How and why to write for a site in a "boring" business niche? Advice for marketers and copywriters

A site needs a blog. Content is the basis of any promotion and a way to increase traffic to a site. Content has to be interesting. People say and write that constantly. But what do you do if it is the site of an accountancy firm or a company that does land surveying? Useful, expert, interesting content for a site can be created even in that case. 

To begin with, two mythshave to go. 

• First. Remember that articles and other material have to interest your target audience specifically, not every passing user.

• Second. It is held that there are subjects in which content does not promote anything, or in which everything is obvious to everyone. Examples of such niches: design and engineering, construction equipment and so on. But if you adopt content marketing, the return can be enormous — especially when competitors are doing nothing in that direction. 

How do you make the blog on a corporate siteinteresting and substantial when the subject is complex and dull? Read and apply our recommendations. They will interest everyone, from content marketers to business owners. All our advice is based on our own experience. 

A website's content — seeing everything through the visitor's eyes

The words that you have to write for peoplehave been heard by everyone many times. Let us fill them with concrete meaning and back them with examples. 

Analysing your audience's interests should give you the answers to several important questions: 

• How do you show the experience and expertise of your specialists in the field you work in? 

• How do you use content to explain the value of your goods and services to the target audience of the blog and the site? 

• Which objections hold visitors to your site back from buying? How do you remove them with content on the site — blog articles, videos, instructions, checklists? 

• What unique, useful information can you give the users of your site?

Once you have enough information you can start working on the content. The first stage is creating a content plan — a list of blog topics for a month or several months ahead. While working on that document, try to put yourself in the place of a newcomer meeting your field for the first time. To them practically any topic may seem important and interesting. 

How do you study your potential customers' interests more deeply? 

To draw up a publication plan, analyse competitors and sites in adjacent business niches. And be sure to use analytics services. Apply the recommendations below and you will take the blog to a new level of quality and traffic. 

Collect keywords and work with them 

There is no getting by without optimisation and collecting semantics. The main thing is to use key phrases in moderation and not simply insert them into the text of an article but build the article's plan around them. Each phrase should correspond to a section of the article or at least a paragraph of text. 

To collect keywords for blog articles you can use: 

• Serpstat, 

• Semrush,

• Ahrefs, 

• Ubersuggest (a very capable and completely free tool),

• Google Keyword Planner,

• Google Trends.

If you are planning publications in a blog, put the emphasis on informational queries. These are the phrases people type into search in order to find information, to get help with a choice and so on. Often — though far from always — such phrases take the form of a question. Examples: 

• How will SEO change in 2020? 

• The specifics of promoting sites on WordPress. 

• Which hosting should you choose? 

• How do you connect CloudFlare? 

Talk to your sales people, managers or support team 

Analyse the questions people ask your staff. That is a genuine gold mine of information. Many of those subjects can be turned into articles. That way you solve several tasks at once: 

• you take a considerable load off the support team,

• you improve the service, 

• you make the blog more interesting,

• you attract more traffic, 

• you improve the company's reputation. 

How do you organise the information coming from sales people, managers and support? You have to ask the right questions and look for the answers in the mass of data. Be sure to find out: 

• Which need do customers meet with your product or service? Which tasks do they want to solve? 

• How do potential customers phrase their queries? Which information do they want about the goods and services? (For instance: how do the different hosting plans differ? When is renting a dedicated virtual server justified?)

• Which positive and negative sides of the product do users note? Which difficulties do they meet? 

• Which doubts and objections do users have? (For instance: why pay for hosting when there is free hosting? Does a site need an SSL certificate? and so on.) 

• Do they cite competitors as an example of quality? If so, which ones exactly? Which of their advantages do they single out?

Talk to your customers

Always collect reviews, run surveys, record how customers solved particular tasks with your goods and services. A great many buyers want to share their stories, but nobody asks them. Their accounts will bring your blog to life and draw an audience to it. 

Do not expect customers to tell their stories on their own. Use the interview format. Your regular customers will answer questions more willingly. 

Offline events are an excellent place to talk. At exhibitions or presentations you can talk in person with representatives of the target audience and understand better which information will be useful and interesting to them. 

Show the work of the business and the production from the inside 

Users always find it interesting and important to see working processes from the inside. One of the factors is emotional. It is always pleasant to see that behind a product or a service stands a team of enthusiastic specialists who give 100% for every customer. 

For example, a furniture maker can film a tour of the workshop, and so on. Interior designers can show every project before and after their work on it. That is a fairly common solution, but even it opens up the chance to catch users' attention. 

 The scope for creativity is enormous; it all depends on desire and budget. But even if there is not much money for running a blog, useful and original content can still be created. 

Do not be afraid to explain through simple examples

By explaining complex technology in plain terms, you help potential customers make a decision. Remember a simple fact: if a person does not understand what hosting is and what virtual dedicated servers are for, they will never order those services. That rule works in the most varied fields: construction, industrial production and so on. 

So if you can explain how a service works and what it gives, the likelihood of a visitor becoming a customer goes up. 

Being able to talk about complex things in simple words will convince visitors that your specialists are the best in their business. 

Remember practical value  

Your task is not to set out theory. Content in a blog has to be of practical use. For instance, having read this article you learn what a content plan is and how to use interesting content to promote complex, expensive services. 

