Mentee to Mentor’ is a series of articles featuring budding digital marketers who’ve learnt the practical aspects of online marketing under my mentorship. As part of their internship experience, they came across exciting challenges that they had to solve. And they learnt some valuable lessons that they’re sharing with you here.
Sixth up in the series is Agne Simulynaite who worked with us as a digital marketing intern for 4 months at Figaro London Hair & Beauty. Whenever we were stuck for creative ideas, Agne excelled at coming up with different perspectives and and presented some brilliant ideas to approach a content marketing challenge. I invited her to share her thoughts on how she tackled writer’s block and those day-to-day scenarios when she wouldn’t know what to write or how to write and yet, she’d come up with a great social post or blog post.
Over to Agne now:
Hello! This is a blog post about how I come up with my ideas when it comes to content marketing – in fact, when it comes to writing or creating anything, really.
Here’s the irony: I don’t really know how to write this post.
Right now you are thinking: “But … you are writing this, I am reading it!”. Omg, you are totally right. Here is the thing: I’m just writing what my brain is coming up with.
That’s it, that’s my secret. I just let my brain write what it wants, and let me tell you that it work like a charm every single time.
This is just my style, I don’t think too much about the content and just write whatever comes to my mind. Especially when writing my first draft. I put all my confidence in one technique I learnt in high school: stream of consciousness. It’s truly my best friend.
If you’re not really familiar with it here is a little explanation.
The stream of consciousness is a writing style of the early 20th century. And it consists of writing sentences one after the other without punctuation, without thinking about structure or anything.
This isn’t great just for writing down your thoughts and ideas as they come but also … I’ll let you in on a little secret:
by using this technique, when someone reads what you wrote, it gives them the impression of being inside your mind.
I think that’s pretty awesome. It helps to connect with your readers and that’s another goal of all of us, right?
Of course, when you have many thoughts and you write them down all at once, to not confuse your reader it’s advisable to reread your work and decide what’s pertinent. It can’t all be so great, but I’m just talking about my personal experience here.
Another tip, is that I always try to make connections with other sectors I’m passionate about or interested in. I include insights that can help understand or teach something new to those who read me. These references can be great to explain point of views for example. It can greatly enrich your work and it can also train your brain to link concepts. It can help you to be more creative in the long run.
And to be able to connect and link different topics you need a broad cultural background. Sounds exhausting and too time consuming? Wrong. You already have so much knowledge and you’re just not using it. From movies to books, to life experiences and beliefs you have. Everything you need to write and be creative is there, inside of you.
We’re using 100% of our brains, but for sure not everyone is using 100% of their creativity and their knowledge when they need to come up with some fresh new ideas. Your potential is there and through writing it’s possible to unleash at least 50% of it if you haven’t already, of course. There are many articles stating that writing can increase your creativity and also your clarity. And we all know that to come up with something good you need a clear mind, otherwise everything gets confusing and you can’t get to the point.
Last but not least, to make your content more personal, you can add some quotes or movie recommendations, there are many ways to make your writing interesting. Personally, I like to make references to movies I like and from there I can go about other personal thoughts of mine. I enrich my post and at the same time I recommend some good must-watch.
The content you will deliver will always be unique, nobody will ever have the same writing style and creative thoughts that you have. I think that’s mind-blowing and that’s what makes every piece or idea you create special and truly unique.
Embrace it, and go for it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Agne is an Italian student and currently she’s studying Languages and Communication for Business and Tourism for her bachelor degree. She interned at Figaro London for four months and during that period of time she has learnt so much about digital marketing and copywriting.
Agne has many interests and she considers herself a polymath. She is passionate about languages, history and psychology. Thanks to her internship she discovered that she really likes to write too. She enjoys watching movies and TV shows, but also anime and has a tendency to write quotes down whenever something grabs her attention.
Creativity is intelligence having fun!
– Albert Einstein.
Connect with Agne on LinkedIn. She’ll be pleased to hear from you.
Gabriella Ferenczi 