Here are 5 basic marketing tricks of the trade that can help turn your boring business into a fun one:

1 – Write like a human being.

No one likes to be bored, so don’t be boring. That means writing like a human being – in other words, write the way you talk. Use slang, contractions, and colloquialisms to make your content easy to read and understand. Just because your business might be on the serious side doesn’t mean you need to be super formal.

2 – Be personal.

In your tweets, Facebook updates, and email marketing – or any other message that you send to your customers – be personal and casual. Call your customers by their name, not Sir-or-Madam. Keep track of them in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool so you can add personal messages too (“How is your daughter adjusting to college, Steve?”). Publicly declare how much you like your customers.

3 – Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Be self-deprecating. Acknowledge how boring your business is – and embrace it: “Did you hear the one about the network engineer? Of course not – who wants to talk about a network engineer?” If you have a great company culture and employees with side-splittingly funny senses of humor, shine the light on it and them.

4 – Use Pinterest.

Your business is probably more visual than you think. Let’s go back to the poor beleaguered network engineer. I typed “wires” into Google image search and got back some pretty beautiful images. When I typed in “microchips,” here’s what I got – again, some beautiful images came up in the search results.

5 – Tell stories.

One of the smartest things you can do to make your boring business interesting is to turn customer success stories into blog posts. Have fun with it. You could start your stories with “Once upon a time” and end with “and they lived happily ever after.” Your readers will get to know you better, and they’ll be entertained, too.