Ideas are the lifeblood of any content marketing campaign. Without new ideas, campaigns—no matter what their aims—will quickly become stagnant.
But creating ideas can be hard.
No doubt you and your team are full of creativity, but producing actionable ideas that can achieve your objectives is the hard part. In this article, we'll examine how to keep your brand ahead by consistently delivering winning ideas over the long term. The three main stages of that process are...
- Idea generation
- Idea evaluation
- Campaign creation
1. Idea Generation
Many organizations think themselves great at idea generation, but they often seem to fall short. A combination of process and people is what makes it possible to continually generate good ideas.
On the people side, a mixture of creative and logical minds is needed to get the best chance of success. Don't be afraid to exclude people who aren't contributing, and include those from other areas of the business who think in different ways. Different perspectives are massively important at this stage.
The creative talent should be firing lots of ideas around and going off on tangents with their creativity. A lot of good ideas come from such brainstorming, but it's also when a lot of time can be wasted with ideas that aren't relevant to the brand. The logical side often ends up holding things together and establishing some boundaries in the form of aims and goals that are to be achieved.
Process also plays a key role at this stage. Before any brainstorm, ensure that you have undergone a preparatory process that includes unearthing data, gathering audience insight, and getting attendees to think about their own ideas in preparation for the main creative meeting.
That preparatory work allows the meeting to be more structured, to be based on data about the audience you're trying to engage, and to get off to a fast start with already considered ideas. (Find out more about this process by downloading Datify's free e-book on data and content marketing strategy.)
How you brainstorm is up to you as an organization. We at Datify have found that getting the relevant people in a room for at least half an hour is the best way to come up with some ideas quickly. We then go away to evaluate.
If you find during idea evaluation that more ideas are needed, hold another idea-generation session.
2. Idea Evaluation
In a creative meeting, the first rule is to not belittle anybody or their ideas; otherwise, that great idea that someone may have next time might not be shared.
The second rule is that the opinion of the highest paid person in the room shouldn't be the deciding factor. Just because your boss or your client really likes one of the ideas doesn't mean that idea should be the frontrunner; the audience insight data, for instance, might suggest that a less-preferred idea would work better for the audience in question.