Welcome to My Blog

If you want to hold brainstorms that unearth better, more creative ideas, it all starts with the people in the room. Like, the actual number of people in the room. 

That’s my first tip for you: Follow the “pizza rule” for brainstorming. If you’re unfamiliar with the “pizza rule,” it’s the idea that if you have more people in a room than you could feed with a pizza, there are too many people in that room to hold a productive meeting.

Same goes for a brainstorm session: If you’ve got a dozen people sitting around a table, expect a really long list of really mediocre ideas.

So, what else can you do other than bribe a group of two to six people with pizza to unearth good ideas? So glad you asked.

Better Brainstorming: 12 Tips for Getting to Good Ideas

1) Invite a diverse group of people.

If you’re on a team that works on all of the same projects together, goes to team meetings together, sits next to each other in the office, and hangs out in the same group chats all day … well, needless to say, their ideas will likely start to get pretty homogenous.

Instead, invite new people from other teams to your brainstorms — people with different skill sets and experiences to help get you out of your rut and see things in a new way. It’ll give you that great mix of new perspectives and contextual knowledge that’ll help you land on ideas that are both original and doable.

2) Keep the meeting to 22(ish) minutes.

We’ve written about this technique from Nicole Steinbok on the blog before, and it’s one I’ve used with positive results. (I usually round up to 30 minutes, but what’s a few minutes among friends?) It works particularly well for people like myself that thrive under the threat of a deadline. 

In my experience, having a limited amount of time to brainstorm only works if all participants are actually ready for the meeting. (More on that in a minute.) But two other tenets Steinbok harps on are a no-laptop rule, and a no-off-topic-banter rule. While some might disagree with the latter (as my colleague Erik Devaney vehemently does), I have found that aggressive time constraints in and of themselves help keep people on task and delivering their best ideas as a result.

3) Provide context and goals well before the meeting.

“Well before the meeting” doesn’t mean that morning. Offer any pertinent information at least two business days in advance so people have a fighting chance at actually being prepared for the brainstorm.

In addition to providing any reading materials or contextual information that helps set up the reason for the brainstorm (and explicitly asking that they read it, too), describe what the ideal outcome of the meeting looks like. This will help people come into the meeting understanding the scope of what you’re all trying to do. I think you’ll find this helps you avoid wasting time catching everyone up so you can get to the brainstorm right away. 

4) Ask people to come prepared with some ideas.

Often, great ideas don’t show themselves when you ask them to. They pop up on the train, in the shower, while you’re watching TV … basically any time you’re not actually trying to come up with the idea.

This is one reason why it’s good to provide a few days of lead-time before your meeting, but it’s also why you might want to explicitly ask people to think of some ideas beforehand. With this approach, you might find that you start the meeting off with pretty strong ideas from the get-go, and the group can add to and modify them to make them even stronger.

Frankly, I’ve also found that when everyone comes in cold turkey, the brainstorm often ends with a long list of very uninspired ideas. At the very least, whoever runs the brainstorm should come with a few ideas to kick off the brainstorm and give an indication of what a good idea looks like. 

Tip: You may actually find that better ideas emerge if you explain what a bad idea looks like. Sometimes, knowing what you’re not looking for can be really helpful in eliminating entire universes, and letting people focus in on something more specific.

5) Say “no” to the bad ideas. Fast.

It might be brainstorm heresy to recommend people squash bad ideas, but I’ve seen one too many brainstorm go astray because people are too scared to say “no.” This is particularly important if you’re trying to run a quick brainstorm session.

Yes, there’s a fine line: Squashing bad ideas could lead people to fear speaking up, missing out on good ideas as a result. But if you’re giving every idea equal due regardless of merit, then you get off track real fast and end up down a bad idea rabbit hole.

Better brainstorms that yield better ideas leave time to nurture the strongest inclinations.

On that note …

6) Foster an environment where bad ideas are okay.

Yes, you should call out bad ideas. But you should also make it okay that people had them. Call out your own ideas, in fact. If people can speak freely, but not feel stupid for doing so, you’ll get more ideas out — which makes it more likely you’ll land on a good one.

7) Lean into constraints.

