Here’s How “Boring” Businesses Can Create Awesome Content

For some companies, content topic ideas can be pretty obvious.

There's a lot of cool stuff to talk about, and your audience loves reading about that stuff.

Content marketing is a no-brainer.

But in some niches or industries, it's tough to figure out what kind of thing you could even write a blog post about, much less an interesting one.

Maybe your company manufactures some specific industrial supply or widget that doesn't have much bearing on consumers', or even B2B customers', day to day lives and work.

Or it's something super technical, familiar only to a small handful of specialists.

Sometimes, there are things to talk about, but the obvious ideas run out pretty quickly.

Or maybe your industry is just, you know, boring.

Whatever the issue may be, the answer may lie in what a recent article from Moz refers to as “tangential content.”

This means creating blog and video content that's related to your industry, but isn't directly about the products or services you're selling.

Tangential content: The cure for a boring niche

At Fractl, we refer to content on a topic that’s related to (but not directly about) the brand that created it as “tangential content.”

Some hypothetical examples of tangential content would be:

– A pool installation company creating content about summer safety tips and barbeque recipes.

– A luggage retailer publishing country-specific travel guides.

– An auto insurance broker offering car maintenance advice.

While there’s a time for branded content further down the sales funnel, tangential content might be right for you if you want to:

1. Reach a wide audience and gain top-of-funnel awareness. 

Not a lot of raving fans in your “boring” brand niche?

Tangential topics can get you in front of the masses.

2. Target a greater number of publishers during outreach to increase your link building and PR mention potential. 

Tangential topics work well for outreach because you can expand your pool of publishers (larger niches vs. a small niche with only a few dedicated sites).

3. Create more emotional content that resonates with your audience.

In an analysis of more than 300 client campaigns, we found the content that received more than 200 media mentions was more likely than low-performing campaigns to have a strong emotional hook.

If your brand niche doesn’t naturally tug on the heartstrings, tangential content is one way to create an emotional reaction.

4. Build a more diverse content library and not be limited to creating content around one topic. 

If you’ve maxed out on publishing content about your niche, broadening your content repertoire to tangential topics can reinvigorate your content strategy (and your motivation).

In our experience at Fractl, tangential content has been highly effective for link building campaigns, especially in narrow client niches that lack broad appeal.

The tangential campaigns earned 30% more media mentions and 77% more social shares on average than the brand-focused campaigns.

You can read more about how to come up with ideas for tangential content in the full article from Moz.