Content marketing is essentially creating content on your website (or other websites with a backlink to yours) to increase traffic, create a feeling of your company's 'expert' status, and hopefully make sales. Since Google loves new, well written content, it is almost essential now to not have a static website, but to keep adding value to it. The hard part for most companies is what to write about to create value and keep your clients(or potential clients) coming back for more info. So my question to you is, if you do content marketing in your own niche market (or that of your clients), how do you create content that is relevant to the customers, even in a 'boring' niche?
Follow the news and learn to write for "infotainment". Instead of writing about how to use a household cleaning detergent, talk about 4 ways that Yoda would creatively use detergent to clean his house. Whenever you can tie into pop culture or find other ways to make it interesting, people will want to tune in for the entertainment value alone. We go out of our way to be entertained as a culture.
About creating content in a "boring" niche: That's a good question. You have to find a way to incorporate personality and past experiences into the content to make it interesting. Sean DeSilva offers some great advice about this, I see. Good advice, Sean.
My company spends a lot of time with market research. Though its been said before: capture your customers info and ask them what they want to see. The power of a question can't ever be understated. Even if just a few people answer you've gained info that'll get you a few more visitors that you wouldn't have had otherwise.
Content marketing requires a ton of hard work though and could take years to see significant traffic from Google
Follow authority figures that can allow you to know the trend. Or maybe do a write up based on the latest views from these people. Or you could always outsource that process and let your writers research.
Hi Apocrypha, Do you know what your customers pain point is that would require them to use your product or service? Usually customers will search on their "problem" not who you are. For example, they may search on "website SEO" instead of "web marketing agency". Use that pain point to develop content and build on what they need. Hope this helps.
Even in boring niches people have problems they need solved. Look for common questions asked in the niche and answer them in your content. Search on relavant forums, blogs and social media sites. Boring niches can have content that is linked and shared to. Check out this piece on real estate and look at the amount of social shares it has - http://homebuyernation.com/2013/11/18/tips-for-first-time-home-buyers/ Credit for that goes to Brian Dean at Backlinko for pointing that resource out, see point #19 on this article here: http://backlinko.com/seo-techniques