Companies must continually make decisions, solve incidents or seek alternatives to certain problems and procedures and improve their processes. To tackle these types of situations and avoid choosing the most common solutions, which in the end take you to the same starting point, it is interesting to use creative techniques such as Brainstorming to generate innovative and effective solutions. Over the years, brainstorming sessions have proven to be successful for marketing teams in different situations. Complex decisions and new ideas come together in brainstorming sessions and here we will explain why they are useful for marketing and other industries.
What is Brainstorming and how can it be applied to digital marketing?
Brainstorming is a creative technique based on the interaction between the members of a group to create new ideas on a specific topic.
According to this technique, the interaction between the different members of the group enhances creativity and ideas are generated that, working individually, would not be achieved. In this way, thanks to group work, the ideas of the users are fed back with those of the other members of the group.
What is brainstorming for?
Brainstorming is primarily used to:
Generate a lot of ideas. An example would be when you want to start a business and you don't know what to build
Improve the creativity of work teams. As for example when they ask you to create a logo for a client.
Find new opportunities to solve problems or improve a company process.
The use of Brainstorming helps solve problems, generate innovative solutions and overcome conformism in a certain job or situation. Sometimes it can also help to find ideal business opportunities to implement in a company. For marketing purposes, brainstorming is essential in different processes that a company goes through, for example, the development of a new product / service, the design of a new branding book, the content that will be shared on social media, and much more. Brainstorming sessions are carried out constantly in a marketing department to share ideas and thoughts with all the people involved.
Brainstorming session step by step
Phase 1. Preparation of the brainstorming
Before carrying out a brainstorming session, it is necessary to know several fundamental aspects about brainstorming, such as the basic rules, figures that intervene in the session, the space in which it is carried out and, finally, common mistakes to avoid at all costs.
Phase 2. Development of the Brainstorming session
Once all the elements for the brainstorming have been prepared, it is time to start the session. Brainstorming is made up of four stages: Warm-up, Generation of ideas, Improvement of ideas and, finally, Evaluation.
Phase 3. Analysis and choice
With this last step, the ideas are analyzed and the most appropriate / interesting one is chosen to solve the problem raised at the beginning of the session and, therefore, the Brainstorming session is ended.
Tips to make a brainstorming session more effective
Encourage the proposal of bad ideas
For a brainstorming to be truly effective, all its members must feel comfortable and not be ashamed to share their ideas, regardless of whether they are good or bad. This is especially important when some of the participants are shy or may have an impression to speak in public.
A very good idea to end these negative feelings is to spend a few minutes of the session encouraging the participants to come up with absurd ideas. This relaxes the atmosphere and they lose possible embarrassment. If the participants are not receptive, the moderator should start spouting their bad ideas. Once the goal of relaxing the participating team has been achieved, it is time to refocus the brainstorming on actionable and useful ideas.
Organize games to encourage improvisation
For creativity to flow, it is necessary to create a good environment / climate. Therefore, many brainstorming begins with improv games that help foster a good atmosphere and relaxation.
Create inspiration boards
Inspiration boards, also known as moodboards, are one of the most commonly used brainstorming ways for ideas, emotions, and feelings to flow. Moodboards are very useful when you want to discuss new branding and design concepts.
For this, in these moodboards, multiple images are used, colors and other visual elements are combined that are directly or indirectly related to the theme or problem to be solved.
The moodboards that you use in your brainstorming can be on a cork, blackboard or virtual like the example you have just above. Also, you can use other tools such as moodboard maker apps to help you organize and share your own inspiration dashboard.
Change places
Brainstorming in a different space can affect the functioning of the brain, in such a way that if you change towards a motivating environment, more and better ideas are generated.
Creativity, innovation and differentiation are elements today that every company looks for and needs. Brainstorming can be very useful to achieve something really different and that surprises your clients and users. Of course, it is a technique that, although it does not seem complex, has many factors that shape it and influence its result. Therefore, you must pay attention to each of them or otherwise, the results you get will not be what you expect. If in the end you decide to do a Brainstorming session, we hope that this content will help you improve the results and prepare everything to perfection. Let us know if you would like a meeting to discuss a marketing strategy for your business.
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