There’s no such thing as boring.
There’s no such thing as boring. Even this AMA thread with a vacuum cleaner repair technician gets pretty interesting.
The world we’ve built isn’t boring. We make the world boring when we decide not to learn more about it, or, as soon as we stop thinking creatively about it.
Don’t listen to a single blog post on “marketing in boring industries”. If you do, you’re going to struggle from day one. Instead, follow this tip:
Read this classic 15 page book by James Webb Young. It’s called: “A Technique for Producing Ideas”. It’s a classic text (written in the 1960’s for ad creatives in copywriting). It’s about 30 pages long, and a surprisingly small and quick to absorb paperback.
Webb Young’s concept is utterly simple: absorb a subject, collect and curate snippets of useful data, research, live and breath the topic for as long as you can. Do that long before you attempt to come up with any ideas. We’ve based our creative method in this direction, with some enhancements of course.
To make the process as efficient as possible, we use a tool called Mural.ly, a collaborative ideas board – you can drag and drop copy and images from your web research, and arrange each idea into categories and order by chronological importance. What starts with a mish mash collection of random bits of information around a topic can end with inspiration for angles that stand up to scrutiny from even the most informed experts in the field.
How to produce better ideas
The real trick is to collect your research, review it, and then walk away for a time. When you return to your work, repeat the process and as you begin to feel ideas appearing, write every single one of them down, even if they’re not that great at first.
There’s no such thing as boring content. Content can be inspiring, in-depth, exploratory, guiding, challenging, emotive, frustrating, problem solving, and many, many things. But you’re a content marketer, don’t label what you produce as boring.
