All internal marketing professionals can attest, sometimes you just don’t know what to post. Creativity slumps are completely normal and expected in a profession that requires you to be creative all the time.
However, bouncing out of these slumps can be tricky. Sometimes you get a burst of inspiration and have content ideas for days, and sometimes you’re stuck in a slump for weeks. Here are some options available to everyone in a creativity slump.
Define the Problem
What is it that you’re having trouble with? Blog content? Social media graphics? A witty and attention grabbing newsletter? Whatever the problem is, once you define it, you can narrow your quest to find a solution.
Sometimes stating the problem will elicit a response that solves the problem.
Explore Your Options
You’re not the first person to hit a creative roadblock and you certainly won’t be the last. Many people have gone through bouts of creativity blocks and are willing to share their experience and advice with you.
You could approach this in several ways. First, you could join a Facebook group that is dedicated to asking questions. A Social Media Manager Guide, is a great, private group to join on Facebook with over 14K members.
Another option is to ask a question on websites such as Quora, which have thousands of questions just like yours, that you can research or you could ask your own question and wait for the responses to start flowing in.
One last option is asking a mentor or a colleague with more experience that probably went through the same thing at one point.
If you don’t have a mentor, there are dozens of mentorship programs you can register for to be paired with someone with similar goals but more experience. Professional Mentor Program is a great resource that doesn’t take long to register for.
Third Party Tools
Sometimes, you just can’t get out of this slump. It feels like all of your good ideas have run dry. Fortunately, there are tools for that! Two of our favorite among our marketing team are Answer The Public and Hubspot Blog Ideas Generator.
We’ve received pages of content ideas just from doing a few keyword searches on Answer The Public. It’s a search listening tool that gives you the top Google searches among your audience. It categorizes the top searches between questions, prepositions, comparisons, etc. It lets you tap into the mind of your audience to discover what they want to know which gives you more content ideas than you know what to do with!
Hubspot’s Blog Ideas Generator is a great tool for when you don’t want to cover the same topics over and over again. You can input 1-5 nouns to narrow or broaden your results. It gives you a week’s worth of blog topics that you can spread out over months or you can download a year’s worth of blog topics, giving you hundreds of ideas and helping you hop over that creativity obstacle.
Ask For Help
It’s OK to ask for help. If you want to be successful, sometimes it’s necessary. Asking a coworker for any ideas they have or sitting down with your team and having an official brainstorming session will only help you grow professionally.
Asking for help doesn’t make you unqualified for your position, it makes you human. It shows your superiors that you care about the company and its prosperity and you will do anything to see it succeed.
Pauses in creativity happen to all of us, but overcoming it is easy when you use the right resources.