Uninspired Marketing? Resources to Reboot.

Have you ever felt like you just cannot catch up?

Regardless of how much careful thought and planning is put into building and executing campaigns, modern marketing can often feel like a constant fire drill. Marketing in an era where “set it and forget it” is simply not an option, where we must constantly adapt to shifting prospect needs, where there is more data than ever to analyze and act upon, does not leave very much room for error—let alone room to take a breath.

It’s easy to feel like you should be doing something with every minute, and to feel like you haven’t done enough.

Regardless of how much careful thought and planning is put into building and executing campaigns, modern marketing can often feel like a constant fire drill.

It’s also easy to become distracted or knocked off course. We get asked for extra, unplanned reports from higher-ups. We have to pen a timely blog post, press release, or other response to sudden or big industry news. We have to drop what we’re doing and create an extra special piece of content to help sales close a big deal. There’s this really hilarious post on Buzzfeed about cats dressed as dogs.

All of these things and more can interrupt a routine, and add many extra hours onto a week. They can make a marketer feel like he or she just can’t keep up.

I’m in one of those zones right now. Typically a Spartan when it comes to Inbox Zero each day, I’m at over 100 unread emails and counting. My LinkedIn inbox is almost as bad. My Kapost dashboard is flooded with “item overdue” reminders. I’m behind on replying to every single member of my team on something they’ve asked of me. I don’t even know where to start in handling my “Action Pending” Evernote notebook. I mean, I did book a super awesome group of musicians this week for my wedding, but I’m not sure there’s a way to graph that in my monthly reporting.

Actually, this totally works.

Something’s been off. Have I just had stout-brain from too many visits to the Mountain Sun? Not enough sleep or exercise? Those may be contributing factors, but they’re not the core.

I decided to see if I could trace back when I first fell behind. What happened that paused my forward progress, and where did I first fall behind because of it? I filtered through the mountain of emails and outstanding tasks, and realized more that once I had pushed back a deadline on my next blog post. My outstanding Sr. Managing Editor Anne Murphy was understanding, and our awesome content team fortunately had churned out some great pieces to fill the gaps, but by not submitting a post on time, it did throw my progress a little out of whack. The issue wasn’t that I didn’t have a post ready for publishing. The issue was that I did have a completed post ready to go, but Buffer got there first.

He’s saying “Son of a Buffer” right?

Now, I admire Belle Beth Cooper and the Buffer team for the quality content they churn out. We even named them part of the Kapost 50 for their excellent content marketing efforts. But lately seeing “Joel from Buffer” in my inbox has made my gut churn, as I find myself cautiously checking the topic to see if Buffer wrote about something I wanted to write about, too. I don’t want to seem like I’m copying them in my writing. Then, the other morning I came across a statement that shook me:

“Everything is a derivative, and that’s OK.”

In the containing post 5 Ways To Find Truly Unique Blog Ideas, Julie Neidlinger lays out some excellent advice that helped me break through what I felt to be a lull in creativity. I had found myself in a place where I was allowing myself to get sidetracked because I needed to create something, and didn’t know what to create.

But as Julie says in her post, “Waiting for inspiration to happen, like writer’s block, is more an excuse to avoid the unpleasant work of producing something when it doesn’t come easy.” That statement echoes a post by Heidi Grant Halvorson called How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To where she outlines three major reasons for procrastinating and how to break down those specific mindsets that become barriers to productivity.

My image choices have been described as “interesting”.

Those two posts are excellent and I highly suggest you read them if you feel like you’re overwhelmed. I realized my breakthrough came from reading other people’s takes on things. Sometimes when you can’t figure out what’s happening on your own, you absolutely need to see what other people think.

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