Content marketing is a valuable tool for many businesses, as it has lower costs than traditional marketing and can provide higher rates of conversion. However many businesses struggle to come up with interesting content, especially in certain niches. This article will outline some useful strategies to create content in any niche that will drive new traffic, generate brand awareness, and increase conversion and sales.
Strategy 1: Solve Customer Problems
One of the most important things to keep in mind is that providing a useful solution is never boring for the specific audience that has that problem. For example, an article about lawn care might be less exciting than “Make 20,000 Dollars A Month Doing XXX” but when your parents are coming over from out of town but your front lawn looks terrible, then an article on lawn care fixes becomes super relevant and interesting. Solutions are valuable and providing content with that information makes your content memorable and trustworthy!
So how do you know what type of informational content to create and which problems to solve? The first step is to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. You should have a detailed idea of the type of person your customer is, what they do, and what they spend their time focusing on. From here focus on customer pain points and areas where they may lack information, and begin to make content to address those needs.
Ways to come up with Solution Focused Content:
- Make a list of the most common questions you are asked daily
- Make a list of the common misconceptions or confusion that people have about buying your product or service.
- Visit relevant topic forums and communities and see what questions are being asked
You can turn all these ideas into a piece of content!
Strategy 2: Help Them Accomplish A Specific Goal
Another way to look at creating content is to find out what end result customers want and show them how to get it. When people are searching for content they often have very specific goals they want to reach, such as removing a stain from their couch or fixing an appliance in their kitchen. This gives businesses the opportunity to provide extremely relevant information to get users to their end result of accomplishing their specific goal.
For example, if a business sells stain remover, they can make a tutorial on how to use the stain remover on different surfaces such as couches, carpets, drapes, etc. This way when users are searching for ways to remove stains they can easily accomplish their goals by following the tutorial instructions! This will create trust between customers and the brand as users are able to successfully reach the results they desire with the help of the company!
Strategy 3: Make it Entertaining
Entertainment is a powerful tool because people crave it. There are so many social media channels that make millions based on their capacity to entertain their audiences. Especially during these times, people are looking for distractions that content can provide. Even “boring” products can offer entertainment value with a little bit of creativity. In addition, entertaining content is very helpful for creating brand awareness because it is memorable and easy to share and discuss.
Here are two great examples of companies that are not entertainment-based, but were able to create entertaining content that helped them succeed:
- Blendtec sells a powerful kitchen blender but it had poor brand awareness in 2005. Then it launched its “Will It Blend” YouTube series. In these videos, the blenders were used to blend up different and highly random house items ranging from marbles to a video recorder. The videos were highly entertaining and went viral, which positively impacted Blendtec’s revenues, which grew to over $40 million in 2006!
- The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is another example of an extremely successful campaign. The campaign encouraged people to dump buckets of freezing cold water and ice on their heads and tag other people to do so as well. This created funny reaction moments and was all done in order to build awareness for Lou Gehrig’s Disease. The campaign spread like wildfire and generated over $115 million in donations in 2014!
In both of these examples, the main point of the content was entertainment to bring attention and awareness which is very different from promoting the product/concept itself.
Strategy 4: Provide New Data
Original research is extremely helpful and interesting in any niche because it provides new insights that can help people make business decisions. There are many ways to conduct original research so that you can provide valuable new data, such as gathering and cross-analyzing current data or conducting surveys.
Once you have done the research and come to new conclusions, make sure to highlight your most important findings. Also, make sure to structure your informational content in an easily digestible format.
This type of data-driven content is more labor-intensive because original research requires more time and resources to create than other types of content. This means that businesses create this content less often, so there is less competition for reader attention in this area. In addition, the shortage of new data makes this type of content much more popular when it is available.
If you decide to conduct original research consider your assets and resources that could be helpful. Maybe you have a popular Instagram account with followers interested in your niche, you could survey them to create original content. Another possibility would be to analyze your customer base or customer data to reveal new insights.
One of the best examples of successful data-driven content is written by Brian Dean the creator of the Backlinko Blog. This blog focuses on the niche of SEO and all of Dean’s articles feature in-depth research or case studies that draw valuable insights into the field. A recent example is his article “Google Lens Study: Results From 65,388 Visual Searches” which provides a detailed analysis of Google Lens ranking factors and draws valuable insights. This article drew a significant amount of traffic to the Backlinko site and contributed to establishing the site as an authority on SEO.
Take-Aways:
Whatever field you are in you can, even traditionally ‘boring’ ones, you can still create interesting content that will be effective in gaining new traffic.
The main take away is that content that provides value is never boring, so focus on providing solutions, providing information, or providing entertainment! If you are able to deliver on these fronts than you will succeed!