We all know the benefits of content marketing by now – especially if you’ve been following Ghostit for awhile. Content is merely any creative material that is published and pushed on the internet by a business or brand. Some forms of content marketing include but are not limited to blog posts, email newsletters, videos, and social media posts.

A lot of the time content is created strategically and targeted towards a specific audience to drive traffic and increase leads. This is done through the development of a content strategy. In fact, we wrote a blog on why you should always have a content strategy in place to enhance your marketing efforts, read it here!

Other times content is created because the creator (who in the beginning is usually the business founder) is genuinely interested in their business industry and its surrounding knowledge.

Whatever the reason behind content creation the fact of the matter is that business owners need to have fresh, relevant and interesting content to attract readers.

When the business is still a small to medium-sized business, the founders who are genuinely interested in their business industry still have the luxury to continue creating the content necessary to drive new readers and grow leads. This creation stems from a passion for the business and can drive excellent content. As the business grows larger, founders and owners don’t have the time to focus on content creation and often have to source their content from their marketing team, an appointed writer or hire an external professional writer.

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This introduces a level of complexity- especially if your business industry is considered “boring." How do you motivate your writers to create the same level of content that is both engaging, informative and interesting to readers?

At Ghostit, we face this problem all the time, and we’ve put together a list of tips to help your writers form the best content for “boring” industries.

1) Sometimes it's not the object that matters, but it’s influence

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 For example, you are a retail company, and you sell a specific line of products. You may be genuinely interested in your products or services, but your writer is not. Or worst, the product is something boring like pipes. How do you write content that is specific to your business but still drives engagement? Instead of focusing on the actual product or service to its specifics, take a look at the relationships that surround it. You can still grab attention by detailing what a product is capable of not necessarily what it is.

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Let’s revisit the example of pipes if I wrote only blogs about how strong my pipes are my audience is going to fade very fast. However, if I wrote about the environmental impact of low-quality pipes or the health hazards of drinking water in fast rusting pipes, this might bring more attention to the benefits of my product without having to write specifically about them. Writing about what the product can do or facilitate provides the reader with some background information that creates an engaging article.

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2) Don’t Conform

Now we know that content doesn’t just stop at the specifics of a business, the best is when you understand the relationships your business has with its external environment. However, when a writer is doing the initial research into a topic, it’s not surprising that they will find several of the same types of articles online (probably from competitors). 

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If the content is relatively common, it's advisable to do extra research to make it meaningful to make yourself unique. You’ll have a hard time competing with other companies that are bigger or more established than yours with the same content.  Try and look for stories, facts, and knowledge beyond the typical websites that are related to your business. You can find topics by looking at forums, or groups that are frequently visited by your targeted audience. 

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Learn the finer details of your industry will not only make it easy to create content that compels visitors to think about your product, but it will also establish the business as a thought leader. It’s easy to use tips and tricks taken from a handful of other blogs for your purposes, but spitting out the same information as everybody else might make you lose credibility.

3) Narrate a story

Have you ever read a blog that feels like facts are just spitting out at you? No personality, no introduction, just sell, sell, and, sell. What I am trying to say is content that reads like a textbook is not only dry, it will cause your reader to stop reading. In 2013, Chartbeat conducted a study that showed that most readers are only getting about 60% of the way through a piece of content. 

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That’s 40% of your hard work wasted. What’s worst then writing about a boring industry? Dreadfully boring content about a boring industry.  What is generally missing in a lot of content (hopefully not this one too) is storytelling.  

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Having any kind of narrative allows your brain to not only identify and relate to the content more, but it also helps with memory and therefore brand building. People will be more likely to share your content verbally through storytelling later and thus building your brand by linking it back to your business.

Write as you speak, and introduce examples. Relate, relate and relate. A good way to do this is to create pain points throughout the content. A pain point is a problem created by the writer that’s introduced into the piece of content. For example, I introduced the problem of purely objective pieces that read like a textbook. The content writer then provides the audience with a solution.

Hopefully, these three tips have equipped you with the tools needed to combat boring content. Our Ghostit team happens to be experts on writing content for a variety of industries. If you have a question give us a shout at hello@ghostit.co and we will happily answer!