Do I have your attention?

Good. I’d hate to bore you. There’s enough boring content out there already.

I’m well aware how much else is constantly vying for your attention. We’re all busy. And it’s not like you have to read this article. The only way you’re going to get all the way to the last line is if you want to read that far.

Be honest: How often have you downloaded a white paper or e-book because the topic is directly relevant and interesting to you, only to lose interest after the first few paragraphs?

Yes. I thought so. Boring content.

Perhaps the information and insights weren’t as original or useful as the landing page led you to believe. Perhaps the dense language and staid format made reading the content feel too much like hard work. Or perhaps the copy simply took too long to get to the point …

So, let’s look at how you can avoid some of the most common causes of boring content.

Avoid relying too heavily on AI

When talking about content creation, the obvious elephant in the room is generative AI. But while LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are useful, they’re still only tools. They’re only as effective as the prompts you give them. As the saying goes: rubbish in, rubbish out.

Generative AI isn’t capable of genuine creativity. It simply recycles and remixes the knowledge and ideas that are already out there, wrapped up in a more sophisticated form of predictive text.

Ask it to generate an article on car maintenance, for example, and it will draw information from all the other articles on car maintenance that already exist. It’s not going to suddenly come up with original advice or insights no one has thought of before (unless it’s telling you to pour glue on your pizza to keep the cheese from sliding off). Side note: fact-checking still matters.

It’s easy to get carried away with the speed and ease with which you can produce content with ChatGPT . But don’t forget the same goes for your competitors as well. If they’re publishing content on similar topics, they’re probably using similar prompts to you. And as ChatGPT (and friends) are connected to the exact same internet as the rest of us, it means the information and insights contained in your content will likely draw from similar sources.

In a word: generic.

You can’t really characterise your content as thought leadership if it’s only recycling information and insights already out there.

As Rand Fishkin writes, “If your content isn’t better than what AI can produce, it’s not worth making.”

Don’t mistake activity for productivity.

A common mistake with content marketing is to approach it as a purely tactical exercise, focussed on secondary metrics such as publishing frequency, social media Likes, SEO uplift, and website traffic. Treating these as goals in themselves risks divorcing your content from its real purpose — positively impacting your bottom line.

But does publishing four or five articles every week really matter if the result is low quality content (and burned-out writers)? Does it matter if you rank highly for certain keywords if your bounce rate means no one sticks around? Does it matter how much traffic your content attracts, if there’s ultimately no discernible change to your sales numbers?

It might feel more productive to skip straight to briefing your writers or jump into ChatGPT without all that messy creative thinking. But if your content briefs or AI prompts amount to the proverbial sow’s ear, “Here’s a topic and a bunch of keywords”, don’t expect a silk purse in return.
And when your writers are rushed, there’s zero incentive for them to do more than the minimum required to meet the brief. So, you end up with a bunch of ten-point listicles no different to hundreds of similar blog posts already filling the first few pages of Google for those same keywords.

How boring!

Allocate time for research, planning and strategy

Developing effective, attention-holding content means investing more time in the planning stages. It takes a concerted strategy and a framework that prioritises three things:

1. Originality
2. Relevance
3. Usefulness

For example, at SALT, we researched the most popular types of content and arrived at three pillars we could confidently support with content that would be uniquely ours:

• Original (not desk) research
• Peer content, drawing on exclusive interviews
• Case studies with Salt customers

Then we mapped out a methodology to produce these pieces with as much originality, relevance and usefulness as possible.
Yes, developing a strategy can be a painful process, requiring plenty of research, deep thought and time to get right. But it is the bedrock of effective, non-boring content.

Hero the audience, not the brand

Content marketing isn’t about saying what your brand wants to say, with little or no regard for whether anyone else is interested. You’ve got sales brochures and product webpages for that.

PR agents struggle with this problem a lot; counselling business clients on why no media outlets will run their self-serving press release about a new product launch. Your content is no different. Where’s the story? Where’s the hook? Why should anyone outside of the business care?
Being unable to answer these questions virtually guarantees boring content.
Content marketing is about attracting an interested audience to your brand by providing them with the information, insights, and engagement they’re actively seeking out.

In short, good content should feel like a conversation.

In an ideal world, every one of your readers should feel your content was created specifically for them. You want to demonstrate how much you understand their use cases and needs, their obstacles and limitations, their concerns and fears. You want them to read your content and think, “This person or brand totally gets what I’m about and, more importantly, what I’m looking for.”

Of course, we don’t live in an ideal world. You can’t handcraft each piece of content for an audience of one.
But you can use customer and audience research to identify those shared themes and behaviours most likely to resonate with more people, allowing you to craft representative avatars or personas to target with your content.

Tone of voice — Say it with feeling

Even if the information you need to impart isn’t wildly original — there are only so many ways to check your car tyres, for example — you can still give your content a fresh slant or imbue it with more personality through tone of voice.

One of the ways to do that is to write how you speak, which also helps to convey the sense of content as a conversation. However, your tone of voice needs to be appropriate to both your audience and the topic.

B2B content often struggles with tone of voice. Worried that business clients won’t take their brand seriously if they use plain language, creative imagery, and perhaps even a little *gasp* humour, they instead adopt a formal, academic style of writing.

But that misunderstands that B2B customers are still people too. Our brains don’t switch from B2C to B2B just because the clock strikes 9am. If someone finds your new white paper too boring to read on the bus or at home, they’re not suddenly going to find it unputdownable when they’re in the office.

Consider your target audience. What kind of relationship do you hope to nurture? What brand values do you want to infer? What language choices will make your readers feel like your brand understands them and their world?

Conclusion

If you’re reading this sentence, it hopefully means I’ve held your attention effectively. (You didn’t just skip to the end, did you?)

With any luck, you found the above interesting, actionable, and absolutely not a chore to read. I hope the tone of voice was even a little fun. A bit of quirky humour and personality won’t suit every audience or every scenario – but in the right place it can help make your content more original, more memorable, and much less boring.

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