According to Demand Metric, content marketing cost 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3 times as many leads. It’s no surprise that 90% of organizations use content marketing as part of their marketing efforts and that it continues to grow in popularity.

There are many questions that business owners ask themselves such as:

  • What do you do if you are in a “boring” niche?
  • Does content marketing work for “boring” industries?
  • Will people actually read your content if you write it?
  • Will it attract links, social shares, and boost long-term traffic and sales?

(Disclamer: we don’t mean to call yours, or any, industry downright “boring,” but when you’re writing content for a niche that doesn’t automatically drive engagement, there can be difficulties!)

The good news is that if you follow the ideas presented in this article, the answer is a resounding yes! Content creation can work for you even if you have a difficult niche, you just need to pick the right target audience. 

Let me show you a few ways you can create content niche content for great SEO marketing results!

Ready? Let’s do this!

What Problems Do Your Customers Have?

The first important thing to remember is that content isn’t boring if it solves a problem for a specific audience. 

For example, an article about cleaning your pool might be less exciting than “How to Make a Zillion Dollars,” but when you have friends coming over to your pool party on Friday, and the pool is really dirty, that niche content becomes really interesting, super fast.

When you write informative content that solves the problems or answers the questions of your prospects, your content becomes more valuable to your audience and to you as the content creator. 

Start by defining your customer profile’s search intent and thinking about what type of information your customer might be looking for.

Here are a few ways to get content ideas:

  • Write a list of questions you get asked every day.
  • Write a list of common misconceptions that people have about buying your product or service.
  • Visit forums and communities where people are asking about your topic and see what questions are being asked.
  • Use Answer The Public to find questions that are popular.

Turn all these ideas into a piece of content! These concepts can boost the performance of your  content marketing strategy simply by answering the questions your target audience asks. It can also keep your audience engaged and increase your organic traffic for your specific niche.

Help Your Audience Achieve A Result

Another way to look at creating content is to find out what end result customers want and show them how to get it.

A great example of turning a seemingly boring niche idea into a successful piece of content would be “lawn care.” 

The lawn care brand Toro has racked up a nice 2.6 MILLION views with this video on lawn striping.

Toro understood that customers wanted their lawns to look amazing, so they produced this video showing how to achieve that result, and gained millions of views in the process.

The point is to help your target audience achieve a result, regardless of how difficult or unentertaining that result is. In fact, a case study by BrightEdge states that 60% of online experiences happen with a single search. 

That means, that regardless of what the question is, most people just Google it. That leaves a huge demographic available to you, even if your niche is a little less trendy.

Conduct Original Research

One type of content that performs well in any niche is original research, which can be created by gathering and analyzing data on a topic or conducting surveys. People love research and data studies because they provide strong support to back up ideas.  

In fact, according to Dragon Search Marketing, 61% of customers said they were more likely to buy from a company that created interesting custom content.

Although many content marketers want to create more data-driven content for search engines, many businesses struggle with this type of content. EMarketer presented several studies which showed that businesses have difficulty with data management and performing data analysis. 

Research and data-driven content can also take longer and require more resources to produce. Due to the resources required, research and data-driven content is scarcer and thus more popular among readers.

Before creating data-driven content for your digital marketing strategy, also ask yourself if you have access to content assets that your competitors lack. 

For example, if you have built up a blog readership that is interested in your niche topic, you could survey them to create original content. Or you may be able to analyze your customer data to find unique insights into your market.

Moz has been very successful with this tactic and one example is their Local Search Rankings Factors survey. In this study, they interview industry experts about the local search ranking factors. They release a new survey each year so that they can continue creating content and providing up-to-date information.

Another example of original research is Orbit Media’s annual blogger survey. Andy Crestodina sends a survey to over 1,000 bloggers to find useful data like how often bloggers write and promote their content. According to our Backlink Checker, the page has over 3,700 backlinks from over 1,000 domains.

Add A Story

Another way to create quality content for a boring niche is to create content that entertains. Not only do you need the right type of keyword research and SEO basics, but you need great content. Entertainment-related content can result in a much larger reach in some cases, which can be great for branding and driving awareness of your business. 