If you have every resource and opportunity in the world, creativity will naturally stifle. Lay out the constraints you’re working within in terms of goals and resources for executing any idea you come up with. Then, try to see those as opportunities for creativity instead of roadblocks that make it impossible to come up with a good idea.

8) Lean into silence.

Anyone in sales already knows: Silence is power. In a brainstorm, silences are times when people get thinking done — either about their own idea or how to build on the last idea that came up.

And hey, it might also encourage more people to speak up with an idea just out of their hatred of uncomfortable silences. Heh.

9) Lean into failure … outside of the brainstorm.

If you have a team where taking smart risks — regardless of outcome — is rewarded, people will have a better sense of what ideas are worth pursuing and what’s worth passing on. Because, you know, they do it a lot and get a second sense for these things. 

If experimentation is a part of your team culture, that’ll manifest itself in way, way better ideas than if your team is stuck in stasis. You’ll have better brainstorms where creative and smart, yet risky ideas come out. 

10) Be prepared to ditch the meeting altogether.

Sometimes in-person meetings aren’t the right format for unearthing good ideas. Certain brainstorms can be better performed digitally.

For example, we often to Google Doc brainstorms when curating ideas for list posts across a large group of people. There’s really no need to pull everyone away from their work to participate in a brainstorm like that, especially because the list items are pretty easy to come up with and we’re typically looking for volume of ideas rather than one or two big ideas.

The benefit of brainstorms like this are that people can participate on their own time, too — when they’re ready and eager to contribute ideas, not when the meeting happens to occur.

11) Provide a place for anonymous submissions.

For some people, the “right format” might be an anonymous submission. Provide a place for anonymous idea submission both before and after the meeting. People might have some ideas before or after the meeting that they’re reticent to bring up in front of the group. It’d be a shame to miss out on those ideas due to shyness, discomfort, or simply a preference for writing out ideas instead of speaking about them. This is easy to set up through a Google form. 

12) Be prepared to pursue absolutely nothing that came out of that brainstorm.

Don’t feel like you have to choose and pursue an idea just because you had a brainstorm. If the brainstorm didn’t yield any good ideas, that’s fine. It wasn’t a waste of time. But you will waste your time if you pursue an idea that isn’t worth doing. Moving forward on the lesser of all evils is still … evil.

Instead, do some reflection on your own about why the ideas aren’t ready to see the light of day, and see if any are worth more thought before ditching them. Perhaps you’ll get another group of people in a room to iterate on them — or even the same group once they’ve had some distance from the ideas. Now that ideas have started flowing, you might find a second round of brainstorming yields something even better.

What other tips do you have for getting more out of brainstorms? Share with us in the comments.

Think of the most successful salespeople you know. They’re equal parts artist and scientist, skilled at building trust, telling their products’ stories in a persuasive way, answering and overcoming objections and, finally, closing the deal.

If you’re an ecommerce company, your website is your salesperson. And like a good salesperson, your site should bring your brand’s personality to the forefront while leveraging a few fundamental tactics of artful online dealmaking:

1) Build Trust by Highlighting Your Brand Promise on Your Homepage

Strong salespeople never begin in the middle of the story. They start by presenting who they are and what makes their company different—in other words, their brand. Homepages are a great place to show off your brand message, best products, and any timely promotions you might have.

Do you offer an at-home trial or free returns? Are your products eco-friendly? The homepage is the place to establish what sets your company apart, typically using bold photography and punchy statements that can link to interior pages for more info. Making your return policy clear and easily accessible can also help build trust, as can having a clear value proposition.

2) Create a Complete Shopping Experience

Product pages are the meat of your sales pitch and should overcome customers’ concerns and objections for purchasing the product. Having beautiful product photography is one of the quickest ways to increase sales. Not only does it help your brand build trust, it makes it easier for customers to make purchasing decisions as they can more clearly study the product. On product pages, use photos of the front, back, top, sides and bottom of your products to mimic the experience of looking at a product in person. If applicable, show the product in various stages of being open or closed with accompanying products or accessories. In addition, it’s a good idea to show the product in use so that customers can get a sense of size and scale.

Do your products group naturally into “looks” or collections? Just as a brick-and-mortar shop owner might dress a mannequin or arrange a grouping of products in the window, ecommerce providers are increasingly upselling by adding the ability to shop entire looks or groups, rather than one product at a time.

