iBlogMarketing

Ideas are the bread and butter of the marketing business, if you will ignore the cliché. Every commercial, every direct mail letter, every single email, almost every word of any marketing piece came from an idea. Ideas are important. They are the fun part of the process, and all too often undervalued. Clearly, your ideas for marketing your business have value. How you get marketers to listen and how you make your ideas reality, is all up to you.

Getting Ideas
Really, ideas just happen. You don’t necessarily get them in the shower or right when you’re about to fall sleep, but sometimes the best ideas come when you least expect them. That’s not to say that brainstorming is a waste of time. I find it’s still helpful and often get the best marketing ideas a few hours after a brainstorming session. That is after I’ve already brainstormed all the bad ones.

The important thing about generating ideas isn’t when or how you come up with them, it’s remembering them. The best way to do this, is to right them down. And I recommend writing all of them down, not just the ones you like because you may come back to them later, change you mind about which ones you like or find a way to improve a really bad one and turn it into a golden idea.

Sharing Ideas
In marketing, ideas are not a dime a dozen. Ideas are money. Of course, there is no guarantee that your idea is great, but quite even horrible ideas like a fussy grocery store manager running around squeezing toilet paper will generate results. So when you’re ready, share your ideas. Two heads truly are better than one and if you share an okay idea with someone, they might be able to take that idea, expand upon it and turn it into your next big marketing campaign.

If you’re not ready to take your ideas to your marketing agency, start by sharing with someone you’re comfortable with. The only way to find out if your marketing idea is any good is to share it with others. Someone thought of DOS, someone thought of Windows and people with a bit less in the bank thought up Google and YouTube. Quite often, these ideas came through trial and error. It’s important to bounce your ideas off others and for them to do the same, because it fosters a good marketing strategy.

Turning Ideas into Reality
An idea will always be just that unless you have the right tools to turn it into something more.

Working with a marketing or advertising team can help generate solid marketing ideas, but more than that, they can execute an entire advertising or marketing campaign based on that idea. They can turn a simply idea of a store manager squeezing toilet paper into the longest running tv commercial in history with over 500 ads.

Marketing isn’t just about having the best idea; you also need to be able to turn those ideas into something. And whether that ends up being 30-second spot that airs only once or a new slogan that will carry your brand for over 2 and a half decades, you’ll never know if you don’t first come up with the idea.