Ideation guide for digital marketers: From theory to practice in 6 steps

Kristina Lazarevic

Annie Shortland

7th November 2023

What is ideation?

In its broadest sense, ideation is the act of forming ideas and thoughts. This means it’s something we all do every day. Where this definition differs from the ideations conducted by marketers is that we need to come up with ideas ‘on-demand’ to meet a creative challenge. 

Depending on your role and business, this can be anything from coming up with a new brand awareness campaign to ideas for a new product launch. But when confronted with this challenge, many marketeers can find themselves asking: where do I start? 

In this guide, we outline six practical steps to help you come up with ideas you can get excited about, with full confidence in their ability to succeed.

  1. How to prepare for ideation
  2. The creative brief
  3. How to conduct a successful ideation
  4. Five ideation techniques to try
  5. Choosing the best ideas with validation 
  6. Idea execution: a collaborative success

We’ve written this guide with content and digital PR marketers in mind, but the process and techniques we explore are equally relevant to anyone who is looking to shape targeted ideas.

1. How to prepare for an ideation 

For marketers, great ideas don’t always just happen. 

Quite often, there’s a need to generate ideas on the spot, which can be challenging if you don’t have processes and frameworks in place to encourage creative thinking or to stress-test the ideas you want to try. 

Before you get to the point of creative idea generation, you need to: 

Have a clear objective

Do you want to understand your target audience better? Would you like to be seen as a thought leader? Maybe you’ve just launched a new product that you would like to build awareness for? 

All these scenarios pose unique creative challenges, so it’s important every ideation is rooted in what you are aiming to achieve. This will allow you to come up with ideas that actually meet KPIs and deliver the desired results. 

Questions like these can help you get started:

Get in a room (physical or virtual) to discuss this with others involved in the project to align all parties. Once clear objectives are set, you can move to explore the wider context surrounding your creative challenge. 

Below are examples of objectives you might be looking to achieve with your creative idea and their respective KPIs. 

Understand the wider context 

From researching your key audience and looking at what competitors have previously done to what type of content is trending in your target sectors, this step is all about discovery. 

We call it, defining your campaign strategy.

This step will narrow down core themes, or seasonal peaks and formats that resonate with your audiences. Your research will bring to attention ideas that already exist and avoid your team potentially wasting time to only spot this later down the line. 

At Builtvisible, we conduct a campaign strategy project before any ideation and the main insights that help our ideation sessions include:

Techniques and other ways of gathering initial research to form your ideas are discussed in our piece explaining how to develop a campaign strategy using audience and media insights. 

Spending time ahead of ideation to understand the wider landscape and context of your creative challenge will stop you from:

Thinking about these points is central to the strategic thinking behind solving a creative challenge and therefore form the basis of any successful idea. Starting here not only ensures your ideas are innovative, but that they are relevant and will work. 

So, now you have clear objectives and an understanding of the context – what comes next? 

2. The creative brief

Your brief should facilitate creativity not prohibit it.

Having a solid brief in place allows for a focused ideation with an informed team to keep ideas relevant and on track. Whether you’re a product developer, a digital marketer, an engineer or a politician, the ideas you come up with will never exist in a vacuum. 

What is a creative brief? 

The creative brief is a pre-ideation document sent to all attendees to help them get up to speed and prepare for the ideation session. It should outline the key objectives set out in step one and summarise any relevant wider context research that took place. 

Why is a creative brief important? 

The main goal of the brief is to provide information to attendees so that everyone can be on the same page and come prepared.

Creative briefs are important because they ensure the time in the ideation session is spent on idea generation that will lead to actionable concepts rather than further conversation about the goals, target audience and KPIs. 

What does a good creative brief look like? 

A good creative brief should be concise and straight to the point. The emphasis here is on including only necessary information, as you don’t want to overwhelm attendees which could restrict creative flow. 

To help with your creative brief creation, we’re created a downloadable creative brief template for you to use. 

How long does it take to create the brief?

If you’re following our process, you already have all the info from section one of this guide. So, the creation of the actual briefing document shouldn’t take too long. 

It’s worth noting that the first time you prepare for an ideation session, it may take longer as you arm yourself with research and data. 

When do I send the creative brief to ideation attendees? 

Sharing your initial research with your team is only useful if you give them time to digest it and prep. This is why sending your brief at least a couple of days before your ideation is crucial.

You don’t want to spend time during the ideation session deep diving into background research as this can easily eat up your time and start additional discussion, and ultimately harm the creative space you are trying to create. 

3. How to conduct a successful ideation

The word ideation can create immediate panic, with the thought of forced creativity. But if you’ve followed our process until now, you have everything you need to ensure a successful ideation.

To successfully engage and motivate someone during the ideation session, you need to find ways to appeal to their logic or emotions in a meaningful way. It requires an understanding of the person or group’s needs, values and interests. 

