In this article, I'll examine the art of thinking sideways for one of the slightly more tricky marketing clients I've worked with. I hope that this will provide an insight for fellow content marketers and SEOs in similar scenarios.
It's amazing what you end up finding online working in the SEO game. Some of the most obscure business sectors have thriving communities and many online magazines and publications. It's really quite staggering.
What any SEO or content marketer should know is that there really is a conversation happening online in every industry. However niche it might at first appear to be, positioning your client to become a part of that conversation is the challenge!
"Boring" businesses
I've worked on a pretty mixed bag of clients over the past two years or so. From pharmaceutical services to interior design products, and from renewable energies to our digital agency's own efforts.
But one client has really stood out in terms of being a ‘boring' business. However, this has actually become the most fun and exciting campaign I've worked on.
The business? Car parks.
The starting point
As a more content production focused SEO I must admit that I panicked a little. How on earth could we create content around what is essentially a concrete space with a few white lines painted on it. Car parking is a generic, mundane service that no one really cares about. Or do they?
Of course, the obvious link building technique would be reaching out to local businesses and organisations in the surrounding areas, asking them to link to their nearest car park for their own customers' information. However, that had its limitations in its own right - it was finite.
We needed to consider how we could create awesome content around their brand and sector.
Brainstorming for "boring"
I always find myself coming up with loads of ideas for clients, some good, some bad. A good content marketer will admit that some of their ideas are rubbish, while some will have more clout. One thing I must recommend to SEOs and content marketers is that no idea is useless.
Some of our agency's best ideas were sparked from the ‘not so exciting ideas' that have then been developed and refined into more engaging pieces of content. They've had an awesome effect - but I'll come onto that in a moment.
No matter how extreme or bizarre your client's business sector is, there will be ways of creating content around it. The best place to start is by throwing down all of your ideas and initial concepts and sharing this with your team. One person's ‘average idea' might spark an idea in a colleague's head and develop into an awesome campaign.
Here's my equivalent of Rand's Whiteboard Friday image:
From refining some of these ideas, we began to think about content curation and the opportunities that might manifest from them.
The art of thinking sideways
To create outstanding content you need to go beyond your own expectations. If it doesn't ‘wow' your clients, it's never going to ‘wow' your target market and get those highly authoritative, juicy links.
In our first few meetings with clients, I always explain that their content is something that already exists. It is the refining, SEO repurposing and creating of it in a suitable way for web audiences that should be the role of the digital agency.
It is really interesting to read recently on Moz that more SEOs are spending a proportion of their time working on site with their client rather than from their agency office. This is something we're trialing with our clients at the moment.
This gives SEOs:
- A greater understanding of the client's business
- An insight into the brand and content possibilities
- Ongoing exposure to content opportunities
As an SEO, by repositioning your understanding of the client's business you can think from a new perspective. You'll begin to see opportunity where you wouldn't previously have imagined.
Content is something within the business, something within the brand. It can come from customers, staff, right through to the business' CEO. Without sounding too evangelical, it's something within the personality and aura of the business. The role of the SEO agency should be to help tease this out. Hallelujah!
The results
Finding an insight of interest can come from those in the business - after all those who work in it will always know more about the business, its operations and how the sector works. We worked with our car parking client to figure out what drives (pardon the pun) engagement and interest that we could piggyback off and play up to.
We had a few interesting ideas emerge from our discussions after our first few meetings and jumped on the bandwagon of drink driving - which is regularly in the news.
We launched with a drink drive awareness piece of content during the Christmas holidays and also created partnerships with local authorities and national charities to push a road safety campaign
Clicking through the images will show you the creative outcomes we arrived at for a 'boring' client.
We worked over the past eighteen months on a few different pieces and have a few more in the pipeline. By thinking around the client's content opportunities, we also created the following pieces:
Parking danger spots revealed!
We've seen some awesome movement for the client's keywords over the past eighteen months and are continuing to create content that will provide value and engagement to users. We've also been able to organically get a few thousand people liking a car park company Facebook page too!
All of the business' success has come from thinking sideways around how content can be created, and gaining insights around the industry. We have involved the client's team from car parking attendants right through to MD as part of the process.
Takeaways
The art of thinking sideways can really provide SEOs and content marketers an opportunity to create outstanding content that will heavily influence a client's business objectives.
These key points can help break through any content blocks or idea barriers you might come across, but most importantly will help you to create outstanding content.
Marketable assets: Everything to do with the client's business is a marketable asset that can be repurposed or manipulated for search marketing.
