Being the head of a digital marketing team is not an easy job.This type of work requires a lot of creativity and outside-of-the-box thinking. But with volumes and volumes of small tasks to conduct, it’s not easy to keep your team open to creative inspiration.
Regardless of the creative aspect of this work, if they aren’t motivated well enough, your employees may start looking at their task as yet another time-waster on their 9 to 5. It’s your job to persuade them otherwise.
Luckily, there are so many great ways to motivate, empower and even enable your team members to unleash their full potential. For this to work, you’ll have to take a different approach to a lot of your old business practices.
With this in mind and without further ado, here are several ways in which you can nurture creativity in your digital marketing in 2018.
1. The best motivation is intrinsic
The first thing you need to keep in mind when conducting a digital marketing campaign is the bigger picture. Specifically, the way in which this bigger picture works in your/their favor.
As the owner of the company, this digital marketing campaign helps you expand, grow, contribute to your brand and increase your sales. In turn, this leads to wealth, prosperity, renown and, perhaps, even building a legacy for years to come.
As a digital marketer, success in a campaign or an outstanding marketing move gives you another star to pin on your chest. In turn, this leads to a greater renown within your niche, which will make your services more in demand and, therefore, more expensive.
At the end of the day, you need to know your angle. To put it in the simplest way possible. You need to know why it is good that you try to be as creative, unique and outstanding at what you do.
In a case where you’re leading a team, it’s vital that you manage to help them figure this out. Where there’s intrinsic motivation present, the results aren’t far behind.
2. Make their job easier
Amongst the greatest productivity killers out there are menial tasks that are constantly distracting your employees from their core responsibilities.
For instance, a great content writer sometimes worries more about content optimization than about the content itself. This causes them to spend less time on the aspect of coming up with fresh ideas and makes them simply rush to get to the technical part.
The best way to help them across this obstacle is by equipping them with adequate WordPress content optimization plugins.
In this way, they will automate the technical aspect of content marketing and have more time to focus on the creative part of the job.
3. Think both visual and text
The world of digital marketing is both verbal and visual in nature. Therefore, you need to be represented in both of these aspects equally. In other words, you need to achieve an equilibrium between the quality of your web design and that of your staff’s writing.
Seeing as how skilled web developers are incredibly expensive to employ as full-time staff members nowadays, a lot of digital marketers prefer to outsource their web design tasks to a company they deem reputable enough.
The only issue here is coordinating between your in-house team and the agency you’re outsourcing to. This is where you’ll get to put your managerial skills to a test.
4. Quicker brainstorming sessions
While it is true that not all of your team-members perform as well under pressure, you need to keep in mind that quicker brainstorming sessions tend to bring greater results.
According to the latest survey, an average office worker wastes about 31 hours monthly on unnecessary meetings.
Now, sitting in a meeting where the manager or team leader is giving a speech in the form of a monologue will most likely lull your creatives in the state of sleepiness.
Instead, you should send all non-vital information through email or Slack, and hold quicker, more intense brainstorming sessions instead.
5. Tell your team it’s ok to take more time
Another thing you should keep in mind is the fact that rushing to finish tends to kill creativity. Therefore, you need to let your team know that it’s ok to take a bit more time writing that piece they’ve recently started.
Back in 2014 the average time spent writing a blog post was at about 2 hours and 24 minutes, while, by the end of 2017 it was at 3 hours and 20 minutes. This is almost a full hour of difference.
Needless to say, as Google’s algorithm self-improves through deep-learning, the criteria for content quality will keep rising. This is why we might expect this trend to keep heading in the same direction in the future.
6. Longer formats are in
Aside from this, you need to encourage your team to do more thorough research on the topics they intend to write, and create larger content formats. In the past, blog posts that were about 600 to 1000 words long were all the rage, while today, the things have changed.
Nowadays, people prefer blog posts that are longer than 3000 words, as they get all the information they need in one place, instead of having to scavenge for pieces of the puzzle all over the internet.
Nonetheless, in order not to kill off the creativity, due to the sheer effort of writing such daunting volumes of content, you need to find a way how to properly schedule your editorial calendar.
7. Use statistics for inspiration
Finally, in order to get inspiration, you need to look for relevant and reliable sources. In fact, a single interesting statistic may give birth to an idea; this idea can then grow into a paragraph; this paragraph can then grow into an article, infographic or even a white paper.
The audience loves hearing interesting stats about things they deem relevant. but, in order for this to work in a broader scope of a digital marketing campaign, it needs to be refined into actionable information.
At the end of the day, being creative and unique in a world where millions and millions are writing on the same topics is not an easy job. Still, it is something you simply have to try your hand at if you want to achieve admirable results.
Fortunately, with adequate motivation, organization, and leadership, this doesn’t have to be such a difficult task after all.
7 Ways to Nurture Creativity in Digital Marketing for 2018
