Alrighty, Carnage fam, time for our favorite activity – brainstorming!

It’s probably the best part of marketing. You know how it goes – you get your team together to talk new tactics, new ideas, new tools. And, of course, everyone swears there are, “no bad ideas here.”

Regardless of what your brainstorming sessions look like, everyone needs a little refresher. Hootsuite stopped by our office (via email) to deliver eleven fresh ways to kickstart your brainstorm.

1. Review top performing posts or content. A simple review of any organic or paid content will help you zone in on what is and isn’t working. In other words, do this to get rid of inefficiencies. And call on your team for ideas on how to replicate that success.
2. Investigate your competitors. We’ve talked about this a lot recently, but it’s so dang important. There are a couple of different things to look into, but one of Hootsuite’s favorite Q’s is: what are they (competitors) doing that you can do better?
3. Go seasonal. Use quirky little holidays to create content relevant to your audience. BTW, apparently, today is #nodirtydishesday (time to get cleanin’).
4. Ask your audience. We’re lucky ’cause whenever we’re in a rut for content we hop into our Facebook Group to ask you all. But it’s not always that easy. If you have an email list, build an incentive for subscribers to answer a few Q’s. Or, start a chat on Twitter/Instagram.
5. Review trending hashtags. This is something you should probably do every day. Take a minute to check out trending hashtags. This can do wonders for engagement. Just don’t pull a DiGiorno here.
6. Accept all ideas – at first. We’re huge fans of this advice. Doesn’t matter if you’ve been in marketing for two years or twenty, no one likes to get rejected. Take in all suggestions. Even the crazy ones! Hootsuite then recommends having a separate session dedicated to refining that list.

What are some things that help kickstart your brainstorming sessions?

Gonna take a guess and say that you probably have some email automation built into your marketing strategy.

If you haven’t revisited your email automation campaigns in a few years, today’s the day to do it with help from Hubspot.

Hubspot recently revamped their drip campaigns and had some pretty impressive results. But before we get to that, let’s take a look back in time…

In 2015, your drip campaigns were probably based on actions someone took on your website. If they downloaded social media content, you continued to send them social media content. Makes sense.

But, as Hubspot found out, that’s not really a good way to go about segmenting your audience. Chances are your customers wear more than 1 hat so sending them one type of content probably isn’t too helpful.

So what should you do? Let your audience choose. Yeah, that’s right, give the power back to the people.

For Hubspot, they give their audience options on the types of content they’ll see next in the drip campaign. It’s kinda like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. (Are those still a thing? Those should definitely still be a thing.)

When someone downloads something from Hubspot, the follow-up email asks a simple question, “What marketing or sales challenge are you looking to tackle?” From there, they get four options:

• Generate More Leads
• Grow Revenue
• Manage Sales/Pipeline
• All of the Above

Over the next few weeks, subscribers will get content based on what they chose in that first email.

Here’s how to implement a similar strategy for your drip campaigns:

• Identify your main persona’s biggest challenges.
• Which challenges can your business solve for?
• Put your content into buckets that can solve these challenges.
• Figure out which stage of the buying cycle these pieces belong in.
• Build out the campaigns that all start with the same Choose Your Own Adventure email.
• Collect data, analyze, and iterate.

Want more insight into Hubspot’s new plan? Smash the button →

Need help revamping your email strategy? That’s just one of the things we do really, really well. We’re not trying to toot our own horn, but…beep beep.

But really, if you’ve got a marketing/design/development project that you need help with, get at us.

Y’all heard of the Metro Photo Challenge?

It was a 2017 Metro Newspaper photography contest based in Brazil, but open on a worldwide scale. They wanted to find a way to get everyone involved. Including those who don’t even own a camera. So without further ado, introducing... drum roll, please...

The Newspaper Camera.

Yes, Metro Newspaper gave the oldest form of media a brand new role and it is pure genius.

This contest is the coolest thing we’ve seen all year. Just watch it!