The Ultimate Guide to Epic Content for
Boring Industries
The tactics and resources you need to create content that attracts traffic, leads, and sales through your online presence.

About the
Author
As VP of Inbound and CoFounder of GuavaBox,
Andrew spends a majority of his time planning content for clients and for GuavaBox. To help power his endeavors he enjoys hand-brewed coffee, early and often.

Introduction
As B2B marketers, it can be easy to look at RedBull and Coca-Cola and wonder how we could ever be as innovative and exciting in our boring industries. Before you start throwing yourself a pity party, remember that your target audience does not think your industry is boring.
They love it, they live in it everyday, and they bore their friends to death on the weekends talking about it.
Think of these people while you're planning, creating, and promoting your content.
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Build a Strategy
Before you put finger to keyboard you need to construct a strategy. This strategy serves as your atlas. Your atlas allows you to navigate your course like a true sea captain.
The most essential component of your strategy is your goal; it is the
X of your treasure map.

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Strategy Quick-Tips
•

Focus your inbound marketing strategy on the questions your prospective buyers are asking.

•

Plan your strategy in quarters. For the upcoming quarter, plan out each blog post around a content offer, plan out two content offers for the following quarter, and pick a theme for the next two quarters. •

As you create your content, look at the analytics, hone your strategy for the next quarter and plan a theme for three quarters out. Create Detailed Personas
Creating epic content marketing starts by putting the customer first. To create content that will really resonate with your audience, you need to walk a mile or two in their shoes.
Creating detailed buyer personas will help you better understand the influences, interests, and activities that matter to your target customers.

Persona Quick-Tips
•

Give your persona a name and a photo.

•

Spend some time with your existing customers to better understand their pains.

•

For each persona, identify 10-15 specific questions they’re asking during their research process.

Use the Content Branching
System

Thinking about 12-months worth of content can be overwhelming. Try using a Content Branching System instead.
Content branching breaks content planning into easy to digest chunks.

Content Branching System
Explained
Decide on 6-8 main content features that answer the most common questions that customers ask. This list of themes provides direction to your content creation over the next 12 months.
Once you have your list, plan on creating cornerstone pieces of original content for each area. These could be industry reports, expert video interviews, an op-ed in an industry publication, or even a book.
After creating the cornerstone piece, start branching out into smaller, more in-depth chunks. These can be formatted in a lot of different ways. If you create an in-depth industry report like ThomasNet's
Industry Marketing Barometer, CMI's B2B Content Marketing
Benchmarks, or Hubspot's State of Inbound Marketing, you can break that resource down into 10-15 blog posts that further digest the data.

Use an Editorial Calendar
A Content Branching System will help you identify a large volume of content to create, but it is your editorial calendar that activates the plan.
An editorial calendar should break down the timeline for your material to be created, posted, promoted, and reformatted as other pieces of content.

Editorial Calendar Quick-Tips
•

Start one and stick with it!

•

Use a collaborative platform like Google Calendar or
Trello so your team can share the document.

•

Don’t just include publish dates, include promotion of your content on your editorial calendar.

Define Success
When you watch a football game, everyone knows that a touchdown means six points.
The team with the most points at the end of the game wins. There are rules in place for scoring the game and determining the winner. Image source: http://bit.ly/1m2W3me

What does success look like?
•

The same type of scoring needs to happen for your marketing efforts. Outline the key performance indicators
(KPIs) that indicate success. These can be metrics like:

•

New leads generated

•

Landing page conversion rate

•

Traffic-to-lead ratio

•

Lead-to-customer ratio

•

Lifetime value of the customer

Measure Along the Way
While the outline of your marketing plan should stretch out 12 months or longer, the everyday activities need to be measured and adjusted as you go.
Create a weekly recurring checklist for your content marketing team to dig into your marketing analytics.
Measuring results helps you clearly identify what is working and what isn't working. Online content marketing allows this to be done almost in real-time.
Pivoting toward the marketing elements that have attracted the most qualified consumption will help to increase your marketing ROI over the long term.

Measurement Quick-Tips
•

Set a reminder in your calendar each month to measure the effectiveness of the last month’s marketing. •

When you’re creating a new content offer, create at least two versions of your calls-to-action. Then test each version at the end of relevant blog posts. Stick with the one that performs the best!

Content
Inspiration and
Creation
With a strategy in place, it’s time to start creating. It’s helpful to surround yourself with streams of relevant content. This helps keep you up to speed on the latest and greatest in your industry.

Interview Your Experts
There are likely people in your company who are filled with golden content - content so good that folks would eat it with a spoon if there was just a way to access it. As a content marketer who thinks like a publisher, it’s your job to find a way to extract the information.
One quick and easy way to way to capture content from boring industry experts is to interview them journalist-style. Just grab your iPhone, turn on the audio recorder, and get them talking.
At the conclusion of the interview, you can hire someone on Elance or oDesk to transcribe the audio for you. This will make it easier for you to find creative ways to reformat the content.

Interview Quick-Tips
•

Record the audio from every interview using
AudioMemos on your iPhone or using the audio recording feature in Evernote.

•

Come to the interview with a list of questions to help keep the conversation rolling.

•

Give the interviewee a heads-up on the type of questions your’e going to be asking so you don’t catch them off-guard.

Curate Content on Your Blog
Content curation focuses on bringing in industry-relevant content from around the web. There are a few different ways to do it well. One way is to build thought leadership. If you find a thought provoking piece of content, you can add your perspective to the topic, provide a preview of the post, and attribute the work.
Another way is to create wrap-up posts. They are just a collection of
5-10 interesting articles with a brief intro and a link to read more. Both of these strategies can help provide a boost to your content creation.

