Content Marketing can be a rather challenging task, and even more so when your product/service is so-called ‘dull’ or ‘boring’. One of the most common misconceptions about content marketing is that it takes an exciting product to enable exciting content marketing. But the fact is, some of the greatest content marketing efforts are from seemingly ‘unexciting’ products.

Red Bull
At its core, Red Bull is just an energy drink (and it doesn’t even taste that good), thank God the marketers behind Red Bull’s successful content marketing efforts did not try to showcase the brand as a great tasting energy drink. Instead, they aligned themselves with the interests of their target audience: Extreme Sports. Red Bull has developed great content in that area to entertain and engage their target audience, elevating their product to not just another run-of-the-mill energy drink, but THE definitive energy drink that athletics look out for. In 2016 alone, they sold more than 6 billion cans of drinks!

Red Bull Stratos was a space diving project involving Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner attempt the highest sky-dive on record.

Blendtec
BlendTec’s YouTube channel currently has over 290 million views! How did a brand which sells blenders (such a common household product) achieve such success?

To showcase the strength of their blenders, they started a video series called ‘Will it Blend’ featuring their CEO trying to blend everything except fruits and vegetables, specifically exciting products such as the iPhone, Apple Watches, Wii remote controls and many more!

Blendtec has over 290 million views on YouTube! Not bad, when your main content strategy revolves around blending random objects.

DBS
When DBS launched the mini web series, DBS Sparks, they successfully humanised and dramatised the usually dull world of corporate banking. The web series managed to garner over 2.8 million views on YouTube alone. Not bad for an ‘unexciting’ corporate bank.

Content marketing strategies to transform your brand from blah to wow

If these so-called ‘boring’ brands are able to gain such mileage with their Content Marketing efforts, there is no excuse why other brands cannot work towards a successful content marketing initiative. To do that, we look at some content marketing strategies that could help transform your efforts.

Expand the conversation beyond your products or services

One mistake many brands make is that they tend to restrict their ideas within the confines of their product or services. Expanding the conversation beyond the product or services helps widen your perspective and makes your content marketing a lot more interesting.

In Red Bull’s case, they expanded their conversation beyond their core product and went into the extreme sports segment. Red Bull’s content marketing efforts are so successful that they are now licensing their content to major sports networks like ESPN, generating additional revenue in the process.

To better flesh out this approach, the following are some ideas of how brands from the ‘boring’ industries can expand their conversation.

Tax Industry: People might not be really interested in reading up about tax regulations or tax-related tips – at least until they need to file tax or get into trouble.

Now, talk about alleged tax fraud involving Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi or Neymar, and people will sit up and listen. Get into the conversation and give your expert opinion.

Seeing that many celebrities tend to get into such situation, you can focus your content marketing efforts on such interesting yet educational content. If successful, you might even bag yourself a couple of rich celebrity clients!

Real Estate Industry: There is nothing really interesting to talk about if you focus your efforts within the confines of your company’s core services but a well-taken photo of projects your company is involved in can ignite thousands of engagements.

Showcase aesthetically taken photos and videos of buildings and landmarks your company is involved in. You can even go as far as commissioning a photograph/videographer to capture the entire process from the groundbreaking day to project completion.

Dig deep and re-tell the stories

An interesting fact about DBS Sparks is that all the stories in the web series are actually inspired by true events. DBS’s key strategy arises from re-telling stories in a concise and interesting format which people can relate to. Most importantly, they have embodied their core value within the stories: Impact Beyond Banking.

In the same aspect, brands can dig into their history and look for true stories or successful case studies and re-tell them in the form of a short film or any other formats that are interesting.

Become a real thought leader and empower other businesses

The term thought-leadership could sometimes be overly fluffed up, and every day we see industry practitioners aggressively curating and sharing content and pretentious quotes or ‘lessons’ on their social media platforms, in a bid to be considered a ‘Thought Leader’.

In my opinion, a real thought leader is someone that not only shares great content but someone who actually empowers other businesses. Beyond just sharing content, develop a specialised platform – like a content hub, organise events to gather business owners and one-on-one meet-ups to engage and help other business owners.

An example of a brand that represents real thought leadership is HubSpot. Besides their plethora of great content pieces such as articles and white papers, Hubspot also went as far as developing Hubspot Academy, which provides a comprehensive certification course to educate marketing professional. With the aim of transforming the way the world does business. Best of all, its FREE!

In a nutshell, learn how you can provide value with your marketing efforts. When the time comes for a business to procure services which your business can provide, guess who will they turn to!