How To Make Content Marketing Work In “Boring” Niches

Create an event calendar to boost your content marketing

It’s hard to break into the news when something major is happening, or due to happen, like a film release, major sports event or award ceremony. This is why linking your content marketing strategy to current events can help to ensure your output is relevant and timely. Sit down with your marketing team and create a calendar of upcoming events. Next, try to brainstorm ways of linking your industry to these events. Although this might require a little creativity, in most cases you should be able to find an angle that allows you to take full advantage of the media coverage and interest generated by the news story.

As well as events that can be plotted in a calendar, it’s important to be able to respond quickly to breaking stories. Google Alerts, Hootsuite, and BuzzSumo Trending are good tools for monitoring the web for terms that are relevant to you and your industry.

Industry events are another opportunity for adding creating attention-grabbing content, especially if you add input from other attendees or speakers. For a great resource on how to get started check out, “How to Attend a Conference and Take It Over.”

And, if you need help finding an event, check out Curata’s list of marketing conferences. 

The 6-3-5 brainwriting process

When you speak to other people in your industry about news and events that affect you all, you probably don’t consider that these stories are unlikely to break out of your industry and hit major publications. 

A good way to garner ideas from others in your organization is to utilize the 6-3-5 brainwriting process. Developed by Bernd Rohrbach and originally published in German sales magazine Absatzwirtschaft, the technique asks for six people to write down three ideas each on a specific topic. They have five minutes to complete the task before exchanging pieces of paper with the person on their right and repeating the exercise. After just half an hour you should have 108 ideas, at least some of which should be good enough to run with.

If you don’t have six people handy, the exercise can also be done with four, five or seven participants. Groups that are any bigger can become unmanageable so it’s important to keep your team small, agile and productive.

Skyscraper Content for better content marketing

If you work in content marketing techniques, you’ve probably already come across the term ‘skyscraper content’. It’s a unique method of generating content, which has been eagerly taken up by people within industry. This is largely due to the proliferation of content marketing which has left the internet saturated.

For those working in sectors where it feels like every topic has already been covered, this can be a tempting route to go down. In essence, the technique involves scouring the web for content related to your industry. If this has been well received, look at ways that you can re-use it, putting your own unique spin on it in the process. BuzzSumo is excellent for this process as you can search historic pieces or trending pieces of content for any term using their ‘content research’ tab.

Find High Performing Content

Once you’ve created your new and improved piece, get in touch with the publications that used the original article to let them know about your content. Ideally, these same publications, bloggers or influencers should be interested in using your content, giving you a ready made set of prospects who would be receptive to your new piece.

Instead of re-writing a piece of skyscraper content, collaborate with others in your industry. As a team you will be able to distribute the content more widely than if you worked alone. Andy Crestodina offers a great how to guide on collaborative content.

Content research

However boring your particular niche may seem at first glance, there are guaranteed to be some aspects of the industry that capture readers’ attention. Finding out what these key elements are can help you to tailor your content and make your marketing more accessible to your target audience. It’s also important to look at other industries and see what’s been successful. Could it be applied to your own industry?

As previously mentioned, one of the best ways to do this is to use a content research tool like BuzzSumo. The service will track web content from competitors as well as shares across a range of social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+. By identifying the content that gets the biggest response from your target audience, the service can help you to create interesting content of your own.

The tool allows you to run keyword searches around a certain topic, analyze your competition’s output and identify the top influencers in your industry. This should give you a good idea of the subjects, talking points and events that are getting people most interested in your industry.

Here’s an example: London Underground Map is a relatively saturated content topic. Google shows 72 million results in a search for the term.

But we were able to branch out and get a significant number of shares, particularly on LinkedIn for our “London Underground Map – Property Value Over The Past 10 Years” post.