How To Create Content When Feeling Lazy

Amir Jirbandey

Spending glorious summer days indoors at work can be a drag. What’s even worse is seeing your friends’ vacation snaps while scrolling through social media to find inspiration for your next newsletter or content piece. So what do you do when you have to create content and continue your marketing drive throughout the 6 week long summer holiday period? (More like 2 weeks in April if you’re here in London as far as having Sun is a factor.)

Do more with less. Repurpose your email designs as well as content across channels to make them go the extra mile. I’ll show you some ways to get the most value out of your existing content (both using email to drive additional traffic and tweaking content for email) when you’re feeling the summer brain drain. I’m actually taking my own advice while writing this piece – trying to draw inspiration from previous content we’ve created – as I gaze out into our courtyard where some Google Campus people are having a little BBQ.

Work smarter, not harder (or just a bit lazier in this case)

I’m not telling you to literally copy and paste old content or even repeat the same idea. But when you’re looking to create content, draw inspiration from previous pieces and see if you can follow up any of the previous issues you’ve tackled in your blog posts.

You can take a point from an ebook or an interesting article and elaborate on it to create a piece or turn a presentation/infographic into a blog post; or vice versa. In terms of email content, maybe check your social media for certain phrases that worked really well and test it out as a subject line in your email. Have a look at your Twitter analytics and see what worked well for you last summer and follow up on those year-old pieces:

Take time to revise your annual email goals

Back in December, we talked about redefining your email goals: “Put on your consumer hat and look through the holiday campaigns your competitors have sent through so far. Which customer demographic is underserved?”. If you’re sending time sensitive emails, specifically around the summer holidays, be sure to keep an eye on the competition and see how you can stand out.

Reevaluate your goals in terms of open and click rates as they can fluctuate in comparison to rest of the year. This depends on your target audience. For example if your target audience are teens from ages 16 to 21, you might see a rise in open rates as these young persons are on their school break. If you’re targeting B2B clients, then you might see a drop during August, as this is when they take their family vacation.

Replace your colleagues with free tools

Is your design team off on holiday right now? Try using some simple and free tools to reuse graphics you already have. One of our favorites is Canva, you can create brand new email headers and banners as well as social media images in a couple of minutes. Or, manipulate old images to create something fresh.

So you’ve created your “lazy” content, but is your email marketer, sipping pina coladas by a pool somewhere hot? No fear, replace them with Publicate. You can use Publicate to curate your newsletters through an easy-to-use dashboard by dragging and dropping different links to populate your new piece. Then, embed the HTML code into your email template and you’re good to go!