Alex Turnbull ran an experiment where he created a blog post and added a story to the beginning of it. 

He split tested the version with the story at the beginning against a version with no story and the version with the story had around 300% more readers and over 500% more time on the page than the version without the story. This proves groups of people like entertainment! 

Stories are so powerful that one of Twitter’s co-founders started a called Medium, a social media blogging platform for people to share their stories and a great niche market. The platform grew to 25 million users and had an estimated $400 million net worth in 2015.

Here are a couple of stories that did really well on the platform: 

Stephanie St Claire, a business coach, wrote this blog post sharing 11 things she wished she had learned before starting her business. She starts off with her entrepreneur story and then shares lessons she learned. The post got upvoted over 17,000 times.

Another story that did well was Naoki Hiroshima’s story about how he lost his $50,000 social media platform Twitter name to scammers in 2014. Even though he only published one blog post on Medium, that post gained him 2.8k followers on the platform.

You’ll also want to write compelling blog headlines to attract readers. Try our FREE Headline Title Generator to help you create the best headline! 

Stories are a powerful tool for making content more engaging, even in boring niches.

Focus on Entertaining Your Audience

Entertainment is so powerful that some businesses choose to focus their content on creating entertainment value rather than education. Here are some examples of boring products that got massive results by getting creative.

  • Let me use Squatty Potty LLC as an example. This company started as a small family business in Utah. They offer a wide range of Squatty Potty toilet stools for toddlers. Seems like a topic not too many people want to talk about. However, by creating some type of controversy in their marketing it created a seemingly boring topic and created something interesting and entertaining. With well over 40 million subscribers on Youtube, it proves that walking on thin ice can work for some businesses. Just remember that controversial advertisement needs to be well thought out and planned right, so your company doesn’t spiral downhill. 
  • The Dollar Shave Club is another example of using entertainment as a marketing tool. In 2012, this company consisted of 10 employees and needed to boost its brand to be able to compete in such a saturated market. They took to Youtube and created an ad that reached over 27 million views. 10 years later, the company was sold for 1 billion dollars.

Notice that in all of the above examples, the focus was more on using entertainment value to bring attention and awareness, versus just promoting the product itself.

Here are a couple of examples of entertaining content: 

Make a video, podcast, or infographic

Most people these days look for products or services online to get brand information such as trustworthiness or product reviews. With that said, most people want to see these products in action with content such as videos rather than written material. 

In fact, videos are 50 times more likely to get organic rankings than plain text results alone. Another interesting statistic is that 62% of Gen Z and Millennials say they want more visual search results than any other new technology. 

Another great way to make your content entertaining is to create a podcast! 78% of people know what a podcast is, and 24% of people listen to podcasts weekly. 45% of podcast listeners have a monthly income over $75K and 50% of all U.S. households are fans of podcasts. This audio marketing campaign alone may increase your conversion rate and sales just by talking about your products and services! 

As an extra tip, you could also bring some color to your content by creating fun illustrations or infographics.

In addition, did you know that 67% of B2B marketers are currently creating infographics and around 32% of them say that images and other visuals are one of the most important forms of content for their business? People love to see their brands create great visual content! 

Hire An Expert

Still can’t figure out a way to make your niche content interesting?

Try hiring an expert to do it for you. Actually, did you know that 61% of companies have indicated they outsource content marketing work to either agencies or freelancers? There’s no shame in getting professionals to do it for you!

Often times “getting out of your own head” and hiring someone can help get the train rolling.

When you hire an expert, you can drastically improve your content because the expert can weave together insights that you may have not considered!

Niche Content Is the Way to Go

Even if you’re in an industry or small business that’s typically considered boring, you can still write killer niche content that is effective in getting traffic.

Remember that content is not boring for people who are looking for solutions to their problems, informs, or entertains them.

If you’d like some help creating great content for your brand, you might be interested in our HOTH Blogger service!

Don’t forget to sign up for free and schedule a quick call to one of our search engine optimization experts to get the ball rolling!