USE CASE:
MARKETING

Marketing is an indispensable part of our lives. Whether it is about selling a product or a service, a marketing strategy for attracting customers is vital for any company or organization. However, working in the marketing industry is not such an easy task as everyone thinks. Great efforts need to be made in order to offer and sell a product or service to a great number of potential clients and customers in an effective way.

These ask for good planning and organizational skills as well as an ability to prepare suitable marketing strategies, conduct market and competitors’ analysis, identify a target customer, and follow marketing trends. Moreover, working in the marketing department requires a good sense of creativity and ability to explore new original ways to create and disseminate better messages across marketing channels to the targeted audience. Bearing in mind all of the challenges from above, iMindQ can help you with:

The marketing industry is a fast-paced environment, where it is easy to get lost in the information overload and to have problems meeting deadlines and completing tasks. Therefore, brainstorming fresh ideas, creating, planning and, in the end, executing a proper strategy for selling product or service can be a challenge for everyone working in the marketing field.Marketing people are in need of a practical way of staying organized and systematizing their tasks, managing information overload, stimulating brainstorming, inspiring creativity, generating ideas in order to boost productivity, increase performance and achieve goals.

Mind mapping is a creative technique, which can facilitate the execution of the marketing tasks. Among the advantages that mind mapping provides for marketing people are good organization and prioritization of activities, effective brainstorming and generation of ideas, thorough market research and competitors’ analysis and more.

Some of the vast array of benefits mind mapping offers are improved thinking, greater productivity, faster memorization of details, planning and organization of tasks and activities, better decision making and problem-solving, an organization of complex information, easier management of data, logical flow of information presentation, and much more.

Marketing people can use mind maps to:

  • encourage original ideas and brainstorming;
  • build more effective marketing strategies;
  • develop better campaigns;
  • outline marketing communication plans;
  • focus marketing efforts on defined target groups;
  • create targeted content and messages.

Brainstorming and generating ideas

To bring original ideas for a campaign to the table, particularly in a team, can sometimes be a challenging and time-consuming activity. In fact, brainstorming sessions are usually organized with the goal to generate fresh and innovative ideas, but sometimes these fail because of a poor organization and unsuitable environment.

Most brainstorming sessions don’t reach the ideal result because of the lack of an appropriate tool which will allow proper management, recording and further future development of the ideas proposed by everyone on the team. Therefore, in order to conduct a fruitful brainstorming session, which will allow all of the above mentioned essentials, as well as in which people will be comfortable enough to present their ideas and build upon others’ ideas, the needed supportive tool is a mind map.

With a mind map, everyone’s proposed and presented idea can be easily captured, organized and, if needed, further developed. By having all ideas visually saved, grouped and organized logically in one place, team members can collaborate more closely and contribute to the overall success.

Developing a brand identity

Mind mapping supports and stimulates creativity. Rich with icons, images, colors, arrows, connectors and many elements, mind maps allow to create an eye-catching and inspiring visual presentation of simple information.

When it comes to developing a new product or expanding existing services, a mind map can be of immense help. It is a tool that can help marketers to expand their creative horizons and think of fresh ideas for new products or services to offer to their customers. With a mind map can be defined the all components of one product or service, such as logo, colors, typography, etc. In addition, within the mind map can be created guidelines to follow when it comes to setting the tone of voice between the brand and its consumers.

Marketing strategy and campaign development

Using mind-maps facilitates the process of brainstorming and generating innovative ideas, which also leads to the fast development of marketing strategies and launch of marketing campaigns.

Mind mapping can assist in making a clearer illustration of a particular problem, which can assists the process of thinking and finding an appropriate solution. This way, when developing a marketing campaign or a strategy, with the use of mind maps users can strengthen their problem-solving skills and stimulate thinking outside the box.

With mind maps, one can get an overview of all the important information and build a detailed marketing strategy, which will provide faster and easier memorization and visualization of all the activities and actions. Following the strategy developed within the mind map, marketers can easily plan a suitable campaign for a particular product or service.

Conducting a market research

Conducting a market research is needed before planning any kind of marketing strategy for a product or service. It is an activity that allows marketers to find in-depth information about many different aspects that will help them plan their marketing efforts accordingly. The market research is conducted in order to learn and understand consumer behavior and the cultural, societal and personal factors that influence it.
With mind maps, marketers can organize their market research activities and visually represent data after the research analysis has been conducted. By exploring the market trends and conditions, they can come closer to defining their customers’ behavior and needs. Later they can also make a solid plan for targeting potential customers and positioning in the market in question.

Performing a competitors’ analysis

Performing a competitors’ analysis is crucial for developing an appropriate marketing strategy. This activity requires good analytical and organizational skills. For better identification of competitive organizations and orderly collection of important information, marketers can use mind maps.

In the center of the mind map can be put the focus topic, which is competitors’ analysis that would later branch out in a different number of competitors. Every branch would divide into numerous segments that would cover different aspects of the marketing analysis. For example, the user can analyze the social media and advertising efforts of its competitors and determine their strengths and weaknesses. In the mind map also can be made an overview of the characteristics of competitors’ target customers – their sex, age, behavior, etc.

After finishing the analysis, a suitable strategy that will correspond to every effort needed for better positioning on the market can be developed.

Defining target customer

Defining a target customer before offering a certain product or service is crucial for the business. And this is very easily doable with a mind map. In the center of the map can be placed the target customer with age, sex and other important characteristics that define him/her. From this focus, numerous clusters with different aspects can be branched out.

Marketers can develop more than one target customers in a relation to their product or service. And in this case as well, mind maps can be implemented as a practical tool. Just instead of creating clusters with characteristics for one target customer the user will create for two or more target consumers.

Managing and organizing information

Marketers take time to plan and organize their work. Every day they manage and analyze a great amount of information they collect from their marketing and advertising efforts. The mind mapping technique is a very useful method for collecting and organizing an overload of important information.

Reports from social media and marketing campaigns created on a monthly basis can be easily organized within a mind map. And these can be put in different types of mind maps according the specific needs. When needed, marketers can include attachments to a mind map or import files from different formats. In the end, they can share the map with all information with every member on the team.

This is a very critical aspect since in marketing there are usually more people working on different strategies, plans and reports and if the information of their analysis is not synced they risk to loose essential data.v

Conducting meetings and making remarkable presentations

Business presentations are a crucial part of every marketing activity. Therefore, marketers usually practice gathering of their teams for a meeting or a brainstorming session in order to explain plans and activities and delegate tasks.

However, getting the audience to pay attention and understand exactly what are your goals and objectives is rather difficult. One way to do this more easily is to outline key information in a mind map. This map can be used as a guide when describing projects. Also, it can be shared as a printed copy so that everyone on the team understands better what would be their assignment.

Building an effective content strategy

The marketing efforts don’t stop at the creation and execution of a good social media and advertising strategy. Content creation now goes hand in hand with these. Making a content strategy can be a very important asset when placing a product or a service on the market.

What will be written, how it will be written and to whom it will be presented are the essentials when it comes to content creation. And these essentials fall under the exploration of new approaches in the effort to channelizing content and reaching out to the target customers.

Mind mapping can help marketers to build a quality content strategy that would help them target the right audience. In a mind map can be organized all the essentials of the strategy. Later this map can be synchronized with the maps for social media and advertising campaigns as well as with the maps for target customers in order to see if the content strategy is headed in the right direction.