You don't have to create something from scratch to be creative.
I said what I said.
There's this persistent lie in creative fields that convinces us that unless we're building something from the ground up, it's not creative enough.
It leads to so many creatives overworking themselves and burning out, because every project starts from zero, every single time.
I remember when that narrative broke for me... I was working with a very smart email marketer. I'd just come off a years-long stint working in retail where the demand for new marketing and fresh campaigns was off the charts.
My second month with the email marketer, we ran a campaign for a particular product. Let's call it... Bask.
Our Bask promo went SUPER well. In fact, we beat out all the competitors on the affiliate leaderboard. I was even more astonished when I realized it was the same campaign we'd run a year prior, before I joined the team.
Fast forward to the next year. Another Bask promo... same email sequence, same bonus offers. We changed subject lines and switched up the order of thoughts in each email a tiny bit.
We won again.
Fast forward again. The next year we came in 4th on the sales leaderboard. I went to my boss to ask if that meant it was time to refresh/rewrite the campaign. He urged me to hold the line.
Fast forward again. We were back on top. Same email sequence 5+ years running. We didn't always win the affiliate contest but we always had great results.
That's when I realized... hey, I've been making this ridiculously hard on myself.
With the world's current obsession with craft, handmade, artisanal... it seems counterintuitive to repeat. But repeat we must!
Does that mean I think we should let things get boring, repetitive, stale?
Absolutely not.
But in a world where distractibility is high and attention/retention is arguably low, why do we need to create brand new things ALL the time?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
I told a client once... my goal is to get us to where 80% of the time we're running like clockwork. Things planned and written in advance, operating smoothly.
That means that when the 20% arrives, the hair-on-fire moments, we have the bandwidth to shift out of reactive mode into proactive mode.
You can't be running like clockwork if you're building every product, every advertisement, every marketing push, every service, every onboarding, from the ground up.
Systems and templates and recycling campaigns that WORK aren't normally the sexy thing that makes creatives want to create... but they can be life savers and game changers.
Food for thought.
______
Hey, it's day #26 of my 40 life lessons learned in 40 years. If this resonated with you, could you like/comment/share?
______
By the way... the Kindle and paperback versions of my book, Permission to Kick Ass, are officially available for pre-order! If you like rants like this, my book is PACKED with them. Link here: https://a.co/d/fZTbqh9
Business Innovation and Marketing Consultant
1moSocial media organic growth is the best Free option for making people discover your business