Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Marketing Agencies – Are you looking to generate fresh creative content ideas for your next content marketing campaign? This short guide has what you need to know about the ‘Speedstorming’ technique to give you a head start for your next client project.
Many marketing and SEO agencies strive to deliver innovative content ideas that elevate their clients’ visibility and success.
Where do these creative ideas and concepts come from?
Internal brainstorming sessions are crucial for this, fostering idea generation to gain creative and unique perspectives in transforming a client’s content marketing campaign from good to great.
Enter the Speedstorming technique, a dynamic brainstorming activity that any SEO and Marketing Agency can implement to ignite creative content marketing planning whilst getting maximum involvement from your marketing team.
With some coffee at hand, it can also be a great team-building exercise, especially when all the members of your marketing team’s ideas contribute to a successful campaign, boosting their morale.
This short guide will explain the Speedstorming technique and how your marketing or SEO agency can apply this content idea activity to your marketing agency’s brainstorming efforts.
What is Speedstorming?
Speedstorming is a fast-paced creative content idea-generation technique for internal brainstorming with the purpose of stimulating creativity in a ’round-robin’ format.
This concept was developed by entrepreneur and consultant Peter Grazier to quickly generate ideas for problem-solving that empower employee involvement, empowerment, and team building.
Furthermore, Speedstorming can also be referred to as content marketing speed-dating, whether for marketing strategies, SEO keyword planning or social media content brainstorming.
Why is Speedstorming Becoming An Increasingly Popular Tool For Marketing Agencies?
In today’s fast-paced marketing environment, every marketer and agency seeks innovative content ideas to make their clients a viral success.
Notably, the Speedstorming method offers multiple advantages in agencies becoming more efficient in their planning and brainstorming processes – here’s why:
Speedstorming Gets Your Whole Marketing Team Involved
It’s reported that 50% of employees stay at a company because they feel part of a team.
In fact, the Speedstorming technique empowers everyone to be key contributors and can be an influential morale booster when their ideas are selected for future development.
Equally important is that this brainstorming method can be great for junior employees who are always seeking opportunities to shine amongst their peers.
Encouraging Better Participation Compared to The Traditional Whiteboard Method
Traditional brainstorming methods by marketing agencies using whiteboards can be plagued due to fear from participants with low confidence and a fear of embarrassing themselves in front of their colleagues, often leading to fewer ideas.
The Speedstorming technique removes this fear, allowing team members to feel like they can contribute more freely.
Speedstorming is Fun As Well
Remember those activities you used to do in the younger years of schooling where you passed around a sheet of paper where you would write a sentence and pass it to the next person to develop a fun, no-sense story?
Speedstorming brings back that sense of childhood playfulness, making brainstorming for new marketing content ideas enjoyable and engaging.
How to do Speedstorming
- Assemble Your Best Thinkers: First, gather your marketing team or people who know the targeted industry well (ideally 5 people). Schedule a meeting with them for roughly 20-30 minutes depending on the group size.
- Setting the Stage: Secondly, when your marketing or SEO content masterminds meet, provide them with a blank sheet of paper. During this brainstorming session, ensuring your team is aware not to share, discuss their content ideas, or peek at each other’s papers (until later) will be important.
- Turning Speedstorming into an Idea Firestorm: Thirdly, set a timer for 3-5 minutes, instructing your brainstorming team to come up with three content marketing ideas. Your participants should be encouraged to think creatively and with a wild imagination.
- Pass The Torch: At the end of the 3-5 minute timer, have your participants pass their paper to the person on their left.
- Repeat: Complete the last two steps five times, then collect the papers from each participant. Boom!
Visualisation by Martyn Snibson Communications using Canva
Summary
From this exercise, you should have 15 content ideas from each person, resulting in a whooping treasure trove of 75 ideas (with 5 participants).
Altogether, though there is a chance that a lot of the ideas for content marketing concepts aren’t useful, it should still mean that you have a wealth of potential decent ideas around which to build your marketing agency’s content.
The speedstorming brainstorming technique can be repeated multiple times for different clients, prompts or topics to develop heaps of ideas quickly.
Want to try out this brainstorming method for content ideas within your marketing agency?
Check out our article on ‘Lofi-Content’ so that you can use this brainstorming method to elevate your content marketing strategies!