Get out of the office: Working a day every month at the client's office will give you a new perspective on their service or product. This can lead to new ideas around the type of content you will need to be creating.
Conversations: Talk to people within the organisation across different levels, they will all offer up different types of insights and perspectives. These might be insights that you can turn into amazing ideas for content.
Value: Is the content you're creating providing value of some sort to those using it? This could be emotive, or practical.
First off, those infographs are fantastically beautiful. I must ask, are those done in-house by you or do you put together the idea and outsource the actual infograph creation? If it is outsourced, would you be open to sharing who designed them? I would be very interested in working with a company capable of creating such great work.
For sideways thinking, I'm not sure exactly how this thinking could be considered "sideways" as opposed to general out-of-the-box thinking. As far as out-of-the-box thinking goes though, this is top level work. I can see your thought process perfectly...
Why would someone want to park their car here?
Because they are too drunk to drive.
Drunk driving is a hot-button issue.
Boom. Perfect marketing campaign.
In one fell swoop you have helped a great cause, driven traffic to your client, established trust and authority, and targeted your most profitable target market (which I would assume to be people who leave their cars in the park overnight). For all this, I must say bravo. This is the future of inbound marketing.
Hey Tyler,
All of our infographics are designed in-house. We've got a fantastic team of designers here at Parallax and we're super lucky that they're able to get on board with our content team's crazy ideas. As well as that, we've got some great developers who enjoy creating infographics too.
Check out another one we made for a different client (one of my favourites). We made this one around the time that the UK X Factor was about to finish - https://www.lemoncake.com/simon-cowell
"Content is something within the business, something within the brand. It can come from customers, staff, right through to the business' CEO. Without sounding too evangelical, it's something within the personality and aura of the business. The role of the SEO agency should be to help tease this out. Hallelujah!"
Amen! :)
I think I first came across this when Rand shared it, but here's one of my favorite examples of creatively marketing a 'boring' product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYcv6odWfTM
Robin, great examples. You must have a fairly large budget to produce those pieces though as they require a good amount of work.
Some questions if you care to answer..
1. What time frame would you budget for the 'battle of the sexes' piece?
2. What do you provide the client with in-between the time you're creating a new piece and the time it is complete? Other types of marketing?
3. How much do these pieces cost on average to create? You have to involve research, writing/outlining, designing, developing and then marketing the piece.
4. How are you marketing these larger content pieces? Via social? email marketing? Do you reach out to others to promote? I'm curious on promoting these large pieces after they are complete. What happens if you create a content asset and it doesn't produce many results after working so long on it?
Thanks!
Hey Adam,
Thanks for the message.
We're lucky to work with a client that's open to a lot of different activities. With this particular client, we work with them on a monthly retainer and creating an interactive infographic such as those mentioned above would use the majority of their budget for around two months.
As far as a time frame, again they normally take a few months. We start out with a few of us in our content team putting together ideas, wireframing and making sure the content is right. Next up we'll move it on to one of our designers who'll then make it look fantastic. It then goes into the development stage where it can take a while depending on how complex the content team decided it should be. We've had it before where we've had to adapt our ideas due to them being far too complicated to build with the budget we have available!
For this client, we work with them across social, website maintenance, blog and reporting. Whilst we're developing an infographic, we'll often put together a few brief news articles as well as putting together reports on how they're performing online.
We tend to market these pieces by putting together a spreadsheet of potential contacts and influencers, and contacting them directly. Our plan is always to get great content like this into the hands of people that will enjoy it. It's rare that something you've spent a long time on creating would not get many links - if that is the case, I'd recommend looking at why. Was it too hard to navigate? Too much text? Awful experience on mobiles? Making sure you've got analytics set up correctly is vital!
Thanks for the detailed response!
It must be nice to have the leisure of working with companies that allow you to take several months to develop one piece of content for them. Impressive work, continue on.
Superb article Robin.
Great examples, Robin. It boils down to being creative. There really is no limit.
Never heard this tactic for described as "thinking sideways" before, but it makes a lot of sense. I know I'm one of many SEOs who's encountered the "boring client industry" and struggled through it. In fact, right now I was looking for interesting topics based on keyword opportunities from competitors.
Entering competitor landing pages into Adwords Keyword Planner has been a huge difference. It not only reveals topics that the competitors have covered and your client hasn't, it gives you an idea of specific questions users are asking and answers they're looking for.
Once your initial content marketing brainstorm runs it's course, it can be difficult to keep creating content along those lines. Any suggestions for after the initial brainstorm, Robin? For the really long-term client engagements? It's easy to get stuck in a rut.
