Commercial waste management. It isn’t a subject matter likely to inspire the liveliest dinner party conversation. I was surprised then, to find myself strangely riveted to the PHS Wastetech blog Who knew the complexities of veterinary waste, or that tightening the retail supply chain could help in the battle to reduce waste?
Hats off to the content marketing team at PHS for creating and maintaining a blog about waste that is in turn lively, topical and human.
We hear all the time from marketers facing a similar challenge. Their first statement goes something along the lines of: “My business is dull. Nobody out there cares about what we do”. A question commonly asked is “How can I create blog content that people will bother to read?”
To anybody resonating with the first statement, remember that the service that your business provides is useful to your customers. If nobody needed what you offer, or cared about what you do, the business would not have been created, let alone still exist.
When it comes to developing blog posts that people will be drawn to read, we advise marketers to focus on three areas of content creation:
1) Relevance
Those who aren’t involved in waste management won’t seek out a waste management blog. Agreed. It is critical to determine who exactly will be interested in your niche, whether they be buyers, suppliers or consumers, and cater to them with each and every article published.
2) Topicality
Timely content tends to perform well, long-term analytics reveal. Tying business blog content to either what is in the news or important events in the social and cultural calendar tends to create broader appeal. It’s also well worth keeping an eye on what is trending – even in the world of trash. When US-based removal business 1-800-GOT-JUNK? spotted a trend for ‘trashion‘ (fashion made by recycling items destined for the dustbin) it wrote a related blog post. It’s often surprising to see how niche services can successfully link blog content back to mainstream culture.
3) Problem-solving
Unlike those blogs guilty of writing from an egotistical, product-led perspective, the PHS Wastetech example is written for buyers, and as such focuses on the very real problems and issues that organisations have with waste.
However unexciting your product may seem, when you focus on buyers’ problems you’ll likely discover an array of ideas for content creation. Coming across solutions and advice to pressing concerns is far from dull, and so long as the useful posts keep coming, so will your audience.
Creating a dynamic, exciting blog – even on the most mundane-sounding of topics – is certainly achievable, we’ve seen it done. Truthfully, it takes a little more creativity and thought to generate a consistent flow of content, as well as sustained analytics to determine which types of post perform best. Yet with a corporate blog up and running, the benefits of communicating directly with a precise target audience rather than relying on existing media channels are extremely alluring to any business.
Photo: Keepingtime_ca
