It is important for your company, regardless of its target audience or niche, to adopt content as a way to appeal to your existing and potential customers in order to remain competitive. However while some niches, such as technology, travel or showbiz, can easily attract a large, more general audience others, such as insurance and finance, are often considered inherently boring. Such niches appear to present a significant challenge when it comes to writing engaging content that people will actually want to read. Here’s how you can connect with your customers in any industry.
Form an Emotional Connection
There are subjects that some people would rather not spend their time reading about, but even supposedly ‘boring’ topics peak peoples interests at times, whether it’s dental insurance or debt management. By forming an emotional connection with your readers, you have the opportunity to appeal to their needs and sensitivities while also educating them and helping people to put their minds at ease when they are seeking answers to important questions. To form a meaningful bond with your audience, you need to establish a distinct voice to your brand by presenting a perspective that people can relate to. It also pays to stay clear from industry jargon and connect with people in a way that goes beyond simply listing benefits and features of your products or services.
Think Strategically about Your Customers
Relevancy is one of the key pillars of any successful content marketing strategy, and relevant content comes from having a strategy in place that fully takes into account the needs and desires of your customers. By clearly defining your target audience, you’ll be better equipped to make sure that every piece of content appeals to them and forms part of a greater strategy. In conclusion, it is far more important to focus on your intended audience to provide interesting content that is actually relevant to them, rather than thinking solely about factors such as your search engine ranking.
Tell Stories
Telling stories, particularly from a first-person perspective or in the form of a case study, is a great way to showcase your company in such a way that you can make it appeal to your target audience. By telling a story, you can demonstrate how your business can help its customers as well as forge an emotional connection with your readers. Storytelling also presents an excellent opportunity to express your brand’s personality rather than using soulless, generic content that isn’t personalized enough to appeal to a targeted audience.
Help Solve Problems
People frequently turn to the Internet when they seek a solution to a particular problem, regardless of whether or not the subject matter at hand might not be boring to them. For example, people might not find something like debt consolidation to be an interesting subject, but at the same time, they may need answers to their questions and ways to solve their problems. Not everything has to be entertaining or exciting, and there are markets that are better off taking a more professional, hands-on approach.
Get a New Perspective with a Guest Post
Although establishing and amplifying your brand’s voice is an essential element of content marketing, it sometimes pays to get a new perspective in the form of a guest post by using a freelance blog writer or buying content. Guest posting benefits both parties, since the poster typically gets some recognition for their own efforts while you get a piece of content that could boost your business. Having the occasional new perspective by way of a guest post or user-generated content can help to build up trust and maintain an engaged audience, particularly when it comes to ‘boring’ industries.
The Shock Factor
Although the shock factor can help to appeal to the sensitivities of your readers and formulate unforgettable, highly sharable content, it is also something that you need to be very careful with. Many marketers go horribly overboard with the shock factor, often to the extent that they anger their readers, particularly in such cases where facts are grossly exaggerated or, worse still, outright lies. If you intend to deploy the shock-factor tactic, be sure to cite your sources and maintain a friendly, honest way of writing so that you don’t risk losing your credibility.
Conclusion
The key takeaway here is that you need to approach content marketing as a way to appeal to your audience by offering them a genuine value proposition, rather than seeing it as a way to directly generate sales. It is also essential to have a clearly defined target audience and think beyond generic content formats and subject matter so that you can appeal to the most promising leads.