Brainstorming sessions with your marketing team are crucial for developing new ideas and agreeing on courses of action.
To ensure your next meeting runs productively, consider the following best practices.
Get the Ball Rolling Before the Meeting
If your team goes into a brainstorming meeting without knowing what it is concerning, it will take a lot longer for ideas to start flowing.
Therefore, you should set out clear objectives and goals before the session. You should also set boundaries like budgetary constraints.
Invite your marketing team to arrive with a few rough ideas. For a truly productive meeting, it is a good idea to ask each team member to arrive with around three loose ideas.
You should also set an agenda for the brainstorming meeting ahead of time to ensure there is a workable structure in place and you do not go over the allotted time frame. The last thing you want is for your session to become a free-for-all.
When you prepare the meeting and your team beforehand, you can better steer your team in the right direction, avoid wasted time, and get down to the nitty-gritty.
Come Up with an Effective System to Separate Good Ideas from Bad Ideas
You need a system in place to separate feasible and good ideas from unfeasible and poor ideas.
Whether you are using a whiteboard, paper, or a digital document to record the ideas your marketing team comes up with, you need to be able to easily identify good ideas, bad ideas, and possible ideas.
When working with paper or a whiteboard, using stickers is a simple and fun way of coding different ideas. Instead of plain stickers, consider using glitter stickers or holographic die-cut stickers from StickerYou.
When you add some fun to idea classification, your team can become more animated and more inspired.
Have a Designated Facilitator and Notetaker
Even with systems in place to structure the meeting and classify ideas, it can be difficult to ensure things run smoothly if you do not have someone in charge of facilitating the session.
So, designate a facilitator who can help ensure the meeting stays on track and moves things on after allocated time frames for each part of the brainstorming process.
You should also designate someone to take notes. Yes, each member of the marketing team is sure to be keeping their own notes, but you need someone to note down everything that is being explored.
As marketing ideas evolve later down the line and you hold more meetings, it can be invaluable to have access to everything that was previously discussed.
Use the Brainwriting Method to Create More Fully-formed Ideas
There are lots of different ways of brainstorming, such as using flowcharts or fishbone diagrams, but one of the most effective brainstorming techniques is the brainwriting method.
It works like this. One member of your marketing team writes down an idea and then passes it on to another person. The next person develops the original idea, introducing his or her own ideas and solutions.
When each member of the team does this, you reduce egotism among the group and come up with much more thought-through ideas.
Once the brainwriting process has been completed, the group can discuss and consider ideas that are almost fully formed. They can then be prioritized and fleshed out further.
Face Ideas Off of One Another
After your team has come up with ideas, and good and bad ideas have been separated, you and your team need to whittle down the ideas further.
Face ideas off of one another until you are left with a selection that the whole marketing team agrees upon.
Everyone should be behind the ideas that are agreed to ensure your team comes up with a productive, passionate, and successful campaign.
