Tips in 10: Idea Generation

Heart Internet’s Tips in Ten

Idea GenerationYou’re just ten slides away from brainstorming

better ideas quickly and easily.

Timing is everything

• Time management doesn’t improve efficiency; focus management does.

• If you’re not interested, you won’t succeed.

• Forcing ideas doesn’t work: you need a starting point to avoid wasting time.

• Give yourself enough time for what you want to do, or it will show.

Online sources of ideas

• Has to be something you’re genuinely interested in to produce a good result.

• Incorporate with social media (searches, trending topics, popularity) so ideas are brought to you.

• Play with existing content in experimental ways, e.g. reduce a blog post to a single tweet, turn a video into an infographic, and so on to get a feel of how ideas can branch out or be simplified.

Offline sources of ideas

• Get off the web – books, films, magazines.

• Get out of a rut – take some photos, go to an art gallery, visit somewhere new.

• Get out of your comfort zone – find out more about a topic you’re not familiar with (e.g. typography, hardware).

• Get into other industries, particularly creative ones.

Brainstorming ideas

• Have clear aims and objectives.

• Start with the intended audience rather than the topic (psychographic profiling).

• Create a list of broad topics, segments and hooks to break down further.

• Keep a list of great headlines/post titles for inspiration & reworking.

Brainstorming through visuals• Pick an image representing a strong

emotion/theme.

• Use mind drifts, associations, or pair up with a practical concept/specific audience.

• Note ideas/pairings that you don’t use this time.

• Can be adapted for pop culture.

Ideas through problem-solving• Find a good, representative source of your target

audience.

• Identify their problems and use them to spark ideas.

• Perfect for helping your visitors identify with you and creating search engine friendly content based around questions/topics they’re interested in.

Child ideas

• Once you have one good idea, adapt it:

Make a series/follow-up

Change the segment

Change the hook

Change the experience level

Change the platform

Change the medium

Analysing good existing ideas• What makes it good?

• Who is it aimed at?

• How is it beneficial to the brand?

• How could it be beneficial for your company?

Using existing ideas

• No idea is original.

• How could the existing version be better?

• How would you have done it differently?

• How could the idea be adapted (different audience, season, medium, etc.)?

• How could your company do it?

Organising ideas

• Keep organised notes of articles, campaigns etc. and highlight what’s interesting/why you picked it out.

• Organise by type where you can – e.g. ‘social media contest inspiration’

• Private Pinterest boards with comments are perfect for visual media. Project management tools such as Trello are better for text.