Social proof—customer reviews—are also an essential part of the sales process and are particularly important for ecommerce, since the customer is purchasing the product without seeing it in person. One way to go beyond typical product details and general customer reviews is to enable customers to rate and review individual features of the product. For example, a clothing store might offer customers the ability to rate each item’s width and length, fit, material and color. That way prospective buyers can decide whether someone else’s three-star product might be a five-star product for them, or vice versa.

3) Seal the Deal With a Super-Easy Checkout

The checkout process is the most crucial element of an ecommerce site. If poorly implemented, none of the previous elements will matter. There are many factors that contribute to a great checkout experience, including speed, having a guest checkout option, easy form filling, progress indicators and a persistent cart summary. If you can offer free shipping or other features that reduce the objections to buying, conversions will go up even more.

Just like salespeople need to understand their customers’ buying process, your checkout experience should depend on your customers’ typical purchases. If they typically buy in large quantities, say a minimum of 10 products each, it’s important to make sure it’s easy for them to get items into the cart with varying quantities. In this situation, you might include quantity selectors inside the product tiles to save customers from having to click into another page to make quantity edits. These kinds of “minor” features often seem invisible, but combine to make a high-converting checkout process.

Of course, just as salespeople must be responsive to their prospects’ questions and requests, your site must load quickly and your on-site search functionality must work properly.

And with all of these elements, you should A/B or multivariate test your ecommerce design elements and iterate –– every business is different, and it’s possible you will stumble upon new best practices during your testing. This is a cost-efficient and effective way to truly know what makes your customers pull the trigger on a purchase.

Like any good sales pitch, an ecommerce site should be constantly evolving, with each design element purposefully chosen, tested and refined or replaced, all with the goal of driving conversions. When in doubt about a design choice, be sure you’ve answered these three questions: What does it make the customer feel about the brand and its products? Does it provide information the customer needs to make a purchasing decision? Does it make it easier to complete that purchase? Let the sales process be your guide, and you’ll have the tools you need to craft a design that converts.

1) PlayBuzz

The original PlayBuzz site is for the average Internet user interested in which Hogwarts house she belongs to or wants to test her knowledge about 1990s TV shows, but PlayBuzz’s business site is tailored to empowering companies to generate an interactive feature, embed it in their marketing content and watch user engagement rise and their network grow.

With PlayBuzz you can create free countdowns, polls, personality quizzes, flip cards, trivia, rankable lists, general lists, gallery quizzes and a swipe voting feature made popular by dating apps. Each element has an appealing quality that catches readers’ attention and can communicate information quickly in a visual manner. It also keeps visitors on your page longer and is designed for social sharing.

When choosing from so many options, remember highly interactive features like quizzes and swiping are good for social platforms and visually driven posts, while flip cards and polls are good for text-heavy content.

When you are designing these embeddable features, keep in mind your company’s brand and voice, this will ensure consistency while adding that added bonus customers appreciate. The best way to track the success of PlayBuzz content is to monitor its social performance in shares, engagement and views.

PlayBuzz is so user-friendly, you will forget you are marketing while playing with the design tools and fun features. Check out these flip cards we made with it.

2) SlideShare

Slide presentations are something nearly every professional has seen or used, whether it’s from business trainings, college lectures or group projects. Putting information in a condensed, easily-digestible format is one of the most popular marketing, sales and proposal tactics because of its familiarity and logic.

SlideShare can be embedded into any blog post and breaks down a topic for readers in a much more visual and attractive manner than static paragraphs of text. Try it with an existing post that needs more visits but provides valuable content.

Take text from the blog, simplify it for each slide, keeping word count at a minimum, include a CTA on the last slide, and embed the feature somewhere in the post. If you put the slides near the top, you can include a friendly disclaimer such as, “Don’t have time to read the rest? We summed it up for you here.”

Readers appreciate options for taking in information and really appreciate when you understand their limits. SlideShare transforms already written content into powerful snippets of data.

Don’t think of SlideShare as a place to put all the information in bullet points; think of it as a place to present an idea in a visual and condensed manner. It might be a good challenge to fit a hefty amount of information into a slide show. This exercise will help you write succinctly and think about content in an out-of-the-box way.