This way you will ensure that attendees bring their most authentic self.  

How long should an ideation session last?

This will depend on your task at hand. An hour is pretty standard for most ideations and you’d be surprised how much can be tackled in an hour especially if your team has pre-prepared ideas. 

For larger scale creative challenges where more than 6 people are involved, it’s worth setting aside a couple of hours or even spreading the ideation across a couple of sessions. 

When is the best time to hold an ideation?

Getting the timing right for your ideation session is key for creative flow. 

While some attendees will love engaging in a session, others may find it exhausting and forcing on-cue creativity can get tricky when your team starts to get tired. In our experience, the best time to have an ideation session is in-person, late morning as they tend to work better. Trying to ideate at 3pm on a Friday is pointless when people are mentally checking out for the weekend. 

Where should an ideation take place?

While it isn’t always possible, in-person sessions are often much better for creativity than virtual calls. It’s harder to motivate people through a screen and to keep the natural conversation going. So if you can, book out a meeting room or head to a quiet space and get thinking. 

Making sure your team is comfortable and free from distractions will help inspire them. We recommend putting laptops and phones away to avoid distractions. Snacks are also handy to avoid any hangry mental blocks.

Who should you invite to your ideation?

It’s crucial to get the right heads together for your ideas to be on the money. 

Great, robust ideas are formed through bringing a diverse group of people with different views and perspectives together. You should aim to invite three to seven people (depending on your team’s size). Ideations should involve at least person from these three groups:

  1. A brand advocate: someone whose job it is to know the brand inside out.
  2. An audience friend: marketers and content creators will have an in-depth understanding of your audience and should help keep ideas on track with them in mind.
  3. A fresh perspective: someone not working directly on the project but still able to offer good ideas. They will act as your common sense as they’re removed from the project to ensure it makes sense to the outside world.

What do I need to bring to an ideation session?

If you’re the person running the session then you should prep top-line insights from your wider context research and a reminder of KPIs to kick off the creative thinking and get people focused is always handy. Reiterate that attendees are in a safe space where no idea is a bad idea.

As an attendee of a brainstorm, come with any ideas you’ve sparked from the brief, your laptop in case you need to refer to campaigns or data sets you’ve discovered (but turn your notifications off!) and a good mood. It’s always easier to get creative when you’re having fun.

4. Five ideation techniques to try

Before you bring your teams together and start bouncing ideas around, it’s important to understand one key fact that speaks to the nature of ideas: there is no such thing as originality.

All ideas exist in relation to other ideas. Adapting, blending, reinterpreting, repurposing, developing and generally borrowing from other ideas is part and parcel of having ideas.

Do not aim for originality. Aim for freshness. If you need reassurance from a world-renowned creative guru take a look at Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist where he explains how giving your own personal touch is the greatest thing to bring to your creative process.

On a practical level, there are lots of different ways you can work on discovering fresh ideas. 

At Builtvisible, idea generation and development is undertaken according to what’s known as the hybrid group structure. This sees individuals work independently on ideas first and then in a group. This is why sending the creative brief ahead of the ideation helps those joining the ideation come prepared with thought starters and relevant ideas for the creative challenge. Academic research has shown this structure to produce a greater volume and a higher quality of ideas than the team group structure, in which a group works together in the same space and time from the start.

Whether you opt for the former or the latter group structure, it’s important you tackle idea generation as a group at some stage in the process, rather than in complete isolation. 

This is where ideation techniques come in handy because they hold the key to structuring the creative flow which will help lead to more formed ideas or provide a way to expand and narrow down ideas until you get to a viable creative solution. 

In the next section, we explore our five favourite ideation techniques suitable for different groups of attendees and types of ideation to help get the creativity flowing . 

5 ideation techniques to inspire creative thinking 

The Mash-Up

This ideation technique involves coming up with creative solutions by combining existing ideas and products which successfully address some of the key human needs. 

This technique can produce some novel results but is a helpful way of getting your team out of a creative rut.

Brainwriting or 6-3-5

This ideation technique is great for producing more developed ideas and works well for remote ideations. 

Once each step is done, the ideas are ready for discussion.

One advantage of Brainwriting is that it makes sure everybody is given the opportunity to have their thoughts and ideas thoroughly considered by the group. This avoids the loudest people unintentionally dominating the sessions.

Questioning assumptions

We all carry assumptions with us – assumptions about what is and isn’t possible, about what people want, about what will work. This ideation technique forces us to challenge these and put everything on the table. 

Wishing

Let imaginations run wild with this technique, which asks participants to dream up the most unattainable, extreme and impractical solutions they can think of. 

This technique is a great way to start any ideation because it encourages aspirational thinking and gets everyone excited about the potential of the ideation session ahead.