The ideal example of a useful article is a case study. That is what an analysis of difficult tasks solved by professionals is called. Case studies can be created outside internet marketing too. Such material suits the niches of: 

• construction and related services;

• design;

• legal services;

• financial services and consulting.  

The standard structure of a case study is quite simple: 

• a description of the problem (sometimes with information about the client);

• the decisions taken and the course of the work;

• the result obtained. 

Each of these points can be changed, supplemented and extended depending on the nature of the business and your own tasks. 

Inexperienced copywriters often go no further than articles about how to choose a particular product or company. We advise thinking about which other customer needs are connected with a particular product or service. For example, the blog of a car dealership can carry advice on safe driving. A company selling power tools can publish advice on repairs and on safety while working. 

People value personal experience 

Wherever possible, talk about personal experience. This recommendation is not always simple to apply, but if you manage it the effect will be striking. 

An element of personal experience can be worked into an article about new services, changes in legislation, emigration and so on. 

Remember the variety of formats 

Remember that articles are only one of the possible formats of content. We also recommend using: 

• posts on social media;

• videos on YouTube;

• infographics (they can be commissioned from outside freelancers);

• PDF instructions and checklists;

• presentations on Slideshare;

• audio podcasts;

• downloadable books. 

Content can and should be mixed. Remember that psychology distinguishes different types of people by how they perceive things. Among your target audience, too, not everyone likes only to read or only to listen. Make the content easy to take in and users will certainly appreciate it. 

Do not fixate on the statistics

We advised you to collect keywords for blog publications. That matters, but the range of subjects in any niche is wider than the list of keywords. Think not only about the statistics but about the use the publications will be. 

Remember that useful, interesting articles will bring you traffic even if they are not optimised for particular high-volume queries. 

This article, for instance, we wrote after studying forums and other blogs on IT and online marketing. Analysing the topics and publications showed that thousands of people are interested in: 

• Are there businesses for which a blog is useless?

• Should you run a blog if your company works in a very complex, highly specialised niche? 

• Which content formats should you use? 

• How do you make content interesting and useful? 

• Where do you get ideas for publications in your blog? 

It is all these questions that we have tried to answer in this article. 

If you manage to find a balance between practical use and optimisation, the result will be striking. 

Write on adjacent subjects 

The niche a company works in may be very narrow. The interests of the target audience are quite limited too. To attract more visitors, ask yourself again what will interest my customers. 

The answer may be connected with your service only indirectly. 

For example, a blog on geology and land surveying can be supplemented with articles on how to privatise a plot of land. 

And in the blog of a hosting provider we write on the subject of content marketing. 

Building a content plan that works, not "one more document"

Now let us work out how to create a content planin which you organise every idea for the blog, social media and other channels of communication. Let us start with the tool for recording topics and other information. It might be Excel, but if you are not the only one using the plan, we recommend keeping it in Google Sheets. That makes it simpler to edit the information and to be sure that every member of the team sees the current version of the document. 

• The first column is, of course, the title and subject of the piece. Record the general sense here. We recommend giving authors freedom in shaping headlines — within certain limits set by the editorial policy and the brief, of course. You can also add notes that open the subject of the article up more fully.

• The next important section is the type of content. Here you have to state: video, article, infographic and so on.

• The third column is the people doing the work. If several authors write for the blog, the subjects have to be divided clearly between them and the deadlines for the material stated. 

• A content strategy in most cases involves work with different platforms. You can integrate the content plan for social media or make it a separate document. It all depends on the nature of the business.

• Another important part of a content plan is the length of each publication. It can be given in characters, words, minutes of video and so on. The question of length is tied to your content marketing budget and to how actively your competitors use it. Writing and publishing more than others is not always right. A race of marketing budgets must not undermine the company's resources. Focus on finding the best authors and setting up the process of creating and distributing content. If your competitors publish eight articles a month in their blog, publish the same number. But make those articles more interesting and more complete; add video, infographics, the opinions of outside experts, practical guides. That is how you reach the top places. Incidentally, a content plan should include links to your competitors' articles, so that authors know what level of presentation to aim at. 

• The next column is the key phrasesthat have to be used in the article. 

• The penultimate column of a content plan is the key points of the article. This part is optional. Many companies have the practice of authors submitting an outline for approval before writing. 

Drawing up a content plan is a business process that can repeat once a month or once a quarter. Many companies build a content plan for a year. The main goal of that approach is to save time. The document has to be as concise as possible and at the same time answer the questions of the people doing the work, so that a minimum of comment is needed from whoever is responsible for content marketing in the company.

Conclusions 

Content marketing is a valuable instrument for attracting interested users and working with them. It makes it possible to build a positive image of the company, attract more interested visitors and form a loyal community of customers. 

Content marketing works even in difficult business niches, for companies whose goods and services are aimed at a narrow audience. 

To create content that promotes such a business effectively, follow several rules: 

• research the interests and problems of your audience thoroughly;

• use different platforms for publication;

• create content in different formats;

• make the content as useful as possible in solving the target audience's problems;

• make sure the content is easy to take in (good sound in podcasts and videos, text and a typeface that are easy to read).

If you carry out all these recommendations successfully, the site will get the most traffic possible and will generate leads and orders constantly. The load on the site will grow in that situation, and you will need powerful hosting or a dedicated server. The Host4Biz team will provide them. 

Read our blog, apply the recommendations and share the most interesting of them with friends.