Whether you’re a creative director, UX designer, social media manager or content creator, these tools will give you some extra inspiration when your creative well is running dry:
Founded by one of the masterminds behind Moz, SparkToro is an audience research platform that can help you understand your target audience on a deeper level. You can get public, aggregated data about the influencers they turn to, the sites they visit, and even the podcasts and YouTube channels they follow. If you’re helping develop a campaign strategy or brand plan, this is extremely powerful. Or, if you’re a content creator, you can uncover the keywords and phrases they use in social posts, so you can be more pointed in your ads, blogs and social posts.
Want to create content that resonates? You need to know what people are searching for! Answer the Public uses autocomplete data from search engines to get more context into keywords and related questions being asked. For example, you can you can see “who,” “what,” “where,” “why” and “how” questions being asked, as well as searches being conducted with prepositions. For example, if you search for “graphic design,” you will see searches featuring “which,” like: “which software graphic designers use.” That alone would make a great blog for our audience! (Excuse me while I jot that down…)
The HubSpot Blog Ideas Generator
If you don’t have the time to mine through a lot of data, look no further than HubSpots Blog Ideas Generator. I would even argue, you can use the tool for far more than blogs: website copy, newsletters, videos, social posts and more. All you have to do is submit up to five nouns and it will spit out a myriad of topics and ideas. Sure, this idea generator may not be the perfect solution, but it’s a fun way to see how the same topic can be discussed in different ways.
If you’re a designer and looking to get your creative juices flowing, this is a fun app to try! Virink is available for Apple or Android and gives you fun prompts to draw. The goal of the app is clear, and it’s right up our alley: to develop imagination and fantasy, and improve drawing skills. Sure, some of the prompts may seem a bit irrelevant to your professional work, but sometimes that detour is just what you need to get a creative spark
Go outside or step away
OK, so this is a bit of a throwaway, but sometimes the best thing you can do is walk away! Going out into nature, stepping away from your desk and getting a new perspective can help you recharge and add some fresh ideas into your mind. Sometimes, just simply doodling in a journal can help you break away from the task at hand and refresh your mind.