Do you feel your writing skills are completely stumped?
Or
You deal with a constant brawl to dig out more from your Content Marketing Team?
Writing on a routine, usually kills the creative edge of a content resource. Once it gets killed, the whole job role is to fill in the word count goal and earn that monthly paycheck.
With such an attitude, a business can gain a mountain of words, but not effective and engaging content, that can be the only right thing your Content Marketing Strategy is looking out for.
If this sounds similar to what you are experiencing with your Content Marketing Team, then you should be beware of these burnout signs.
So, how can you get over this or avoid a major plight, the answer to this is 9 brain-training exercises that will help your team to refresh their mind for creativity.
Many established brands do a weekly meet up, where all the employees are motivated to work better, lift each other and even undertake fun activities that can spark creative thinking.
Now without dragging it any further, here are the 9 brain-training exercises that can add the spirit to be creative in your Content Marketing team; Doesn’t matter if the team is you as an individual.
Decisive Bad Writing To Initiate Good Writing Habits
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This exercise involves, matching your tone with your audience.
To take this up, any brand content piece from either social media post or maybe from the on-site blog, and re-writing as per a decided target audience.
Now this exercise is not about a re-writing practice. The fun part here is, you need to write completely mismatching your audience or in other words, it should be poor in targeting the audience.
Add the fun element in writing. Humor!
Adding a smile or a laugh to each other is the main aim of this meet up. Here while adding a humor to the writing style, you can also discover the right way to target the audience, by working on a wrong way to focus them.
The mind learns the right way to reach the target audience, by just laughing it out on the wrong way.
A Walk Through The Buyer’s Journey
This brain-training exercise helps the content marketers to understand the buyer’s journey in a more tangible way.
In their regular practice, content marketers are inclined to consider the proposed journey a lot, but with this exercise, they can ground their thinking and stimulate creative expression.
Image Source: Sproutbox Media
Discuss amongst your team members about their last buying process. Assembling all the examples, and reaching out to the buying decision while creating a storyboard, can help the team members to base their content creation on this.
This brain-training exercise brings down the essence and encourages the real-world model for buying process.
Which can further help in framing their words right.
Playing With The Headlines
The Headline is undoubtedly the most powerful element of a content copy.
Playing with headline in different tones which will appeal to different audiences. Here, setting the tone as per audience is the trick.
Pick up a brand’s content copy and let each team member give a different & suitable headline to it.
Once done, discuss the various headlines produced. Discuss the different feelings that are evoked by each member and how they serve different audiences.
This will naturally help any Content Marketing Team to develop better headlines.
Fun While Being Persuasive
Another exercise that motivates to be talking & speaking persuasively, no matter what the subject may be.
This game is very significant for businesses that have a wide & different type of audience.
Use of random nouns and adjectives with the help of software who generate them for you. So create two lists of the count of ten. Now each team member picks a combination of 1 adjective & 1 noun from the created list, and then has to market the product (as a result of this combination) to the team.
It is a great exercise to create few laughs, which mentally developing a persuasive speech and how the product is low in significance compared to what narrative marketers can develop.
Strike-Off Of The Clichés
This exercise is pretty basic, but quite effective.
Just simply striking off the clichés from the copies of your fellow team members. This has to be done with a creative bend and to generate more colorful metaphors.
A couple of minutes can be offered to the team and the task is to strike off as many clichés as they can.
While striking off each cliché, they have to share a new way of communicating the idea.
Clichés are anti-expression & anti-personal writing.
Headlines & More Headlines
This game helps your team think about the power of a headline, and how different headlines strike different tones and appeal to different audiences.
Start with the headline of one of your team’s recent blog posts (or other content). Have everyone suggest ways to rewrite the headline. For example:
Then discuss the different headlines everyone generated. What feelings do each invoke? How do they attract or repel different audiences?
This exercise can help your team write better headlines, naturally. But it also serves to inspire more critical thinking about audience and tone that will more deeply inform content creation.
Reverse The Process
Reverse the process of buying decision. The influences those were present in the buyer’s process while making the purchase.
With the team, imagine the whole process of the buyer & his journey.
What was the motivation behind the decision? Keep going ahead like this to reach all the way at the top.
This will help in creating a creative content strategy for the future.
The team might develop new ways to reach out to the existing customers, or even recognize a new audience.
Let Every One Be A Superhero
Superheroes have super-powers.
Let each team member be a superhero and decide on their super-power.
This will help in realizing the core strength of each resource and let the business build and effective solution strategy.
This exercise breaks the conventional route and sparks in the faded creativity.
Act Different, Be Different
In this exercise, let each team member be clubbed in a group of 2-3.
Then each team must come together to bring in different ideas to solve a similar issue.
This exercise brings up an example of different mindsets, that a Content Marketing Team is made up of.
Knowing each others thinking process and learning from each other, this exercise adds insight and escalates knowledge of each team member and adds to their creativity.
Brain Exercising To Expand Creativity
Creativity might be gifted to some, while others might need such brain-training exercises to add that spark to their content copy.
Try these 9 exercises to train & encourage your Content Marketing Team with no or less cost.
Do share your feedback and share which exercises worked best for you.
