Content Burnout: What To Do

As promised, here’s the followup on what to do when you are battling burnout.

When you’re on a schedule to create content and keep your content marketing engine running smoothly, but you’re out of ideas and the well is dry, here are a few places you can look for inspiration:

Look at your peers.

Check out content creators you admire, blogs you follow, and other industry leaders. See what they are doing that is compelling or interesting. Don’t rewrite their work, of course, but look for jumping-off places, or if you can adjust those ideas to apply them to your organization.

Look at the competition.

If you don’t already, check out your competition. You can use a tool like Socialmention or SEMrush to see how their content is performing and what’s connecting with their audience. Again, don’t just rewrite their work, but look at what’s being successful for them and see if there are ways you can use similar strategies for your content and customers.

Look within your organization.

Better than either of the above, of course, is to look internally.

Talk with your sales team to see what content helps drive conversions for them, or what they think is missing in your content library. How can your content better support them?

Talk with your designers, developers, and product teams. What do they wish customers knew about the product? Are there better ways to educate, inform, or persuade customers?

Talk with HR. Content is a key recruitment tool, after all; how can your content strategy better support recruiting and retention?

Your internal team is not only a source of inspiration, but also can be a great source of original, unique content. Consider featuring profiles or short interviews with key staff, to give customers more insight into your organization and processes. And remember, not everything you create has to be on-topic all the time. You can make fun, engaging posts with your team; what are your team members reading, watching, or listening to? Create posts featuring office pets or office fashion. Occasional lighthearted pieces like this make your company more relatable, and these posts are highly engaging and sharable, and often incidentally boost recruitment efforts.

So, when your well has run dry, look at the content landscape all around you. And make it personal; what do YOU like, what do you respond to, what would interest you? Chances are, if a piece of content would engage you, it would engage other people as well. And engaging content, even if it’s not always on-topic, is a job well done.

image courtesy of Mike Linksvayer on Flickr