Ask anyone in a creative profession and they'll tell you that the flow of creativity can be a fickle one. It can seem as though you're flying along with favourable muses, and the next thing you've hit rock bottom, all creativity run dry. If you're trying to create Content for your Marketing, this can be something of a tough blow to take. After all, you're on the clock, and you need to take your content creation to the next level, not leave it stagnating.
Well, we feel your pain, and we've all been there. So in aid of getting your creative juices flowing again, here are our top tips for reviving flagging content creation and getting excited about it once more.
Handy Hints and Top Tips to Boost Tired Content Creators
1. Take Your Research to a New Level
Sometimes you're on fire when it comes to coming up with content ideas by yourself. Other times, maybe not so much. You can combat those "other times" by digging deep and doing a little research in some unexpected areas. One area you should be exploring is your colleagues in teams on the frontline when it comes to dealing with prospects. These will be your sales team members, customer service guys and technical representatives. Ask them about their interactions with prospects, what questions might have been asked and answered given. This is a useful springboard for generating content ideas.
2. Get Inspired with a Little Help
If you're stuck trying to find a topic, don't stress. There are online tools to help you find the right topic and to get your writing started. Hubspot's Blog Topic Generator is a great example, with its algorithm allowing you to generate a list of relevant blog topic ideas using three keywords. Once the topics are generated, you can tweak the titles and discard those which may seem too far off the mark.
3. Grab Hold of Targeted Keywords
Well-crafted and optimised content relies heavily on using the right targeted keywords. But if you've got writer's block, you may not have even been able to come up with any targeted keywords. Having a few keyword suggestions is a good start to setting off your creative spark. Übersuggest is a handy tool that helps you find keywords close to your brand and industry by extracting suggestions that help you build a keyword framework to lend direction to your writing.
4. Go Back to the Drawing Board
Your buyer personas are the foundation on which you should be basing all your content creation efforts. Sometimes, when you've been churning out content at a steady rate for a period, you start to lose focus on those personas. This is particularly the case when it comes to their pain points and goals. Those pain points are an excellent starting place when you're looking for inspiration for your content marketing. Consider the areas where your skills/knowledge and your buyer personas' pain points overlap, and start mining for content ideas there.
5. Do a Spot of Forum Searching
Forums are great places to find out the burning questions people have regarding particular topics, and to spot opportunities for you to use your expertise to answer these issues through some excellent content. Use the questions you find to drive some creative content brainstorming and to help you zero in on hot topics.
6. Look to Your Competition
Check out your competitors' websites and see what they're talking about, what topics they're driving and ideas they're chatting around. This not only helps you can insight into their strategies but also provides you with a window into potential industry content hot spots – concepts being widely chatted about across your industry.
7. Scour Your Social Media Pages
Because social media is the place where your target audience is most likely to reach out and engage with others, or with you, it provides you with a chance to spot exactly what your personas are thinking about, potentially answer their questions and search for feedback regarding topics or formats for future content that they'd like to see you create.
8. Change Up Your Formats
If you've been churning out written blog post after blog post, perhaps it's time to start looking at some alternative content formats to spice up your content creation and inspire you to think out the box. These could be infographics, interviews with industry thought leaders about your target audience, podcasts, slide shares and videos. Video is an especially compelling content format you should consider using as more individuals elect to consume video content across their devices over other options, a trend which is steadily on the rise.
9. Do a Little Light Reading
As content marketers, we all know the value of staying informed, engaged and on point with trending topics and ideas. The problem is far too many of us get too busy to make this a point of practice in the humdrum of our day to day schedules. These monotonous schedules can often contribute significantly to a loss of inspiration and general apathy towards being creative. Curb this effect by making time to stay informed. Sites like Paper.li are excellent for sourcing curative content and also as a source inspiration and information. Make the time to read a little every day, and keep your mind active.
10. Get Analytical
Go back and see what worked well for you before. Your analytics is an excellent source of information denoting which posts and offers were the most well received. Take another look at your content highpoints from the previous year. What factors set those pieces apart, and influenced their performance? Ask yourself whether you could put a fresh spin on a few choice topics, or draw some inspiration from them.
Don't despair if you're facing a bit of a creative wall. Just take a step back, and go through a few of the steps above - you'll soon find ideas for creative content lurking around every corner!
