How To Pivot Gracefully as a Creative

As a creative, you have probably been in a situation where you felt worn out or simply just craved something new. I know I have, multiple times! When I first created this blog, it was all about motivation and self-care. Then I moved to the US and slowly introduced traveling content. Then the pandemic broke out and I just felt… stuck!

I loved my existing content, loved the community I have built but for some reason, I just couldn’t move forward. Trust me, I wanted to continue with the wellness and travel content but the pandemic put a hold on the travel and that ultimately affected my mental wellness, which meant I just wasn’t inspired to create wellness content either. On top of that, I wanted to shift a little and niche down.

Yikes!

Now, you have probably experienced something similar – you have been creating specific content throughout your social media accounts, blog and Youtube and just started feeling stuck and/or gained interest in another niche and struggled to figure out how to introduce it to your audience.

That’s okay! Really, the first step would be acknowledging that you are in a rut so that you can learn how to get out of it.

So let’s talk about pivoting…

What is Pivoting?

Simply put, pivoting is when a business or a personal brand (that would be you – a creative) changes some parts of their content, products or services. As a creative, this could be introducing different content – like going from being a beauty content creator to creating content about fashion. It could also be niching down – from creating general food and recipe content to strictly keto recipes.

Tough, right?

Well, that’s why you are here – to figure out how to do this gracefully. Without disrupting the progress you have made in building a supporting community and without confusing the algorithm too much.

Why you should consider pivoting and when to do it?

First off, you have to understand and accept that people’s interests change overtime. This is due to the fast paced world we live in; there are new trends popping up almost every week. Not only that, each industry is getting more and more saturated, making it hard to keep up and stay relevant.

For these reasons, you need to be open to shifting your content to suit the needs of your audience and whatever the algorithm favors. So when you start to feel like the content you create isn’t satisfying you as much as it used to and you haven’t been receiving a consistent amount of new audiences, that’s when you know you just have to pivot.

Related | How to Build Yourself Up On Social Media

How to ensure a seamless pivot:

1 | Don’t lose yourself

Make sure that your shift is for you more than it is for your audience. What I mean by this is, don’t just jump on whatever is trending or what people want to see. Think about what you want to show them and make sure you are providing value. Ingrain this in your mind – you cannot please everyone, it’s literally impossible so don’t try it.

2 | Stay present

Trust me, when a pivot is due, your mind and body will tell you and that’s when you will be tempted to go MIA on social media for a while to figure things out. Cue in Bryson Tiller… Don’t! Stay there, you don’t necessarily have to post on your feed, blog or vlog during this period. Just be there though, post on your stories regularly and by regularly I mean like almost everyday. Socialize, engage with your audience as usual, maybe throw little hints that you are in a process of changing some aspects of your content.

3 | Listen to your existing audience

Speaking of throwing hints, give your audience a heads up about what’s about to happen and even ask for their advice. You can do this by collecting data from surveys. Let’s say you want to introduce keto meals to your brand – through IG stories use the Question sticker or the Poll sticker to let people voice out their opinions and vote on what they would like to see from the options you give them.

You can ask them if they have heard of the Keto diet before, whether they are interested in learning more, explain why you want to shift to that, ask them how often they would like to see the content. All of that will help you set new goals and gracefully change your content because they are already expecting it.

4 | Work with what you already have

When pivoting, it’s important to ensure that you don’t drift far off from what you were already producing. If your blog, for instance, was all about fashion and now you want to switch to being a book blogger (posting reviews and recommendations), it’s best to just create a whole new blog instead of rebranding the one you already have.

Pivoting is not as drastic! It’s just minor changes in some content that you are known for, not a complete jump from one industry to another.

5 | Create a content plan

Once all is said and done, all you need now is a content plan. These are questions you should be asking yourself:

• Why am I shifting to this particular content?

• Run a market research – see what others in this field are doing to get inspired

• What am I going to post about from now on? More videos? Less written content?

• How am I going to ease into it?

• How often are am I posting? Create a content calendar for this

Go get them tiger!

One thing you will experience during this process is doubts. It’s normal to not believe in your ability to pull this off, it’s part of the process so that means you are making progress already! Allow people to fall off too if they are not into the new features, this will give way to the right people you are trying to attract and help.

Being a creative is definitely hard and you are just constantly expected to be able to pull yourself up from a creative rut but it’s not that easy. Frequently step back and evaluate what you are doing and where you are headed. Allow yourself to have days, weeks and months of no motivation. Learn to adapt to new changes that are completely out of your control and don’t lose track of what gives you joy!