Identity theft

This is a fun exercise where small groups imagine how they would go about solving a given problem if their team were led by a famous character or brand, fictional or real. 

You can either choose someone you think embodies the right qualities for the job to help develop your vision, or someone at the opposite end of that scale, to explore less conventional ideas.

5. Choosing the best ideas with validation

The above tools and techniques will help you build a collection of ideas, some more useful than others. All of your ideas should have been guided by your creative brief, and consequently fit within the overarching strategy. Park any ideas that don’t.

You should still have more ideas than you can action, and likely ones of varying quality.

Selecting the right ideas depends on whether you have a clear set of criteria to assess each one against. To do this you need to refer back to what you know about your audience, and what you want to achieve with a creative idea.

What makes an idea great? The Sweet Spot

During an ideation session what normally happens is an explosion of ideas and different concepts, some of which will be closer to what you are after than others. This helps you take into account a variety of insights when choosing the final creative idea. 

But how do you know you have a good idea in this sea of idea explosion? There are three elements that should help you identify ideas that sit in ‘the sweet spot’ in the first instance are: 

  1. Your brand expertise – to keep it relevant to your product offering 
  2. Your audience needs – to help solve a problem for your audience 
  3. Trending media and news topics – to ensure journalists will want to cover it 

Just because an idea doesn’t have all three doesn’t mean it won’t work. However, it might mean that the idea is more suited to a particular type of creative challenge. For example, if an idea is relevant to your brand’s expertise and what journalists are writing about it’s the perfect opportunity for a reactive campaign. 

If ideas are relevant to your brand and tap into what your audience needs, they’ll make great content for social media. 

However, when an idea isn’t relevant to your brand you are removing that layer of relevancy that keeps you in the centre of the conversation – ideas that fall under this section should be parked. 

How to validate creative ideas? Validation matrix 

We’ve developed a validation matrix that uses a set of relevant questions to ask in regard to a fully-formed creative idea to stress-test it against the common factors that make a campaign successful.

The list of questions can be amended to incorporate your unique KPIs. For example, if your KPIs are social media related, then add a question around whether the idea has a shareable hook. 

To use the following validation matrix, organise a follow-up session (usually an hour is enough) and run your team through 5-6 ideas that you feel are the strongest. Once you’ve presented each idea, ask these 10 questions and if the response to the question is YES, give that idea one point for every YES. 

The idea with the highest score should be the one that is the closest delivering on results you’ve set to achieve. 

Don’t worry if you can’t tick every box, as long as your ‘yesses’ outnumber the ‘no’s, then you’ll know that you’ve done what you can to give the idea its best chance.

6. Idea execution: a collaborative success

The process of gathering and selecting the final idea(s) is completed and you have a creative idea that you can’t wait to see come to life.

Getting campaign execution right is crucial if you’re going to achieve the goals you set out to achieve. In this section, we’ve shared our best practices for campaign execution to ensure you can get your campaign up and running as effectively and as smoothly as possible. 

Each creative campaign varies in complexity but it is very likely that it will require: 

As it is likely different people will be involved at different stages of campaign development, depending on your expertise, these are our three tips that keep our campaigns on track. 

1. Timelines and campaign leads

At Builtvisible, we ensure each stage is planned in a campaign calendar showcasing when one production element ends and another begins. This means the whole campaign team is aware of when they can expect to kick off with their element. 

It’s important that each campaign has a designated lead who will keep on top of updates and timelines so that certain stages don’t take longer than they should do. 

2. Tone of voice & brand guidelines 

When working with copywriters and designers, it is essential to provide them with detailed documents that can ensure the work they do is on-brand. 

In most cases, your brand tone of voice document will help copywriters align with your usual writing style, while designers will lean on your design guidelines to create branded assets. 

3. Measuring success and reporting

Every campaign has its KPIs but often reporting can come as an afterthought. 

To change this, we like to discuss reporting and how we’ll measure success at the very beginning of the campaign so that we know the metrics that matter the most, how to track them and the key indicators of campaign success. 

Tackling this conversation early on (you’ll have most of it from your ideation brief!) will help guide everyone working on the campaign towards the same goal.

Our final thoughts 

As you can see, a lot of thought goes into an effective ideation process, but it’s also one of the most fulfilling aspects of being a marketer. 

Seeing an idea you planted the seed for come to fruition and get audiences talking reminds us why we do what we do. 

Having processes and frameworks like the 6-steps we’ve outlined above eases pressure by offering a structured approach to creativity. It’s important to adapt the processes to your business and the people you work with because everyone is different. 

We hope this guide can serve as a springboard for your ideations, but if you have questions, feel free to get in touch. We also offer creative workshops where we can come and help you generate ideas that will drive the results that matter to your brand! 

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