In this episode of Hardcore SEO, Eric and Senior Marketing Consultant Kristina Ferrari-Barrett discuss the best ways to yield tons of great content marketing ideas during team brainstorms. Kristina breaks down her methods of Brain Libs and Speed Storming and how they can produce lots of great ideas in a short amount of time.
Full Transcript:
Eric: Hey everybody! Welcome to another episode of Hardcore SEO. I’m Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, and with me today is…
Kristina: Kristina Ferrarri-Barrett. I’m a Senior Marketing Consultant at Stone Temple Consulting.
Eric: Well thanks for joining me today, Kristina. Do you have a process that you use for brainstorming creative ideas when we’re looking to put together content marketing plans for people?
Kristina: I do. I have a couple ways of doing it. The first one is hard to kick start, it’s when you’re in the shower in the morning or when you’re just about to go to sleep and you get an idea, but at work you don’t always get that. So, I came up with this idea called Brain Libs, it’s like using Mad Libs. So the idea is to use random association. You get a couple of random words, like you would do in a Mad Libs with the sentence, and then you would get a challenge and create content around the words and the challenge you have. Do you want to get into a creative mood?
Eric: Sure! Let’s do it.
Kristina: So Eric, could you give me a noun and a place?
Eric: Orangutan and NeverLand. And now that I’ve given you that, let’s think of a tough challenge to go on top of it. I want you to give me some unique ideas for a wedding consultant.
Kristina: How about: How to make your wedding guests jump like orangutans?
Eric: Bing!
Kristina: Now that could be a silly idea, but that also could be very useful. It could have a great headline where the wedding consultant audience would say “How do I make my guests jump like orangutans?” And then she could go into how you’re going to make your wedding guests have a great time. And she could go through a list of ideas on how to do that.
Eric: What if you need to come up with a whole boatload of ideas?
Kristina: We have something we use at Stone Temple and it’s called Speed Storming, which is based off the 6-3-5 method. Basically, you get 6 people around a table and they come up with 3 ideas in 5 minutes. They write down their ideas on a piece of paper, once 5 minutes is up, you hand the paper to the person on your right or left and you keep repeating the process. Then the next person would read the ideas from the last person and build on those ideas. If you have “wedding guests jumping like an orangutan” the next idea could be built upon that. Then you would hand the paper over to the next person and then you would repeat the process until everyone has gone through and written down on idea on each of the 6 pieces of paper. This is a way where you come up with 108 ideas in a half hour.
Eric: Right. One of the great things about the idea is, even though a lot of the concepts won’t be that useful, you might end up with 20 that are useful. Which is a really good yield for a half hour, don’t you think?
Kristina: Absolutely.
Eric: That’s fantastic stuff. Thanks for sharing that today Kristina. That’s it for today’s thrilling episode of Hardcore SEO and I’ll look forward to seeing you next time.
