Post-its at the ready – this week on UniquiTV we share our favourite method for creating new blog and content ideas:

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I am Laura Janes. Welcome to UniquiTv. Every week we answer your questions on Financial Services Brands & Marketing. And this week we have a question from Marlene Outrim, “How can I come up with more ideas for our blogs and social media content?”.

Well, I have got a really lovely exercise for this. You are going to need some pens, my favorite are sharpies because they show up pretty well. You are going to need some post-it notes, some stickers and you are also going to need your team. This is a fantastic Monday morning meeting team exercise,  it’s called “Five and Five” to generate new and interesting ideas.

In one of our previous episodes, we did talk about customer personas, getting in the mindset of your customers. If you have customer personas, or for example, here I have a mood board for a specific customer or something similar to that, some pictures or something just to inspire your team and get them in a great mindset, it already helps.

So “Five and Five”,  sit your team down, everyone has got pens, everyone has got post-it notes. You have five minutes to come up with five ideas on a specific thing.

For example, this is for a website, an online advice website, specifically aimed at women. If I wanted to come up with blog ideas for this specific group of women, I’d literally ask my team to come up with five ideas in five minutes.

You would then time five minutes for five ideas. Every team member comes up with five ideas,  therefore if you have five people in the room, in five minutes you have already got twenty-five ideas, which is fantastic!

I would then take those twenty-five ideas and get your team to vote, on which they think are the best, that’s what the stickers are for.  From there you may have three or four ideas that you voted for as your favorite.

You would need to build it out again, following the same exercise as before for building out those ideas. If you have four main ideas, create five ideas in five minutes for each of those. If you do another five on those four, you have created another twenty-five on each of them, creating one hundred ideas in twenty minutes which you can then use and translate into content.

And it totally doesn’t matter if some of those ideas don’t work because you are prioritising them with your stickers, and even if it’s not a great idea, you might find that turning it slightly on its head or having a conversation around it, might lead to more and better ideas, this exercise “Five and Five” can be used for literally anything. I absolutely love it, I use it in all my workshops. It is a fantastic tool for generating ideas and I really recommend that you give it a try.

Thanks for joining us this week. If you have a question, you can tweet us on @uniquity_co and I look forward to seeing you then.