This was the year. Your year. The year you unleashed your content upon the world. Well, more accurately, it was supposed to be. But something happened – or, rather, nothing happened.
Creating content seems so easy. Other people – friends, colleagues, competitors – are churning it out like crazy.
But every time you sit down to write, you spend an hour staring at a blank Word doc. Or you find yourself deep, deep in the rabbit hole of “research” – where you ultimately walk away with little actual customer data and an embarrassing amount of knowledge about your childhood best friend’s cousin’s wife’s mother’s yoga studio.
So, you finish your “writing session” with no writing to show for it and now have a new life regret that you don’t a yoga studio or live in Vermont. (I mean, seriously, that woman looks so happy.)
Don’t be so hard on yourself. Even professional writers get stuck staring at a blank screen, figuratively and literally. (And at least you have a renewed interest in yoga. Silver linings, my friend.)
While there are tons of tricks, tactics, and hacks you can employ to churn out copy like the best of them, Part Two of this series will dig into them.
Before we get there, you have to do the difficult-but-essential work of figuring out why you flopped. And then you get to do the not-as-difficult-and-some-might-say-fun work that will ensure it won’t happen again.
First, you need to look in the mirror. Oh, the dreaded look in the mirror. Difficult but necessary. Something is getting in the way of your content creation, and it isn’t just writer’s block.
Maybe you’re overanalyzing every idea come up with and are ultimately paralyzing your progress. Perhaps you aren’t analyzing anything at all and having trouble because everything you write lacks substance. Or maybe you’re waiting for ideas to just come to you with no strategy or plan.
Once you figure out what is hanging you up and sort it out, there is another important yet often missed step. You need to make sure you’ve done enough research.
Research? But that’s what got you looking into purchasing a cabin in Vermont! Yes, it’s true that without precaution or care, research is the slipperiest of slopes that can take you from productivity into procrastination without any warning. But the right kind of research will arm you ample ideas to fill your content calendar for 2017 (and probably 2018 too).
When it comes to content and idea generation, the right kind of research is qualitative research. Qualitative research is exploratory research, and utilizing it can help you start to understand the reasons, opinions, and motivations for behaviors. To understand what you need to write, you need to understand what your audience wants (and needs) to read. Start talking to people on the frontline so you aren’t writing based on assumptions.
Talk to your customers about how they spend their days and what keeps them up at night. In doing so, you’ll uncover their pain points, and experiencing it all in their words will help to put you in their shoes, which will elevate your content.
Take the time to build relationships and spend more time with your prospects. It will help you will create content that shows how you are a differentiator. Content that showcases how you offer alternatives that others don’t. That highlights how you think about things differently.
When you take the time to learn about your prospects’ true journey, you’ll be able to personalize your content to satisfy their needs. Which will keep them coming back for more.
Aubrey Collins is the director of marketing and communications at MediaTree, a supplier of branded digital entertainment cards. She fell in love with the promotional products industry in 2011 at her first PPAI Expo. She shares her perspective on everything from the industry, what parenting continues to teach her about business, to what marketing campaigns make her cry on her blog. Connect with her on Twitter or email her atacollins@mediatreegroup.com.