How to harvest other niches for content ideas

Good morning content connoisseurs 🙂 

It’s your friendly neighborhood content guy (FNCG).

What’s the only bad kind of cookie? A stale cookie. It’s easy to let your content get stale over time, so today, I’m going to show you a trick you can use to generate not just more ideas, but fresh ideas.

• Main course: How to harvest other niches for content ideas

• Snack: The kind of ad I cannot stop clicking on even though I try not to

• Morsels: Links & headlines from Copyblogger, CMI, and more

Let’s dig in.

» P.S. I read and respond to every email, so don’t be shy about replying to this email to let me know what you think, ask a question, etc. I’m here for it 👊

Main Course: How to harvest other niches for fresh content ideas

It’s easy to create content when you’re just starting something.

But what about that 100th blog post? What about that 50th video?

Content marketing can be an absolute slog. And every niche has it’s own special kind of gravity; there are types of content it feels like you just have to do because you’re in a certain vertical.

If you’re a cooking app, you might feel stuck posting recipes, for example.

If you’re a B2B finance software, you might be doing a bunch of budget content. Or you might be creating carousels on Instagram. Or you might only be blogging and posting your blogs on social.

Our competitors might be no help. They might be doing their same sh*t we’re doing. It might not even be that we’re stale. The industry at large might be stale.

Here’s how to shake that up: take a peek into other industries to see what they’re doing and test it for yourself.

Seems like an intuitively good idea, right?

Here’s the thing, though.

Whatever industry you’re in, trust me when I say you’re not special in your staleness (no offense). Staleness is just content patterns that have been adopted because competitors tend to copy each other, and all industries have content patterns.

And that’s a good thing. It means that by looking into totally different industries, you can not only find interesting ideas, you can find whole types of content to test.

And if one of those content types ends up working for you, it’ll be just as repeatable for you as it has been for the folks in that industry.

Example.

Suppose we run an accounting software business and we feel stale.

Here’s how I’d leverage other industries to create a bunch of new, ideas.

We’re in accounting, so let’s look at literally any other industry. Anything different.

I’m going to go to Instagram and type in “real estate”.

In Instagram, you can’t search for some topics if they’re ultra-broad, so you’ll see a bunch of sub categories. It doesn’t matter which you pick, but it’s good to just stick with a basic consumer type (i.e., B2C or B2B).

Here, I’ll just pick “real estate agents”.

You then see the search results page.

Not everything on this page is going to be worth stealing.

You’ll want to hover over the content and look for stuff with high engagement — say 1,000 likes or more.

As you do that, make a note of a few different things:

• Content types that seem to perform well

• Instagram accounts that seem to have strong engagement

A few I liked from this search.

This data-viz-style post has strong engagement.

This diary-style post has strong engagement.

Scrolling down, I also found a few like this, which are just screenshots of tweets and had consistently had strong engagement.

So, I might make a note to try the following content types:

• Shocking statistics / big numbers

• Diary-style content talking directly to the camera

• Screenshots of tweets with interesting thoughts

I also dug into the accounts these came from (because where there’s smoke, there’s fire), to see if these people had any other great ideas I could nick.

BiggerPockets, the company who was posting the tweet screenshots also has posts like these:

It’s a click-baity thumbnail that creates a strong curiosity gap, and if you click through, it’s a video walkthrough of a school that has been transformed into luxury apartments.

That might be difficult to steal as an accounting company, but we could use the general idea to build something similar.

We might, for example, do a walkthrough of our office, or a walkthrough-style “behind the scenes” client consult.

Jenne Elysse, from above, also seems to post a lot of content that talks about real estate in personal contexts, showcasing her family, etc.:

From that, we could steal the idea of showcasing the human side of accounting somehow.

Our final list of ideas might be:

• Shocking statistics / big numbers

• Diary-style content talking directly to the camera

• Screenshots of tweets with interesting thoughts

• Walkthroughs / behind the scenes

• Human side of accounting

And look, there was a lot nonsense and noise in there, too. There were a LOT of examples of people trying posting Canva templates and sh*t.

And some of the cool stuff might not work for us.

But some might. The point is to get new ideas fast, so we can test and iterate.

Here’s how to use this RIGHT NOW.

• Pick any niche outside your own

• Search platforms for that kind of content

• Look for content patterns and content types with high engagement

• Drill down further into successful accounts to steal even more ideas

• Make a spreadsheet with the types & how you’d transfer them to your own industry

• Test and iterate

Snack: The kind of ad I cannot stop clicking on even though I try not to

I’m a marketer. You’re a marketer.

We know what the deal is.

As a rule, we do not click on ads. YOU CAN’T FOOL US.

But lately, I’ve been seeing this ad on Instagram, and I’ll be g*ddamned if I don’t click—or almost click—every single time.

Ready?

…here it is:

Tell me you wouldn’t click on that.

It doesn’t even make sense.

The copy just “eXpLoSivE rEvEnUe” — lol.

It’s literally so corny. But it’s a hell of an ad to skip. It’s also been running non-stop on my feed, so I imagine it’s doing well.

Why it works: the ad is formatted to do two things at once: (1) generate immense curiosity and (2) look like something everyone already clicks on.

It’s genius.

I also think it’s going to get copied ad infinitum and would not count on copying it with any success (at least not for long).

But there ARE a few things we CAN steal from it.

• Create content (not just ads) that looks like things people already click on

• Pair that with curiosity to create massive clicks

Morsels: Content marketing links

• What Determines Social Media Success in a Company?

  (link)

• B2B Content Marketing > Going Bold or Fading to Beige? (link)

• How to Build an Audience From Scratch In 2023 (link)

• What Happens When B2B Buyers Start Using ChatGPT?

  (link)

• How to get slowly famous (link)

• Why Marketers Should Care About Operational Efficiency (link)

That’s the issue.

Go forth & conquer.

—FNCG