It’s Raining, It’s Pouring: 6 Tips for More Effective Content Marketing Brainstorming

Coming up with a continuous stream of high-quality material is critical to your content marketing success. But, the longer you are using inbound marketing, the more likely it is you’ll run into periods where your brainstorming sessions don’t produce a downpour of new ideas but a light drizzle at best. Fear not and grab your umbrella! We’ve got a number of time-tested tips for ensuring your sessions are productive.

Strategies for More Fruitful Ideation

Before your next brainstorming session, take a look at this list of strategies for getting more out of your gatherings. Making just a few small changes to how you conduct these meetings can produce big results. 

1. Create a little time pressure. Brainstorming meetings, and meetings in general, tend to start and end on the hour or half hour. Ending a meeting slightly before those marks sends a subtle message that you need to make your minutes count. If your ideation meeting is generally 30 minutes long, try scheduling it for 20 or 25 minutes. That little hit of adrenaline people feel as they see time ticking away can be very helpful in producing creative ideas.
2. Engage the percolation process. We’re all familiar with having an “aha moment” in the shower, on a run, or wherever. It happens because our subconscious is working on a problem even when our conscious mind isn’t. If you share background information and goals with attendees well before the meeting (rather than as they walk in the door), you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the uptick in great suggestions.
3. Create an environment where all ideas are welcome. State at the start of every brainstorming meeting that the group is eager to hear any and all ideas. However, also stress that you are hoping to consider many suggestions, and that you’ll need to keep the meeting moving. Let attendees know that it’s not a “failure” in any way if an idea is jettisoned rapidly. (See below.)
4. Kill bad ideas quickly. We often let an idea that clearly has no merit hang around out of respect for the person who suggested it. Doing so takes time and energy away from the pursuit of viable ideas. Yes, give every suggestion a fair shake. But as soon as it’s clear that it’s not what you need, move on.
5. Let silence linger. A lull in conversation often makes people uncomfortable and causes them to blurt something out just to break the silence. Encourage attendees to accept pauses as part of the process. That sound you don’t hear is creative minds hard at work!
6. Create diversity. If all your attendees are from the marketing department, or the software development team, or any functional unit, you’ll only get ideas that are biased by that perspective. Ensure that you are able to think outside the box by looking outside the box when you make your attendee list.

Let’s Make it Rain

 We don’t get much rain at our headquarters in Colorado Springs, but we’ve been making it rain for our clients for more than two decades. And the result has been more qualified leads, increased sales, and larger market share. We can help you with everything from content ideation to marketing automation implementation. Contact us at our headquarters, or at our Springfield, MO, or Olympia, WA locations, and let’s talk about your content marketing goals.