Hey Robin,
Great post, I agree that it can be daunting at first when you're faced with a 'boring' client, and you're just there thinking how the hell am I going to help these guys?!
I'm a huge fan of brainstorming, and my motto is that there are NO bad ideas at first. It's then when I get to the next level that I start cutting back and crossing things off the list.
I apologise if someone has already asked this, but what were the aims you were trying to accomplish through these pieces of content? More links? More traffic? How did you measure that success?
I'm assuming strategic outreaching was necessary to alert the world to the content you created - who did you target? And how?
I only ask because I use a similar approach to yours when it comes to content marketing, and the creating/designing/developing process is the easiest of all!
Hey Louise,
We had several objectives for these pieces:
- Raise the brand awareness
- Improve search engine rankings - Competition from NCP and Q-Park has been high of late so we needed to move ahead of them.
- Most importantly, increase sales in season tickets purchased online.
I'm quite old school when it comes to trying to market content. I'll spend a long time searching online for influencers/blogs/media outlets relevant to the target audience and create a database of who is worth targeting. From there, we'll find out who is the correct person to speak to then contact them a few times - often follow up on the phone. It's really important to build relationships so I'm not worried about giving people a call and getting to know them.
Sounds like you 'build the database' manually. You should check out buzzstream :)
Unless I'm totally wrong and you already use a tool!
Great write-up. It's really useful to follow along with someone else's process and get a different point of view. I always wished I could be a fly on the wall in a different agency every month.
I've built all my influencer databases manually (with the help of some tools of course) as I find I complete a much more detailed and targeted list.
Robin, I haven't tried the follow-up by phone tactic. When working in PR I was constantly asked to send all relevant information by email, and that they preferred to work that way. Maybe it's different in this line of work?
I will say that this article stood out to me ... it's easy to sit down and wax poetic about the multitudes of glorious eye catching content you can hammer out and have the blogosphere gobble up. It's not so easy when your client sells bed pans or adult diapers. It takes a certain panache and some degree of civilly disobedient lunacy to come together and put up some great content.
I particularly like the brainstorming pathway.
I know what you mean. Once, I was tasked with developing online content for a wholesale flag manufacturer. There are only so many ways you can describe a flag. Especially, when the only difference is color. I utilized some of these same techniques (without those great info graphics) and had a measurable degree of success.
Robin, this is great! I recently wrote a post about this very subject. Loved what you came up with for the car park. Tying a hot button issue into an otherwise "boring" subject is a great way to get people's attention.
Cheers Matt!
Great post this, Robin. In my career as a content writer so far, I don't think I've worked at a place where I've not initially thought "struth, what the hell can I write about here?!"
It's definitely about trying to figure out what problems your customers/readers face and trying to solve them with content. If you don't address this, particularly in a niche industry, you'll just be churning out waffle that's merely content for content's sake. Finding out what are the questions your customers always ask, what challenges do they face when they're doing business in your industry etc. really helps to hone in your content. After a while, the ideas will naturally flow.
Thanks for sharing this! I quite enjoyed it. And COMPLETELY agree that there is online convo happening online for every industry.
Great article. Thanks for providing some interesting ideas to create great content.
That's a great way to think out of the box to broaden horizons of your content reach. With so much of content being generated each day for a particular niche, one has to be innovative in ones approach. Relating the business needs with the other niche existing in market is quiet important for such innovation to click through. Many online tools have cropped up for such ideas generation but this was a good one to make the marketing work in more productive manner. Thanks for sharing!
"Content is something within the business, something within the brand. It can come from customers, staff, right through to the business' CEO. Without sounding too evangelical, it's something within the personality and aura of the business. The role of the SEO agency should be to help tease this out. Hallelujah!"
I really appreciated this point in particular. Content marketing tells the story of the business in a compelling and engaging way - and as you illustrate, everyone has a story worth telling.
tested my knowledge in roadsigns - some really funny. I would share that - but in germany road signs look so different... 16 points only ;)
Cheers! Really want us to do a follow up featuring some international signs - I'll keep you posted!
I really enjoyed the use of engagement and parallax for each of the content pieces. I'm curious, you mentioned that you were able to move the needle on the client's keywords.. have you seen a pretty steady increase in organic traffic over those eighteen months?
Hi Tim,
Yeah it's been a really impressive change. Through a combination of using awesome infographics such as the above, and relevant interesting articles on their blog, organic traffic has more than doubled in the past 18 months.
Awesome, that's good to hear!
