Look out for bland content and see if you can ramp up the creativity. Through storytelling, a strong angle or great imagery, you can add more appeal to your content.
NOTE: This is part 7 in a ten-part serialisation of my eBook. Please read the introduction first if you are new to the tool.
Being creative all day, every day is hard. It’s easy to get caught up in a cycle of ‘churning out stuff’ rather than fully committing to excellent content. So it’s likely that much of the content you reassess during an audit will need livening up.
When you assess existing content you may find it a bit dull, even if when it was published everyone loved it. That could be because everyone was relieved that it was finally finished after a painful process, rather than the content itself being amazing.
This part of the audit is sometimes tricky and subjective because it’s not clear what ‘creative’ means. It’s not easy to define it or judge content for creativity. There are a couple of ways to overcome this challenge:
Switch ‘creative’ for ‘remarkable’. Advertising legend David Ogilvy found ‘creative’ too vague a word. He preferred to use the word ‘remarkable’ instead, because it’s more specific. It’s a pretty good word to use when assessing copy or content.
Judge against specific criteria. Instead of assessing against a single word, try asking these questions instead:
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Is the content properly answering a question or meeting a need?
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Does it stir emotions?
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Does it have a great flow, like the best stories do?
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Does it look great?
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Will readers think ‘this is about me and my life’?
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Does it look great at first glance?
If the answer is ‘no’ to all these questions, work is needed. The starting point could be to edit the piece so that the answer to just one of the questions is ‘yes’.
Some solutions for ‘creative’ problems
Here are a few ways to tackle a lack of creativity:
Tell a story
At the simplest level, stories have a beginning, middle and ending. Sometimes doing an edit based around even a simple structure like that can lift a piece to a new level of interesting. But you can go further and use a more sophisticated structure to get your creativity flowing. Tried and tested structures like AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) and PAS (Problem, Agitation, Solution) are a good starting point.
You can find an excellent blog with these and 30+ other structures for copy at https://copyhackers.com/2015/10/copywriting-formula/.
Add some visual appeal
Sometimes the copy itself is fine, but it’s the formatting that’s ‘meh’. This example from Property Moose shows that it doesn’t have to be like that, with a blend of body copy and infographic-style image:
Add a twist
Coming up with a strong angle for content often brings it alive. A piece called ‘Five tips for better roses’ is OK, but what about ‘Better, bigger roses in just five minutes a week’?
And it may be a cliché nowadays but I still like the approach where you turn something on its head: ‘How to guarantee your roses will be rubbish’.