Are you experiencing a creative drought? Or are you bursting with creative ideas for your digital marketing campaigns, but stumped about ways to validate these ideas? Here are five  simple ways you can come up with more creative digital marketing campaigns to achieve your business goals today, no matter where you are in the campaign planning process.

1. Spend More Time On Listening

Listening to your friends comes naturally. You want to hear what they have to say, and it’s easy: They’re sitting across the table from you at brunch, or you’re texting up a storm, back and forth. Because you are involved in this seamless exchange of information, and listening intently, you know as much about many of your friends as you do about yourself. The same is not true of your relationship with your social audience.

With our social audiences, we tend to push out information (owned content) and measure the effect of that content. Sometimes we forget to begin by listening to our audiences and building content around what they actually care about. We end up pushing out content that just isn’t quite right. It’s like your friend telling you about a Golden Retriever puppy she wants to adopt and asking for your advice, and you responding by listing out your favourite qualities of Labradoodles—tangentially related, but not quite right. We marketers fall into this trap an awful lot. Here’s how you can begin to shift your thinking.

2. Build Your Empathy

Building empathy happens when you pay attention and listen deeply. This tends to come naturally in friendships: If your friend is hurting, you’re hurting. You wouldn’t scroll through your Instagram feed while your friend shared the painful news of his divorce, would you? The same concept can be applied to your relationship with your customers and/or social audience. Don’t busy yourself so much with your owned content (what your brand has to say) that you miss out on what your audience is saying and feeling on social, forums, and blogs.

By building a solid foundation of empathy for your audience’s wants and needs—and how those wants and needs evolve throughout the customer journey—you’re also building better content, responses, and, ultimately, sentiment around your brand.

3.Know the History OF YOUR WORKS

One reason you’re able to understand your closest friends so easily is that you have a shared history. You’ve heard the story about Johnny chipping his tooth on a parmesan rind back in college a million times. You were there when Linda got to party with Snoop Dogg on her bachelorette trip. The same level of historical knowledge is important when it comes to your customers.

When has your brand experienced the greatest spikes in reach, engagement, and volume? Which tactics and channels have historically worked for you (or your competition), and which have been misses? This is another common mistake for marketers: We commit to a campaign, regard it as a success or failure, and then move on too quickly to learn and document valuable lessons that can help us do better in the future. Don’t fall into this trap! Continue adding to your (separate) lists of customer knowledge and self-knowledge regularly as time passes and the data keeps rolling in.

5.Share a Common Language

You and your best friend have an endless assortment of inside jokes and maybe even made-up words and phrases that only you two understand. It’s kind of annoying, TBH. But shared experience means shared language. The same is true for listening to your customers on social.

If you understand the slang and solutions that your audience throws at one another without you hovering in the room, you’ll eventually be able to learn their language and use it to better reach them.