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Your industry is only as boring as your marketing.
No matter if you are in the financial, life insurance, or any other stereotypically “boring” industry, your business is not damned to embody that label–and you don’t have to sacrifice credibility for creative, bold, and engaging marketing. Here, we highlight a few ways to upgrade your business’s content from dull to provocative–and to reach more potential leads in the process.
Create
First things first: your inbound marketing campaign must revolve around lucrative content. While you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you will find more inbound marketing success when you put a new spin on the standard topics of your industry.
Curate
Content curation includes searching the web for related content. When you find an interesting piece, add your unique perspective on the subject and provide credit to the author. Hubspot provides an excellent example of 7 Quick Ways to Curate Industry Content for Your Blog.
Ask the Experts
No matter what industry you are in, you will most likely have people within your company who are experts and loaded with extremely valuable content. Your job is to effectively extract the content from you in-house experts and convert it into lucrative copy. As a result, you are much more likely to create relevant, captivating content that has the potential to go viral.
Promote
With the ability to engage exponentially more prospective customers, social media is one of the cornerstones of any marketing campaign. The goal of social media in inbound marketing is to get the friends of your friends’ friends talking about your awesome content–and tracking down your business as the creator (or sharer) of the material they found so interesting, informative, and influential.
Engage
As the first step for creating excitement, you must use social media to engage your audience members. While there are several ways to create social media engagement, some methods prove to be more effective than others. A study conducted by Beevolve uncovered several engagement statistics, such as the fact that posts made on Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday on Twitter and Facebook generated more engagement than posts other days of the week.
Link in to LinkedIn
While LinkedIn serves as a beacon to recruiters and job seekers alike, it also has an infinite amount of value for inbound marketing. According to Hubspot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report, 43% of companies have made a sale through LinkedIn. The most likely path toward inbound marketing success through LinkedIn is through relevant LinkedIn groups. You must find industry-relevant groups and share your engaging content in those groups. If you can’t find a group directly catering to your niche, you may consider starting one.
Find Your Google Community
While the jury is still out on the impact a +1 has on your blog post on a SERP, Moz conducted a study on the impact of +1s on your SERP. Moz found a positive correlation for every +1 received through a Google+ community and a positive effect on the your blog post’s position on a SERP. In other words, you can reach audiences and increase your position on the SERP when you can generate engagement in Google communities.
Revive Old Content
In any case, you should continue to promote and circulate your old content on social media platforms. When you post older content on social media platforms, change the date to increase the likelihood your audience will be engaged by the content.
Believe us: your marketing doesn’t need to be safe and restrained just because that’s the (perceived) nature of your industry. It’s about the content you generate and how you help the right people find it. You can position your business as the industry-experts they already while brining a new accessibility and interest to the information you’re eager to share.
