Last year, approximately 42% of organizations were just taking their first steps toward creating a content marketing strategy. Although still clearly growing, content marketing has been around for decades at this point, and consumers are inundated with content everywhere they look. In order to stand out, businesses have to add value to their audience, and they can do this by creating something that doesn’t yet exist.
While some organizations may take this as a challenge to recreate the wheel, it really means that businesses have to find a niche for themselves and their content. Who do they serve, and how can they best serve them?
What Are You Qualified to Speak on?
The recent commercials from Orkin pest control are the perfect demonstration of sticking to your qualifications. You wouldn’t ask a professional tennis player, fisherman, or dancer to get rid of ants in your house — you’d go to a pest control company. As a business, you can’t create content on topics that you don’t have experience or expertise in. The reader won’t care, and they’ll be less likely to come back to your content in the future.
Stay in your lane when creating content. For example, as a technology company, it would be unreasonable for us to give cooking advice (unless it was to tell you that internet-connected refrigerators and ovens are a security risk). And even if we did, our readers wouldn’t take the article seriously because we haven’t proven to them that we have culinary expertise. Instead, we focus on types of software and tips for using it to help our readers better run their businesses.
Get 10 Brainstorming Ideas to Inspire Your Content Marketing Team.
What Current Gaps Exist in Your Industry?
If you get a lot of the same questions from customers, those likely constitute a gap that you should address in your content. But also, take a look at your competitors’ content and see if there’s a topic that they aren’t covering. For example, if your business sells payroll software, but none of your competitors are talking about running payroll for employees in other states, that’s a clear content gap that could help you stand apart.
This isn’t to say you’ll never write about something that your competitors have already covered, but creating content that fills a gap is a great way to build trust with your audience, so they’ll come to you for answers on the more common topics.
Who Is in Your Ideal Audience?
Part of finding a niche is determining exactly who you want to talk to. Do you have a lot of clients in a specific industry or work mostly within a certain geographic area? Companies often try to speak broadly about their chosen topic, so if you can narrow that down to speak to a more specific audience, it should resonate better within that group.
Let’s say you’re a cybersecurity provider located in California that works with a lot of e-commerce companies. Not only would you know a lot about CCPA regulations, but you’d also be able to speak to how they apply to online retailers. That would be a niche you could speak to in order to grow your audience and build trust for broader topics, like preventing fraud.
Learn How to Build an Audience for your Business.
Creating Content for Your Niche
Once you’ve found your niche, it’s time to start creating your marketing content. Focus on the pain points and problems your audience faces, rather than telling them how great your product is. If you can solve their problems, your product will speak for itself. Additionally, you’ll need to create content in several different formats. Not everyone will read a blog post, so you need to have other options available. Webinars, infographics, and eBooks, for example, can all help you reach beyond your regular audience.
If you don’t have in-house content marketing expertise or just need to augment your current staff, TechnologyAdvice offers custom content creation and syndication services to help you create your niche content and generate leads from it. We can help you meet buyers where there are with our portfolio of sites that speak to 100 million exclusive tech buyers who are actively researching products like yours.
Want to build a successful content marketing strategy? Download The Big Book of Content Marketing!