Use These 3 Brainstorming Exercises to Fuel Your Next Social Media Campaign
Brainstorming, creating, and executing a social media campaign requires a lot of research, time, and effort from your marketing team. Experimenting with new social media channels and audiences has the added weight of uncertainty that the campaign won’t deliver the ROI needed to validate your marketing budget’s investment.
As marketers, we have to keep innovating and trying new things, so this can put us in a tough spot. With new technologies emerging from advancements of AI and personalization, now more than ever is the time to experiment with new social media channels and different strategies on current channels where brands have seen success.
We all start with the same question: Where do we start? Here are three simple, effective brainstorming strategies for your next social media experiment.
For the Content Marketer: The Target Table
Social media agency Vireo Media outlines a simple brainstorming strategy for campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, and more. The idea is to use the table to break down audiences, segment their wants, interests, etc., then develop content that would engage them from there. This is built for small businesses, but the idea can be used on an enterprise-scale for brainstorming purposes. Take a look at Vireo’s video for an example.
When Brainstorming in Groups: Brainwriting
Brainwriting is great for groups at larger companies. Instead of a team leader calling out an idea and team members commenting out loud, they are encouraged to write them down for later discussion. This still allows for team members to be stimulated by each other’s ideas, but it doesn’t sidetrack an individual’s initial idea, with the possibility of being not baking out their first thought.
A professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University stated that “brainwriting groups generated 20% more ideas and 42% more original ideas as compared to traditional brainstorming groups.” Mediapreneur and creativity speaker James Talyor breaks down the concept in more detail in the below video:
For the Dreamers: Wishing
Hubspot shares this brainstorming exercise as one that “[asks] participants to dream up the most unattainable, extreme, and impractical solutions they can think of to a given problem.” Once you come up with your wish-list, scale ideas down to something that your team (and budget) can realistically achieve today. Not only does this get your creative juices flowing, but it forces team members to think outside of the box — and not simply curating ideas everyone else is doing.
