Picture this: Your favorite brand just launched a blog, podcast, or YouTube channel, and you can’t wait to check it out because their content always resonates with you.
But to your horror, the content is the blandest, most boring thing you’ve ever consumed.
Now, you wonder if their content has always been that way, but your affection for the brand made you think otherwise, which forces you to reconsider your feelings about it.
That should be every business owner’s fear: losing customers because of cheap, unamusing, or too-broad content.
If this made you nod and you refuse to make your audience cringe every time you post, keep reading because I’m discussing five things that make your content boring.
Content for a B2C Audience
B2C stands for business-to-consumer and refers to the sales process between the company and the consumer.
You are a B2C company if you sell products or services directly to the end user.
Examples include clothing stores, Etsy, Duolingo, and Spotify.
When it comes to creating content for a B2C audience, engaging and helpful content is what you should strive for every time you post.
B2C companies should be relatable and have strong personalities, as opposed to companies with a cold corporate brand.
Here are five content-wise things you should never do to your audience (please print this out and give it to your content team):
Formality
Before you even try to research a topic to speak or write about, you need to define your audience. Is it a CEO who needs a pitch to consider working with you or someone who’s genuinely excited about buying one of your products because it solves a problem?
That’s right—the second one.
So if you own a B2C business, you have no business (pun intended) writing with the formality usually used in B2B environments.
It won’t make you look better than the competition, nor will it make your audience more inclined to buy from you.
Your job is to provide a solution to your customers’ problems and keep doing it.
And you do that by cultivating a meaningful relationship with them through effective communication.
Don’t think of them as robots scanning screens; see them for what they really are: human beings who crave community.
With that in mind, write conversational content. Whether it’s a blog post, a tweet, an IG caption, or a quick Facebook update, keep it light and not too formal.
Now, depending on your brand voice and tone, your content can be friendly, funny, satirical, or anything in between — whatever it is, focus on creating content that makes the user feel like they are reading a text from a friend.
TIP: You can humanize the process by creating a persona and writing the post for them. That will help you relax and use common words.
Self-Absorption
Most people are busy and don’t have the time or motivation to spend hours reading about a person or a company.
The one exception would be a person or brand they have admired for a really long time (think artists or their favorite cookie brand from childhood).
But since most of the time, it’s just your brand (which may provide a solution but not much emotional value) and your very busy customer, you can’t afford to waste the little time they give you by talking about you or your company in a self-centered way.
No one wants to read a 20-page article about how your company is the best thing in town unless it’s exceptionally well-written and you’re targeting journalists.
A B2C audience likes to consume content that continues what your product already does for them: solves a problem, that’s all.
Your content should give them different ways to continue solving that problem without getting boring.
You can even talk about potential issues that arise from the original problem and use those opportunities to promote new products.
The key is to make everything about your audience and not about you.
TIP: Use the About Us page to talk in-depth about your company, and don’t leave anything out. That way, anyone who wants to know more about your mission, history, and drive can easily do so. Alternatively, create a news section on your site and use it to keep everyone informed.
Forced Personality
Weak branding should be a sin, especially when brands with a vague voice try to be all things at once.
Their content lacks authenticity, and they flaunt a new personality every few days. As a writer and a consumer, I find this extremely annoying.
I want better for both brands and consumers.
Yes, following trends on some platforms, like TikTok and Instagram, may help you go viral, but you can’t compromise your brand in the process.
I’ve seen it many times, and the result is always the same: Your audience notices, questions your latest behavior, and then calls you a copycat.
And while your engagement may be high for a few days, it’s fleeting.
This “trick” gets old quickly, and people get tired of seeing the same thing everywhere.
You should always be consistent with your branding voice (I know it can be hard when you’re just starting, but it’s not impossible).
What you can do, however, is use trends (or any other brand personality you find appealing) to your advantage by adapting them to your brand.
Your efforts to innovate, even if you’re following a popular trend or an established pattern, make your content more engaging, which attracts positive attention.
TIP: If you need inspiration, take a look at what the Duolingo team is doing with their social media content. They have a consistent, light-hearted online presence that most people love.
Cheap SEO
Cheap labor is expensive in the long run because of damage control.
As unbelievable as it sounds, there are still people who think that outdated and bad SEO techniques like keyword-stuffing, clickbait, and content-spinning work in this day and age.
So expecting an article full of poorly executed SEO best practices to perform well, either on the search engine results pages (SERPs) or with your consumers, is unattainable.
That’s why you should never let someone with the wrong idea of what SEO is write your content—unless, of course, you want a joke of an article.
For example, if I—okay, maybe not me because I do this for a living—but someone with no experience can identify and point out the number of times you use a keyword in a post, that content is garbage.
Too-Long Content
With so much information available today, brands need to figure out how much content their audience is willing to consume from them.
If you take a look at how people are consuming content right now, you’ll see that each platform has an unspoken rule about content length. Not many people talk about it, but we all know what we’re willing to put up with on each platform.
For example, podcasts can go on for hours, but most of us tend to stick to 30-minute to 1-hour episodes because that’s what we find most accommodating.
The same goes for all other platforms.
You’ll lose engagement if you don’t consider your audience’s preferences and publish content they can’t consume thoroughly.
There is no “one size fits all” approach to content length, as several factors influence this decision.
For example, if your site has a blog, you may think that publishing eight 3,500-word articles per month is the way to go, when in fact, depending on your niche and audience, you may be just fine with four 1,500/2,000-word articles per month.
The SERPs are important, but not as important as your audience. Remember that, and you’ll be fine.
Make your scripts compelling, your blog posts skimmable, and your captions inviting.
Content for a B2B Audience
B2B stands for business-to-business and refers to the process of selling your services or products to other businesses.
You are a B2B business if your products or services affect the proper functioning of other businesses.
Since some of the above mistakes don’t apply to the nature of your business, I’ll give you two additional mistakes (from a B2B perspective) that make your content boring:
Poor Grammar
Bad grammar makes a terrible first impression in most scenarios, and while some people might be okay with an oddly phrased sentence, I’ve seen higher-ups lose it over a typo or misplaced comma.
Have an editor proofread your content before you publish it, or pay your writers for the extra editing hours. There’s nothing more boring than a supposedly professional piece of writing full of typos and formatting errors.
Besides, how do you expect people to see you as an industry leader if you can barely write? Not to mention, it could make you look like a fraud.
Readability
I know there are writers out there doing a great job writing compelling B2B content, but sadly, I can still find content written the OG way.
By that, I mean boring, unreadable content that not even business people find appealing.
Just because your customers are highly competent professionals doesn’t mean you should bore them to death.
The art of B2B writing is to keep things professional yet enticing.
If you understand this, you’ll know that B2B writing is not so different from B2C because you’re also trying to connect with other people by engaging them and ultimately providing solutions to their problems.
There you have it. Five (+2) mistakes that make your content boring. Take a look at your existing content and make sure you’re not making these mistakes. Don’t forget that new people may discover your brand by interacting with old content, and the last thing you want is for them to leave after a few seconds.