Marketing professionals will always require excellent communication and analytical skills. Mapping customer journeys, encouraging conversions and weighing qualified leads is how a marketing department charts its success. Creative thinking, however, is quickly becoming a key asset as well.
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Creative thinking is more than coming up with a great product idea or killer tagline. Creative thinkers find new ways to solve common challenges and often identify hidden business opportunities. The more organizations infuse creativity into their culture, the better poised they are to boost productivity and beat the competition.
If you want to foster greater creativity in your marketing team and watch your employees flourish, implement these six strategies.
1. Reimagine Your Office Space
Drab walls and high cubicles can drown creativity. Consider reworking your marketing employees’ environment to encourage greater collaboration.
Start by ensuring employees can access quiet areas when they are required to hyperfocus on the task at hand. Then build open spaces for animated dialogue when teams are brainstorming new ideas.
Wall color can also impact creativity. Typical office hues – brown, beige, tan – are considered sterile and uninspiring. Light blue colors create feelings of relaxation, shades of green encourage focus and warm reds and oranges stimulate thinking. Throw in green plants and complementary colors to give the space life.
2. Build a Brainstorming Suite
Along the same lines, encourage better brainstorming by creating dedicated space for your marketing team to work together. A large conference room with a whiteboard and dry-erase markers encourages idea generation. When team members can get up and move around freely, they feel more energized and ideas tend to be more forthcoming.
3. Let Brainstorms Follow Team Members Home
In other words, provide an opportunity for a creative brainstorm to continue offline. After ideas are tossed around in the traditional brainstorm, ask team members to develop two or three more ideas to share with the group in a follow up meeting. This levels the playing field between extroverts, who may have dominated the group brainstorm, and introverts, who have plenty of ideas to share.
4. Build a Diverse Team
Beyond traditional diversity efforts, build a creative team from employees with different expertises, varied educational backgrounds and professional experience. Diversity often drives creative thinking, and it is one of the best ideas for employee retention. That’s important in a post-pandemic world in which great talent can work almost anywhere.
5. Support a ‘Try Anything’ Strategy
Marketing teams are often given the difficult task of building engaging content from basic information. It can take a lot of effort for a team to come up with a clever campaign that focuses on “pool builders near me” or similar client creative goals. Giving employees the freedom to “try anything” can often yield award winning material.
6. Encourage Fast Failure
For marketing teams tasked with clever “pool builders near me” creative, encouraging “fast failure” is another way to boost productivity and retain top talent. Creative thinkers who know there are no repercussions for great ideas that don’t resonate with audiences are more likely to hit home runs because they’re comfortable taking big swings. The caveat, of course, is that those failures are realized quickly and steps are taken to refine the campaign.
Finally, make sure you lead creative thinking by giving your marketing teams a clear goal and a direction to follow. While the freedom to collaborate, put new ideas out in the market to see if they work and embrace those ideas if they don’ is every marketer’s dream, without direction, creativity can flounder.
Creative thinking is changing the way organizations do business. They know creativity with a clear goal is bound to succeed.