How to be more creative. What content should you create for your brand? Watch the below video to learn how to brainstorm ideas using mind mapping technique.
video transcript
Hi everyone. I’m Sarah Panus, the Founder of Kindred Speak which is a content marketing and influencer marketing strategy consulting company. One of my big things is helping people be creative and thinking strategically about their content planning process– whether it’s for your personal brand or your employer.
So, I wanted to walk you guys through a brainstorming technique called mind mapping. Whether it’s been a long time since you’ve done this, or you’ve never done this, I hope it can help you get some new ideas to inform your content strategy.
A mind map will look something like this. It’s a way to think of one idea and then what could that expand into, and what could that expand into.
An example I mocked up here is Wellness. Let’s say Wellness is one of your brand’s storytelling pillars, and you want to think about what types of things would we talk about. Then, you want to have five offshoots from the center. You can have more, but don’t have less. So, my five were food/nutrition, mental, exercise, introspection, and sleep. So what you do if you follow introspection, since this is something I’m focusing on for my personal brand this year, is you want to make at least three offshoots from introspection. You can have more, but try to have at least three. The things I thought of are journaling, silent retreat — which is something I was supposed to do over COVID-19 but it got cancelled so I’m going to be doing it later, calm/quiet mind so you can listen to your internal thoughts better, and then meditation. So then you have this shoot of meditation, and you want to put another three offshoots off of it. And, again you can have more than three, but try to have at least three. For me, I thought of meditation vs. hypnosis; what’s the different between that and we could create some content around that. Another is meditation how tos. And offshoots of how tos I wrote how tos for moms, kids and mindful family time. Another idea is health benefits of meditation, and what it reduces, so I wrote down reduces. Reduces anxiety. Reduces poor health. You could go on and on based on what are people searching for in SEO results.
Another example with the silent retreat idea is why/what is it? Off of that you could talk about the different types. Interview people who’ve actually done them, I could talk about my journey of doing a silent retreat, or wanting to do one. Q&A/Lives, I could do interviews with people. I could go live with actual silent retreats. So, there’s a lot of things that can span off of this. You can keep going, going, going.
Mind mapping is a great way to get your initial thoughts down. Your ideas can be tactical or feelings/emotions you evoke. Like you want to evoke empathy or stress, and what does that mean, and create content that expands on that feeling.
So, then what you do when you have it all mapped out is look through your mind map and circle the big clusters that look most interesting to you and get you most excited and feeling like “yeah, that feels right for my brand”.
Then you’ll have clusters here, and here, and here, and that helps you know where you want to start. And then you can play that out. Let’s do some research, let’s see what other SEO insights we can find to inform the content strategy. What are people talking about, what are they saying, looking for?
That is a quick overview on mind mapping. I hope that was helpful to help you increase your own creativity, gut check some of your content plans as well. I will be back sharing these lessons over time, so I hope this was helpful.
This is Sarah Panus. Good bye.
about the author
Sarah Panus is a content marketing strategist, Minnesota mom, and owner of Kindred Speak, LLC, a remote consultancy that helps brands with digital content marketing, influencer marketing, and brainstorming. She’s spent 17 years helping brands including Sleep Number, Starbucks, Nestle Waters, Christos Bridal, Game Crazy, Cone Inc, etc. speak a kindred language with their audiences, driving brand advocacy and millions in revenue and brand engagements. Email Sarah at sarah@kindredspeak.com to book a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your brand storytelling questions and needs. Follow Sarah on Instagram or LinkedIn as she helps parents working in content marketing-type roles who struggle with overwhelm or confusion at work. Learn more at www.kindredspeak.com.
Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash