Every day, it seems, I hear some brand or another claim that digital marketing doesn’t work for their brand or they can’t find content worth sharing to build their social media community. And, yeah. I get it. Creating great content isn’t easy, especially when your brand isn’t as fun as other brands, like SpaceX or Apple, or it just doesn’t lend itself to content marketing that works.
We’d all like to work to develop content for a brand like the Discovery Channel, Disney, Washington Post, etc. These brands boast controversy, cute pictures, and fun activities. Take the image below, shared on Discovery’s Twitter to see the vast engagement they reached by posting a cute picture that fits their brand. I mean, how cute are two polar bears hugging and they even created a hashtag and a pretend holiday to go along with it.
But, here’s an example of the kind of company some of us work for — decidedly boring. It’s very challenging to create cute pictures for the business-to-business clients that purchase these types of services or make them look fun in any way.
Despite the challenges associated with creating content marketing that works for a client running an industrial warehouse, our clients expect us to knock one out of the park. They want a ton of engagement, like the 500+ likes Discovery achieved on just a single post, lots of followers, a bunch of folks who visit their website every day, and conversion through the roof. An even bigger challenge than producing great results for a boring company, like the warehouse, is convincing them they should even give content marketing a chance to see how it can transform their business. However, with the rapidly escalating cost of a sales call and most travel severely curtailed due to the pandemic, content marketing is about the only strategy left that might produce a positive result. So, let’s look at ways you can craft content marketing that works in boring industries.
Crafting content marketing that works for boring brands
Simplify complex
Often, part of what makes a brand boring comes from all the legalise and complex terminology used to describe what you’re buying. To demonstrate how you can make even this boring stuff interesting, creating content marketing that works to attract new customers, check out the movie posters created by a Next insurance company — yeah, boring insurance.
These great posters, and you can get more of them using the link above, take boring and hard-to-understand terms related to buying insurance. Not only do the posters use the terms, but they also use images that correspond to the concept they’re working to explain.
Show don’t tell
Rather than creating paragraph after paragraph of boring text, try creating a graphic or video to explain the problem. For instance, if you offer a cross-dock facility, you can waste a couple of hundred words explaining the virtues of this type of facility versus the standard warehouse operation. Or, you can show prospective customers this colorful image that makes it nearly impossible to ignore the huge advantage offered by such an efficient operation with the drastically lower number of store deliveries required.
Interactive graphics are even better for simplifying the process of building understanding. For instance, check out this interactive graphic created by Geico to help homeowners understand the fire dangers emanating from different sections of their home. The notion is to provide homeowners, and renters, with information that helps them mitigate damage and the resulting payouts from the insurance agency.
Check out the competition
If you’re stuck on efforts to create content marketing that works, check out what the competition is doing that creates engagement and buzz. If they’re using cool infographics, use their efforts as inspiration in developing your own graphics. Just remember that copying someone else’s marketing is often a recipe for failure. For instance, if you like the way Geico created the interactive infographic above, think about how, as a car insurance company, you might create a graphic showing the various safety features inside and outside of a car and what you should look for to ensure all your safety features are performing at optimal levels to protect both your car and its occupants.
Leverage data
There are tons of free data sources out there, mainly coming from government agencies. You can take that data, present it in an interesting way (read– graphic) and reap the benefits. For instance, I saw a great interactive infographic someone created to show your risk of catching Covid-19 using information from the CDC. The graphic is updated daily as new data make it to the CDC website — you can automate this scraping process with a few bits of Python code. Here’s a link to the instructions you need to make this work.
Not only can you use government data, but you can also collect data from any public source on the internet and craft your own graphics based on transferring the data into a visual form from a text-based format (BTW, it’s important to provide a backlink to the original owner of the data). For instance, here’s a short video I created using data published about content marketing and Powtoons, a cool and easy video creation tool. I hope you enjoy it.
Conclusion
I trust you found this post interesting and you now have some ideas you can use to market your “boring” business to make content marketing that works to drive engagement and increase conversion. Remember, there’s no such thing as a boring business, there’s only unimaginative content marketing.
If you found this valuable, please drop a line in the comment box below. Or, use the box if you want to ask a question. I’d also love to hear your ideas for future posts.
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