How to workshop marketing ideas?

Do you give ideas the respect they deserve? Does your workplace do enough to encourage sessions where ideas flow freely?

Marketing is a creative endeavour which supports a strong business strategy, whether you are a business or not-for-profit. Marketing can and should help you achieve those objectives. Sometimes it is about internal communications or with stakeholders like a Board. They can be for both short-term and long-term goals.

You need a free space in the calendar with key staff to get things started. Often an external source can bring a fresh perspective. Encourage lateral thinking, thinking outside of the box and be inspired by past experiences of others, even if they are in unrelated fields.

How you treat ideas is critical, here is why…

You know ideas are a very powerful thing and they are often underestimated in the value they have within the organisation, and the time that you should put aside to deal with them.

But when you do have an idea session and it’s one of my favourite things to do with clients, it is really important that you get all those ideas recorded. And then you spend some time saying,”What is real? “What is possible?””What is good?” and what is bad?” It’s much like a newborn child. You have an opportunity to help them walk and talk. And you have the opportunity to teach them the good and the bad, and you have the opportunity to point them in the right direction so that they can have their own life and really go on to do some amazing things, not just for you but for themselves.

So really, put aside some ideas and have a purification process when you’re going through them. Let the ideas flow freely and them come back and re-examine them. No idea is a bad idea until you’ve taken it through a thorough process first.

The key to having a successful ideas workshop is to enable at atmosphere where nobody is going to be cut off because they have not considered all the implications first. The analogy with a newborn child is important, because you want to marvel at them first, appreciate them and let them grow. At the same time, they need guidance because we work within boundaries and you always need consider the variables.

I have been part of some bold initiatives in the past which started with an idea that many thought was crazy, or at least impossible to pull off. Where there is a will there’s a way. You just need to make sure if you can pull off a big idea, it is worthwhile because it is ticking some important criteria.

Don’t make the KPI for any idea impossible to achieve. Expectations always need to be reasonable.