Don’t Be Afraid To Bring Your Personal Passions To Work

When it comes to creating content, especially content for your company or client, it can be easy to narrow your focus and limit your sources of inspiration. We’ve all caught ourselves putting on mental blinders that only allow us to think about content ideas related to hyper-specific topics. Even though it does happen, it doesn’t mean we should just accept that as the normal course of business.

There are so many different ways content creators and marketers can invigorate their brainstorming processes to avoid the pitfalls that come with limiting ideas and sources of inspiration you might consider (either consciously or subconsciously) as “acceptable”. And it would take a lot longer than this blog post to cover them all. Instead of attempting that, I just want to focus on one idea that can help creatives produce great content.

Related Content:

• Online Reputation Management
• Digital PR Services
• Content Marketing Agency
• Content Creation Services

Look to your own personal passions for inspiration in your marketing efforts.

Using something you love, whether it be sports, a TV show or movie, your favorite store, or anything that you have a passion for as a source of inspiration can produce incredible results. If you are able to marry passion to a relevant topic for a client or company, the final product frequently shines.

There are obvious benefits to this approach:

• It’s easier for you to come up with a way to tie whatever you personally love to your client or company’s message in a way that will make sense and appeal to other fans, since you have the same perspective and know what content you would like to consume relating to your favorite thing.
• You are also more likely to immediately recognize and correct errors in the content thanks to instinctively approaching it from the same angle as other fans, which are your target audience.
• The entire process of putting your campaign together can be more enjoyable than a typical campaign or content piece because you’re researching and creating something that surrounds what you genuinely enjoy.

These benefits only serve to improve the quality of the final product, and that would not be possible (at least not on the same scale) without the inclusion of your personal passion for the subject of the project.

As an example of how this concept has benefited clients in the past, I want to talk about one of the very first projects I worked on at Go Fish Digital. I joined the company in late 2017 with a background consisting heavily of work in the sports industry.

I graduated college with a degree in Sports Communication and spent years in college and after working in that industry, including time spent with NBC covering the Super Bowl and a season with a Major League Baseball team. So, as you can tell, I love sports. A lot.

When it was time to participate in my very first brainstorm of potential campaign ideas for a client, I used my deep love and knowledge of sports as a source of inspiration. The client in question specializes in global relocation services where they help companies transition employees from one office to another in a different country.

So, how do you tie sports to that idea in a way that makes sense while also being newsworthy enough to earn coverage?  At the time, the 2018 Winter Olympics were just months away and I remembered something I had read about previous Games. Some athletes compete in the Olympics for countries other than the one they were born in.

This idea of athletes relocating themselves and their allegiances from one country to another seemed like a perfect fit for the client given the business they were in. While the story had been covered in the past, I knew it was mostly done in bits and pieces. No one had ever done a full analytical review of the athletes.

We pitched the idea of collecting data on every athlete representing a country other than their native land and analyzing it a number of different ways to the client, which they approved. Our team then spent weeks pouring over athlete biographies and official team announcements from different National Olympic Committees. This prep work allowed our team to have data finalized and ready for design the same day as the official cutoff for roster announcements, a little over a week before the Games began.

Without an increased knowledge and interest in sports, we might not have known the best places to look for the information we needed. We almost certainly could not have had it all ready in time.

Thankfully, we were able to get everything squared away, including creating a series of graphics breaking down our findings. I like to think the expertise and passion that my love of sports contributed to the project shone through and made it more appealing to sports fans and journalists alike.

The results back it up, as this campaign – born out of a personal passion applied correctly to a client’s business and interests – was covered by more than 50 outlets from all around the world, including CNN and ESPN. Additionally, it accounted for more than half of the overall traffic on the client’s site during the Olympics.

And that’s just one example of how and why the idea of bringing your passion to work can help you achieve incredible some incredible results. Since that time, I have seen our team utilize this concept to create incredibly successful pieces of content around their own favorite things – from Game of Thrones to Trader Joe’s grocery stores to astrology and the zodiac and so much more.

At Go Fish Digital, we refuse to check our personalities and interests at the door. At the end of the day, it helps us expand our focus and seize some opportunities that could be home runs. If we didn’t, these opportunities would pass us by. So remember to take off your mental blinders and let your passions guide your brainstorming content creation ideas.