article, and you will be the best on the web to answer them.

This article is written by Shirley Lowe. Shirley works for Rentberry, a global home rental platform.