By Lucid Fusion

Did you know that February 3rd is National Carrot Cake Day? We’ll take that lone cricket song and tumbleweed rolling by to mean “No.” While it’s understandable that National Carrot Cake Day has managed to fly below your radar until now, we’re hoping that after today you’ll remember it as the quirky holiday that changed your content marketing for the better. Here’s why.

As any content marketer worth their salt knows, content marketing is not easy. That’s because creating fresh, timely content on a consistent basis takes a lot of planning, research, effort, and time. Add to that the logistical acrobatics of brainstorming themes and plotting out a calendar’s-worth of concepts in advance, and it’s no wonder that returning to the well of ideas and finding it dry is an all-too-common content marketing experience. Indeed,

60% of marketers list producing engaging content as their number one content marketing challenge

Which is why we love National Carrot Cake Day. The reason this day is worth noting (other than the fact that carrot cake is delicious) is that it represents just one of thousands upon thousands of unique daily, weekly, and month-long “holidays” that exist in the world—days that can help inspire your content creation efforts when industry news is slow or you just can’t bring yourself to write another straight “4 Characteristics of Authentic Leadership” piece—we’ve been there.

And that’s what makes National Carrot Cake Day (and its many weird holiday friends) so great. These seemingly irreverent events can provide a novel way to give all those well worn industry thought leadership themes a special, seasonal spin—and every day holds almost limitless potential!

Here are 3 ways to leverage your everyday to make your content better:

Celebrate your own awesomeness

Writers are always being told to write what they know. That’s because nobody can provide the specific nuance, insight, and perspective into an experience like the people who’ve actually experienced it. You can capture that same magic by celebrating personal/company goals, milestones, and achievements, and translating those events or themes into authentic, human content: run an interoffice poll and publish the results; write a thought leadership piece on what your business’ 5th anniversary has taught you.

Remember: customers don’t just want to buy from companies; they want to connect with the people and ideals behind the brands they support. Giving your customers a peek at what makes you tick, what you find worth celebrating, and how those events shape your view of work/life/culture can help set you apart from your competition AND showcase the relatable face of your business. And it’s worth it to make your company or brand more accessible in this way—82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content.

Embrace the seasons—all of them

We tend to associate seasons with major holidays, but there’s more to winter and summer than just Christmas and Independence Day. While major seasonal holidays are often top of mind and represent great ways to incorporate timely themes into your content, it’s the actual seasons themselves that are universal. Fall, for example, is more than just Halloween and Thanksgiving: daylight savings kicks in, the weather is getting cooler, and people’s mindsets about work and life are switching gears—those are all topics that can help frame content to make it more significant to a bigger audience.

And don’t forget all the seasonal events that aren’t recognized as national holidays but still capture the hearts and attentions of American audiences: the Super Bowl, Black Friday, spring break—these things generate a ton of interest when they occur, and can provide your content with a timely, social media-friendly boost.

Be inspired by the everyday

Every day is a holiday—literally. Whether (allegedly) created by the marketing genius of greeting card companies or established by governments, there’s something happening today somewhere in the world that can help provide compelling context to your current and future content marketing endeavors.

Even if the most relevant content for your industry travels along traditional themes, mining these culture-specific events can help to make those article topics we’ve seen a million of times (Leadership? Culture? Productivity? You know what we’re talking about) fresh, relatable, and engaging. Remember National Carrot Cake Day? Leveraging this funny holiday can spin your “3 Tips For More Effective Culture” article into something new and interesting like “3 Ways Awesome Culture Is Like A Carrot Cake.” We’d love to find out how culture is like a carrot cake—and there’s a good chance otherwise jaded readers will, too.

The big November-December holidays might be out of the way, but that doesn’t mean your content marketing needs to sit, sad and abandoned, like a curbside Christmas tree. With a great multitude of local, national, international, industry-specific, and organizational holidays and events at your disposal, there’s always something happening that you can draw inspiration from and use to make relevant, personal, and fun content. So when you’re running out of ideas and burned-out on research, pay close attention to what’s going on in the world today (National Carrot Cake Day!) and in the future—celebrating the everyday will help you drive your content marketing planning all year long.


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