I think the idea you have shared are good for boring marketing.
Hi Simon,
I like the fact that you highlighted how important it is to spend time on the ideas stage before moving to design/copy..etc
With regards to evaluation of the content once it's promoted, how do you evaluate success?
Is it placements? Social metrics?
My only concern is that if there are not clear levels of what is success then clients can be happy that their "idea" has been created but the long term benefit can be lacking. As in my experience clients ideas on what their audience are looking for is actually what their customers are looking for... when in fact content marketing should be focused at "people connected with potential customers"
So taking your example... rather than looking at people who use car parks... you could target those who are interested in cars in Manchester.
Super Cars in Manchester (who owns them and what they are... i'm sure I have seen a Mclaren P1 in deansgate at one point.)
Anyway still an interesting discussion and good to see a local Manchester company being mentioned :)
Thanks Robin,
Working a day every month at your clients is a good idea - although obviously dependant on how close they are and how busy they are. However, learning your client's business and how they operate definitely helps in understanding the approach they want to take with their marketing and also inevitably you will pick up on certain aspects that might inspire creative content. Aspects that you may have not come across in your research - sort of trade secrets that you need to hear from the horses' mouth and are said in a fairly nonchalant manner.
Coming up with genuinely engaging content is the most talked about issue in SEO at the moment, although you are one of the first to bring up the delicate issue of 'boring clients'. Brainstorming is definitely one of the best ways to come up with new ideas - but my guess would be that not enough companies do this. Just because you might be the project manager, does not mean that you are AlWAYS going to come up with the best idea. You might know the most about the client, but actually this might be restricting your creativity. After all, you are trying to think about things from a bit of a different angle. So why not ask someone who doesn't have a clue, their mind will be much more free to explore various options.
I find that one of the best things to do with boring clients is to make sure that you produce content in conjunction with them. Boring clients can often be in fairly complicated areas - and let's face it, they are the experts. Help them break the mould of their industry, whilst also engaging those that love talking figures or statistics. We get our clients to write a report and send it to us - we then try to either design it up into something eye catching - or word it a little differently so that it gives them a personality and makes them stand out from the crowd. As you said, you would be amazed at the amount of incredibly niche industries that have a very active online community!
Hi Robin,
Even though there are some old post on "content writing for boring businesses" already on the web. Your post totally stand out from the rest. The way you explained it & how with the client's team you people got ideas for the car parking is exceptional.
I totally agree with you that one should spend a day or two in client's office to grasp the overall nature of the business & mingling with their team to be updated on their latest product or services. It seems many people are following this tradition & soon it'd be a must. But unlike some client's are little reluctant to let an agency member to spent a day in their office because they might not feel right of displaying their negative aspect to the member or any other secret which they don't want to share.
But I must congratulate you on the ideas you people generated for car parking. The links you shared are visually fantastic. Like you said, you sat with client's team to generate idea, so how about your own team? Just curious to know this ideas of your own team & then you shared it with client's or you all people sat together & this ideas flown into your minds?
Thanks.
Hi Robin,
Awesome tips, but being a digital agency in India, it is bit difficult to work onsite when you're already managing couple of existing campaigns.
and I must tell you that after docsheldon.com it can be UGC, as this post has five anchor text rich links to a non-relevant site ;) I suggest @Rand to either make them no-follow or remove ;) he he
Hey Robin,
Great post. I think it is important to remember that every business isn't ready made for virality and huge social media followings, which definitely impacts the content marketing strategy for these "boring businesses." However, like you presented in this article, it is possible to execute a great strategy even if you're coming from a perceived disadvantage to start. That being said, I thought this would be a valuable resource for our followers, so I included your post in my roundup of the month's best SEO, social media, and content marketing articles.
https://www.aseohosting.com/blog/2014/04/seo-content-marketing-and-social-media-the-best-of-march-2014/
Thanks again for the valuable information.
Daniel
Hey Robin,
Rendering a fresh approach to anything that appears to be boring is one great way to make things work. I have gained quite good knowledge from your post. Hoping other too are benefiting from it.
Thanks!
Awesome article. I have definitely run into this issue before with some of my clients. Love the MOZ blog.
Robin, Content Marketing is my favorite topic to read and write. Thanks to share useful information that I was missing till now. Shared infographs are really amazing.
Wow. Those data visualizations are top-notch. It's nice to see someone creating content that is actually interesting (and not just for link building).