Content Curation Quick-Tips

•

Find a platform that makes it easy to cite the source for your content.

•

Content curation platforms to check out: Spundge,
Scoop.it, CrowdBase, and B2B Content Engine.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Take some time to evaluate your past content and think about new formats you can use to re-publish it for your audience.
For example, if you have a really popular step-by-step blog post, think about turning it into a checklist and printable PDF.
Include the same content, just change the format. Now you have a quick and easy eBook to share with your audience!

Repurposed Content QuickTips
•

Turn a blog post into a PowerPoint presentation.

•

Post the presentation onto SlideShare and optimize the presentation with relevant keywords.

•

Create a video by using a screen capture software like Camtasia or Screenflow to run through the slides and explain each point.

Use Twitter Lists
One easy way to sift through all the noise on Twitter is to maintain private, niche lists. If you find an account that you'd like to follow, don't just hit the follow button, add them to a topic-focused list.
You can add the list as a
Hootsuite stream. Congrats, you’ve just created a fresh stream of relevant content to inspire your content creation and industry expertise!

Twitter List Quick-Tips
•

Use public lists to build thought leadership in your industry. Invite industry people to follow your curated list.

•

Use private lists to keep an eye on your competition or to build a list of prospects.

Setup RSS Feeds
A key to creating regular content is regularly consuming content.
When you find a relevant stream of industry content, look for a link to their RSS feed. If you can't find it listed, try Googling it.
Once you find it, drop it into your
RSS reader to keep tabs on the content they publish in the future.
Check out Feedly, a great free
RSS reader.

RSS Quick-Tips
•

Make it a habit to open your RSS reader everyday.

•

If you don’t read one of the feeds, delete it. Focus on the content you like to consume.

•

Keep exploring new topics. When you find an interesting article on Twitter, grab the RSS link and add it to your reader. •

Most blogs have a link to their RSS feed, but if you can’t find it try searching it inside Feedly or entering the blog
URL slash feed: TheBlogURL.com/feed.

Promoting
Content
While a better mouse trap may drive people to your door, better content needs to be shared and promoted.
!
In a "boring industry" it’s important to find tribes that are interested in the content you're sharing. If your content is helpful and solves problems, then it will be well received. Find LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn is a treasure-trove for B2B marketers in "boring industries."
Hubspot's 2013 State of Inbound
Marketing Report found that 43% of companies have made a sale through LinkedIn. One killer way to connect with decision makers on
LinkedIn is through groups.
Discovering a healthy LinkedIn
Group can be difficult, but it is worth the investment. A good group will be a gathering place where likeminded industry pros come to share and discuss industry topics.

LinkedIn Group Quick-Tips
•

If there isn’t a healthy group for your industry, consider starting one yourself.

•

Check out the groups that your customers have joined to find prospective buyers.

•

The LinkedIn on-site search feature is pretty weak, so you can try doing a Google search for industry terms and "LinkedIn Group."

Discover Google Plus
Communities
There are mixed feelings out there about the weight that a +1 carries on a post. Moz did an intensive study on the impact of
+1’s on SERPs.
They found a positive correlation, so it doesn't hurt that every +1 received within a Google+ community may contribute positively to the search ranking of your blog post.

Google Plus Communities
Quick-Tips
•

If you haven’t yet, set up a Google+ Profile.

•

Explore the community section.

•

Join a few and start sharing and commenting.

Submit past articles to curated websites
After a blog post has been published for a little while, think about republishing it to a curated website. Websites like
Business2Community and Social
Media Today allow you to submit content that has already been published online, they review it for relevancy, and repost it on their website. This trick can help you reach a whole new audience and increase the shelf life of your blog content. If there aren't any curated blogs in your industry, consider starting one.

Curated Website Quick-Tips
•

If there aren’t any websites that actively curate blog content in your industry, fret not. Try reaching out to industry blogs and ask them if you can post your content on their site.

•

Think about starting your own curated post site using Wordpress. Buy a domain with a relevant industry name, reach out to bloggers, and start posting content. It takes commitment, but you’ll become an industry expert without having to create a ton of original content.

Continue to share your old content on social media
In addition to reviewing and reformatting older content on your website, you should be scheduling social updates for older posts. Hootsuite and Buffer both offer great browser extensions that make social scheduling quick and simple.
You may want to think about removing the time and date stamp from your blog posts too. When someone sees a post from 18 months ago, they may be less inclined to read due to the perception that the information is stale.
Copyblogger does this with all of their blog posts to increase the shelf life of their content.

Create cornerstone subject landing pages that link to old posts
As you create a deep pool of content across a variety of topics, create landing pages with links out to your blog posts. These cornerstone pages are valuable for two reasons.
First, they provide the reader with a simple list of relevant content, all in one simple place. This is a very bookmarkable, tweetable, and sharable destination. Second, it is an opportunity to rank for a keyword phrase that is included or relevant to the collection of blog posts.

Make it rain, old sport!
Hope these tricks help you in your quest to create epic content that is truly helpful, even if you find yourself in a
"boring" industry.
!
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It’s time for action!
Like these tips, but still not sure how to pull it all together into a strategy? No worries, we can help you out!
We’d be happy to review your plans and help you put together an Inbound Marketing GamePlan to reach your goals.
The best way to get started is with a simple conversation. Sign up for your free inbound marketing assessment at:
GuavaBox.com/IMA.