If you need fresh ideas for a blog post, ideation will work best. This is a process of brainstorming and communicating new ideas for content, dental practice marketing strategies, and many more. Do you think your team needs a good ideation session?
Here are the four basic rules of ideation:
There Are No Bad Ideas
Before anyone gets the wrong idea about the ideation process for your dental practice marketing, make this clear to your team: there are no bad ideas. Encourage everyone to join in suggesting ideas—from the comical to the truly great—and disallow the no’s and the uh-oh faces.
Even the bad ideas are good ideas when we are trying to grapple for a fresh idea for a blog post. Writers, in particular, know just how difficult it is to come up with new ideas every time they need to write about the same topic.
Jot Down Everything
Sometimes, because you’re having too much fun throwing ideas at each other, you may forget to jot down a great idea. You may think, “oh, that’s too good not to remember tomorrow.” Trust us, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll forget about it tomorrow.
Many ideation sessions happen without the participants knowing they are doing the process. Ideation happens during regular meetings when employees flippantly throw ideas at each other. The best scenario is the secretary jotting down everything in the meeting’s minutes. The worst case? Nobody bothers to take down notes.
If you’re in the process of birthing a great idea for your website’s content or dental practice marketing, make sure that it is visible to everyone. Jot it down on the whiteboard in bold letters. If possible, draw a diagram or a storyboard. That makes it easy for everyone to remember what you just mumbled about in the last five minutes.
Opt for Hybrid Brainstorming
Hybrid brainstorming is when you allow individual members of the team to ideate by themselves before bringing their ideas to the group session. Once you’re all sitting as a group, let each one present their ideas. This way, everybody gets a chance to talk. When you begin with the process of ideation as a group, the loudest voice will get his way and will set the course of the discussion. This can frustrate those who actually have good ideas to share.
Quantity Tops Quality
Wait… what? Yes, quantity is important in ideation. Worry about the quality of the ideas and topics later. What’s important, at least for now, is that the ideas are coming and more topics for content creation are available. When you stop to think about the feasibility of an idea, the process can be halted, too, and that discourages everyone to share the ideas they think are convoluted.