Great Article Robin,
Special thanks for the key points at the end
Thanks Montrose, really appreciate it
If any of you are still referring to this article, we just launched another infographic for a company that looks after data centres. Again, not a very glamorous industry. However, a bit of thinking outside the box and spending some time with their team helped us to create this. Here we look at a history of the world wide web.
Truly excellent work. Those infographs are excellent, as many have stated already. I like the idea of the whiteboard approach, and using it to combat the boring business'. The high level thinking you put into making it work for them is astounding. What kind of return (traffic, likes, etc) did you see after making the infographs for the client?
Hi Robin
That's a great post, but it's no "boring business" to me.
I would like to know what you would have done for an undertaker business for example. Because in some fields, you have to stay really neutral because of how customers see the business.
Thanks
thats great, and i'll surely share this post :) basically, it's all about brainstorming, lateral thinking, research© .. thanks for sharing important insights! :)
Love the content you've created! Although I've scored surprisingly low on the signs test ;)
Very interesting post Robin, especially the infographics are really awesome and I like your brand parallax it's pretty cool.
As a SEO and as per my experience I am completely agree one of your mentioned point 'understanding the clients business', it's exactly worked in the practical field of online marketing. Once you you are able to getting the point what they are looking for then, 50% effort will be less from your present and that will be very easy to promotion may be content or paid through.
Such a wonderful post Robin, The content you have created linked above for Town Centre Car Parks are awesome and obviously these kind of content get more share and links. I totally agree with you that engaging your client with your content marketing effort is really important. Client is a guy who knows best about his business and his industry and to get a great content idea you should have daily or weekly meet ups with client and his teams.
Is the content you have created for https://towncentrecarparks.com/ is not linkup from home page? Because I am not able to find it link up anywhere on homepage.
thanks for this article it's very interesting
Hey Robin,
I really found your post very interesting and did visit the website info graphics. It is very neatly done.
Do you recommend publishing such kind of content on our business website or on popular content sharing websites? If we do it on our business site, then I am afraid of the chances of it getting the exposure?
Hi Rob
Some great thinking and nice use of infographics, what I would like to know though is can you demonstrate an actual ROI for this campaign? If I were to search for local parking aside from real world signage I would most likely turn to google maps on my phone or perhaps on my computer before I left the house, as far as I'm aware improvement in keyword ranking isn't really going to have any effect on your visibility within maps.
How can you justify to your client spending on SEO as opposed to say a tie in promotion with a local shopping centre?
Hey Sam,
Thanks for your message. Totally understand your point on using maps to find a nearby car park. However, as well as casual parkers, our client is also trying to attract season ticket customers so it's incredibly important for them to rank highly.
brilliant piece..genuinely engaging content add milage to the SEO.
Hi Robin,
Thanks for writing this. I think this idea of thinking sideways is actually applicable across the board, no matter the original "interestingness" of the business.
Quick question though - After the brainstorming, how does your filtering criteria for which you're actually going to run with vary for these "sideways" ideas as compared to more directly applicable ideas for your other clients? Thanks!
Great article. I am responsible for creating content for a 'boring' business (b2b industrial) and typically focus on: whitepapers, industries (trends & industries we serve), interviews, application, new products and so on (I don't necessary find a lack of topics--just a lack of participation at times as everyone is busy). The bright side about writing about 'boring' business is a lack of competition, so we can achieve high organics quickly.
I used to work for a B2B power generator company and all they ever released was white papers and case studies, you know highly targeted sales stuff, and then they would bemoan the lack of brand awareness amongst the average Joe who could ultimately validate and reinforce the purchasing decision. Audience and objectives are key!
Superb article. Love the content you have created and the processes involved, but what about the actual marketing. As AdamBeau says in his 4th question, What was your next step to 'Market' the content?
Hi Robin, thanks for the post, and I must say the code-driven infographics are great... I can see how they'd have grabbed some traction.
What I'd like some more insight into is how you went about 'spreading' the infographics themselves? Did you use paid outreach to get targeted eyeballs? Any clarification would be greatly appreciated :)
Awesome stuff!
I'm worried we're relying too much on infographics. I think they'll decrease our ability to analyze complicated problems and make connections, long-term at least.
Hey Greg,
I totally know what you mean. I guess it's just important to always try and stay ahead of the curve and continue to keep making great, engaging content!
I have a Google+ group on Google author rank and all they ever post is infographics. Kind of like eating tuna each day, all day.
I have read some other articles on this same topic, but what you have presented here is nothing less than a brilliant piece. Thinking of content topics for your client's business is one thing, but executing those ideas in this fashion is great. You have just given me a new way to create interesting content.
Thank Robin.