Running a content marketing campaign in a conventional niche is difficult, a herculean task, really. 91% of B2B marketers already use content marketing to reach customers — making it almost impossible to stand out.
However, it does become a little easier when you are serving in an unconventional, unique niche. Of course, that will mean targeting a much smaller audience, but that may serve you better in the end — as you will have to deal with less opposition.
The only issue with unconventional niches is that 60% of people find it hard to produce content consistently for such a narrow field of focus. So, what should businesses in unconventional niches do to get their audience to notice them?
Continue reading to find out! Included in this article are tested and trusted content marketing strategies that have been applied by various businesses in unconventional niches and have yielded impressive results.
- CONTENT DIVERSIFICATION
Content diversification is a great way of spurring your creativity and breathing new life into your marketing routine. Of course, not all content formats will be as successful for you as others, but dipping your toes in unconventional content markets is a good risk to take, as it should help you diversify the types of audiences you can reach.
Of course, there is the question of how you can juggle managing all these different content markets. It’s pretty overwhelming to create so much content just to sell your product — especially so for startup companies.
One method of doing so is to develop a dedicated team to marketing, which you may or may not be able to afford depending on your funds. If that’s out of the question, you can also try out a marketing automation service that can get the work done for you. A great example of this is a marketing automation platform service provider called Maropost.
According to Tekrati Maropost is an ‘email and cross-channel engagement vendor’. Or, better yet, in the words of Maropost CEO, Ross Andrew Paquete himself: “…A unified customer engagement platform that provides an on-demand, digital marketing service that can help your business automatically increase customer retention and decrease customer churn.”
With the use of a marketing automation platform like Maropost, you can easily establish yourself through multiple channels without draining the bank. It’s a form of marketing automation that is an especially great option for smaller businesses that may be lacking resources or businesses that want to take their customer engagement to the next level.
- STORYTELLING WITH PURPOSE AND CHARACTERS
For centuries, humans have relied on storytelling to share emotions, engage, and relate to personal experiences to gain the attention of others.
Can you recollect your first bedtime story as a child? I bet you can. Everyone loves stories, especially stories that resonate deeply with our core values or needs. This is because stories and narratives help construct memories and keep them intact in our minds.
Storytelling is a very powerful tool in the hands of businesses that seek to create more buzz around their product and publicity for their brand. With stories, you can inspire emotions that can then inspire positive action from your own customers.
In 2018, Carolanne Mangles declared that storytelling is the future of any content marketing strategy, meaning businesses must incorporate storytelling to be able to keep getting the attention of their audience.
As an example, Make-a-Wish used this strategy in their campaign for 5-year-old Miles who was battling with Leukemia. His wish to become Batman was granted but, how did they do it?
In the end, the success lay in their storytelling abilities. Miles’s story helped the audience connect on a deeper level to the donation cause. It capitalized on the audience’s emotions in a way that, even years after the campaign, people are still connected to the little “bat-kid” story.
- VIDEO AND GIFS
Your audience will always demand engaging, creative, and innovative content. So, how can you ensure that your business delivers? The answer is through videos and gifs.
We live in an era where nearly 84% of communications are visual. Video is trusted by 40% of millennials, and half of those aged 18-34 would stop what they’re doing to watch a new video. Clearly, this has the potential to revolutionize your current marketing strategies.
Videos and gifs can also be used in tons of other clever ways for content marketing. They can be used in emails with examples from different brands like those compiled by Mailbakery, product illustrations as used by Microsoft, sneak peeks, product functionality, product’s how-to, call-to-action, and a host of others.
The evidence clearly indicates that videos make people buy more.
To illustrate this fact, Hootsuite grossed over a million views and 11,000 likes with more than 400 comments from their video “A Game of Social Thrones.” They only had 21,000 subscribers at the time – which goes to show the reach of shareable and engaging video content.
Let’s take the story of a plumber as another example. Our plumber wants to get more calls and build an audience. A video can be the most important content marketing strategy in this situation. By creating educational content such as DIY repairs and product reviews, he could go from a local plumber to opening offices nationwide.
Video marketing is here to stay, quite plainly. And, according to Cisco, videos will represent 82% of all internet traffic by 2021. So, whether you like it or not, videos will have to become a significant part of your marketing campaign.
- BLOGGING; EDUCATIVE AND ENTERTAINING CONTENT
Blogs are considered as the 5th most trustworthy source for gathering information online, and around 77% of internet users seek out blog posts on a regular basis. And over 59% of people will share an article without reading it first, or at all, which adds to this phenomenon.
To illustrate the success of blogging, let’s take a look at HubSpot. HubSpot is a marketing behemoth today largely due to its blogs which are focused on marketing, sales, and service. HubSpot, through its blogs, educates users on digital marketing, including SEO, blogging, and social media. This engages new users while also engaging its current audience with blog posts that are current, informative, educative, and consistent.
HubSpot’s audience trusts them because they publish consistent, updated content. In fact, they grew from $255,000 in revenue in 2007 to $513 million in 2018 – a growth in which content marketing, in the form of blogs, had played a huge role in.