Give the most important points priority instead of cramming an entire blog post into a slide show. Graphs, statistics and quick thoughts are especially effective on SlideShare.

3) Make a GIF

Regardless of how you pronounce it (“JIF” or “GIF”), these little graphics excel at entertaining and inserting some fun into your digital content. It shows you have a sense of humor and don’t take yourself too seriously. That said, make sure to use GIFs sparingly and only for appropriate topics.

Many websites have tools for creating your own animated GIF or have a domain of popular ones for every emotion and situation. This imagery also warrants the use of BuzzFeed-worthy titles and descriptions to accompany your chosen GIFs.

This type of interactive content performs excellently on social platforms because of the flashy element and viral qualities. These qualities lend themselves well to tracking social success easily by monitoring shares, likes and engagement.

When choosing or creating a GIF, make sure it is a reference your audience will understand. You wouldn’t want to use a GIF from a popular TV show if it’s not likely your customers are familiar with it. However, if pop culture references are common in your content, feel free to use GIFs as freely as you’d like. 

Websites such as GIPHY make the art of finding the right GIF quick and entertaining, while at the same time providing you with everythin you need to share with your audience. Take the GIF below – I typed “content marketing’ into the search box, found this gem from Mad Men, and simply copied the embed code into the blog. Easy!

via GIPHY

4) Qzzr

If the products or services you are marketing lend well to quizzing your prospects, Qzzr is the right tool for engaging them further. This free quiz-making platform allows you to create a quiz in minutes, embed it into any post and track the results. It also comes with a WordPress plugin for easy integration.

Customers love to test their knowledge, if only to prove how much they know. They also love to reveal pieces of their personality and discover new sides of themselves. Giving your customers these opportunities through quizzes is the perfect gateway for interaction and connection.

Keep quizzes as short as possible so as not to fatigue your readers. Make sure the answers are pointed and don’t allow quiz takers to avoid questions. There is nothing worse than a vague answer and worthless results. And there is nothing better than seeing interactions with customers and the fruitful rewards of getting specific.

You might use a quiz if you are trying to target specific products or services to your customers as they begin their buying journey. The fashion-delivery company Stitch Fix requires all first-time users to take a fashion quiz to determine which products will please them most.

You can emulate this model or use a quiz for testing your customer’s knowledge about your industry, current events or other relevant topics. Readers especially love quizzes that tell them which [car, building, time period, scientist, politician, 1980s pop star, etc. they are most like.

The great thing about Qzzr is the ability to integrate with CRM systems. This feature allows you to track the success of each quiz, pull data from the results and target customers more accurately and personally.

5) Podcasts

Podcasts aren’t just for Serial fans or listeners of public radio. The audio format is a gold mine for the busy professional. It gives multi-taskers a chance to consume your content on their terms. There might not be enough time in the day to read all the content circulating within certain industries or interact with specific companies.

But if marketers give professionals a way to gain all the benefits of static content during their daily commute without burying their faces in a screen, they might see a rise in interest and customer conversation. It’s also great for audio learners and is a much more casual and open environment for bringing guests and commentators to foster a fruitful discussion.

Before creating a podcast, study up. Listen to all different kinds of podcasts to figure out what works. It’s also good to pay attention to which length is appropriate. If you are getting more downloads and listens for shorter episodes, your customers might want quick conversation. But if you see a demand for longer form podcasts, your customers probably appreciate deep dives into certain topics.

Bring in guests for fresh perspective. Try implementing different segments to break up the monotony of a single episode. But make sure to get into the groove of podcasting before you give up or count your early success.

As you develop your podcast and find what works, you will find you can adjust and evolve episode to episode based on listener feedback or performance statistics. The key is keeping your eyes and ears open. Podcasting is just as much about listening as it is about talking.

Wrapping it up

Interactive content rules the marketing landscape for now and the foreseeable future. There’s no denying customers want more than some block text on a page. They want to dive in, learn more, give feedback and get to know the company. Just ensure you are balancing the message within the format and you will see immediate success. Trying any of these methods should result in an increase of engagement and possibly even leads without the headache of a complicated tool and it won’t cost you a cent.