Fear of the Blank Page

I’m taking the reins this month while Mark is otherwise occupied power washing and staining his deck while the weather is nice enough to keep it dry but maybe also too hot to golf (he would argue that it’s never too hot to golf ) – it’s a finite timeline he’s on.

While the summer might seem like a weird time to be thinking about new beginnings, and blank slates it’s actually the perfect time to start planning for action.

I get asked by people all the time how I come up with designs, ideas, and strategies from what seems like thin air. A blank page can be intimidating, the options are limitless, how do you even begin?

Imagine someone asks you to hang a picture in their room. You’d probably have a lot of follow up questions before you even entered the room: What’s on the picture? Why do you want to hang it? How big is it? What’s it made of? What am I using to hang it? What kind of room is it? Is there a lot of furniture in the room? Do I need to bring a ladder?

You need to define your problem before you can even think about all the creative tools you’ll need to solve it.

Solving marketing problems is similar, you just may not have the experience with advertising to know which questions to ask to get your creative juices flowing:

What are you trying to communicate?
What’s the problem you’re trying to solve. This seems straight forward, but a lot of business owners are too close to their products and services and try to solve all their problems at once. Pick one thing to focus on at a time.

Who are you trying to talk to?
If you’ve read Mark’s articles for very long you’ll be familiar with how important your target audience is. You want to speak directly your audience to be the most impactful. All things to all people tends to be forgettable at best and messy at worst.

What’s your timeline?
If you want to promote a sale, or get customers in during a holiday your marketing needs to be timed appropriately. You might not have the lead time for something that needs a lot of hands on it (like a radio ad) or if you can’t get a sign printed you’ll need to break out the markers yourself.

What are the practicalities/limitations?
These are things like your brand standards, sign dimensions, ad formats, or project budget. Every medium has its limitations you need to be mindful of: the number of colours you can use, the time your audience will be able to interact with it, the ability to hire a sky writer in your area.

After you have your problem well defined (we like to call this project summary a creative brief) you can begin to get creative. Sounds simple, right? Even with all this information it can be intimidating to get started, that’s why we generally believe no ideas are bad ideas. Throw out every thought in a sketch, word cloud or playdough sculpture. It’s all brain barf.

This is the point in which you bring in your partner, sibling, bestie, or pet and pitch every idea – yes, even the ‘bad’ ones. Ideally try to find someone to pitch to in the target audience. The ideas that are winners will get emotional reactions – good, bad, or ugly.

If this sounds like too much work, or still leaves you scratching your head with where to begin we’ve got the road map into the unknown that you’ve been looking for.

Cheers, Kate