This post was written by PR superstar Jess Wood.
Whether you’re a marketing strategist, copywriter, PR person, or a designer, we’ve all been there. Working on a new project and you hit a wall.
Like most agencies, here at littleBIG, we often find ourselves under a time crunch. With deadlines to meet, we can’t just wait around for inspiration to hit us, so we have to find ways to keep those creative juices flowing.
We’ve listed a few tips that can help get you out of that creative funk.
Turn to your colleagues
It may sound like we’re stating the obvious here but calling on your colleagues for fresh creative ideas is one of the most resourceful and effective techniques.
At littleBIG we call it an ‘Ideas Session”.
We put together a list of client campaigns and objectives then set aside an hour (or as long as it takes) and put it to the team for a good old brainstorming session.
Together we are a group of resourceful, creative minds coming from design, marketing, PR and social media backgrounds, so we ought to leverage on this, right?!
Turn to others within the communications industry
One for the PR peeps out there – enlist in the help of others in the communications industry such as editors, journalists or freelancers when looking for creative ideas.
In PR we tend to tell the editor what to write, putting our client’s news on their radar and hoping that they like it enough to publish it. But why not ask the editors or journalists what they think is hot right now/coming down the pike; or what topics issues they’d like to cover but haven’t had the opportunity to recently. Reaching out to editors, freelancers or bloggers and having a conversation could spike a number of leads you didn’t think of before.
Also hitting up fellow marketing/communications/design friends and finding out what projects their working on or have worked on that could relate to your current project is a great way to bounce around creative ideas. It could also be an opportunity for you to piggyback on or use as a starting point.
Turn to social media
We could go on forever about how social media platforms inspire us.
Whether we be using it for our social media clients, PR clients or design clients, social media is a wonderful source when looking for creative ideas. It is the digital intersection of photography, writing, video, art, design and more. It gives you access to people who behave and think differently, it allows you to track what is influential, what is trending, what goes viral, what your clients like, even what your client’s followers like.
Like we said, we could go on and on.
Social media has made it easier for people to share creative ideas, start trends, collaborate and communicate than ever before in human history.
As an agency that provides social media services to clients a lot of the time, we turn to competitor’s social media pages to inspire new ideas and discover what audiences are engaging with. Good and bad content is out there so why not utilise this when looking for inspiration?
Absorb media, current news and trends.
Surf the web (we feel corny saying this, it sounds like something Dad would say), but we‘ve always found a good google search comes in handy when we’re stuck on creative ideas. Not just for stories/articles on the same topic, but stories that are presented in an interesting way. Looking at good writing on unrelated topics can really help trigger new ideas – how can this work for us?
We don’t always have to search the web or social pages for current trends– go old school – pick up a newspaper or magazine, tune into the radio or actually watch ads between your favourite TV show. If creativity doesn’t stem from this, conversations can, and conversation can lead to new ideas or opinions you perhaps never had thought of before. For instance, we had a very lengthy discussion in the office about Libra’s new #BloodNormal campaign which got interesting… Nonetheless it got us conversing!
Take a break
If you’ve tried all the tricks in the book to get you out of that creative funk, a simple yet effective way to help is to STEP AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER! Take a walk, take a drive, go for a coffee and take your mind off it! If you’re not on a time crunch come back to it a day or two later with a clear mind.
Looking for a collaborative agency that you can brainstorm ideas with? Get in touch!
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