Author: Franz Malten Buemann

You know how you keep getting notifications about updates being available for your smartphone apps? Well, your website wishes it could do the same for your blog posts. While some of your content may be evergreen and high-quality, other articles you wrote a year ago probably contain information that simply isn’t true anymore. But does…
The post How to Update Your Old Blogs for SEO in 2021: 5 Tested Tips appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Last Updated on August 22, 2021 by Rakesh Gupta As technicians, we’re used to technical change management — converting the current state of a particular tech stack to a future state. Organizational change management, however, is often overlooked. Organizational change management broadly refers to any and everything you do to
The post Ways to Making Organizational Change Management a Priority appeared first on Automation Champion.

Crucial aspects of being a great marketer are being able to measure your success and measure your impact. No matter which metrics you use, you want to prove to your boss (and the company) that you’re worth your salt.
You deserve your budget — and maybe need more of it — and you deserve to dedicate time to the marketing activities that work. Building UTM codes that track your campaigns’ success is the best way to prove it.
In this blog post, you’ll learn what UTM codes are, how to use them, and how to build them in both Google Analytics and HubSpot.

UTM codes are also known as UTM parameters — or tracking tags — because they help you “track” website traffic from its origin.
Now, you might be thinking, “Ginny, I have HubSpot, so I already know if my website traffic is coming from Google, email, social media, and similar marketing channels. What does a UTM code tell me that I don’t already know?”
HubSpot Marketing Hub provides you with these high-level sources of traffic, but UTM also helps you drill down into specific pages and posts within these traffic sources.
UTM Code Example
If you’re promoting a campaign on social media, for example, you’ll know how much traffic came from social media.
Building a UTM code, however, can tell you how much of that traffic came from Facebook or even a particular post on Facebook.
Here’s an example of a URL with its own UTM code highlighted in orange at the end of the URL below:
http://blog.hubspot.com/9-reasons-you-cant-resist-list?utm_campaign=blogpost &utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
In the example above, you’re saying that once traffic comes in from people who click this link, the traffic should be attributed to Facebook. The “medium” is social media, while the “source” is Facebook.
Adding these snippets of code after the question mark above doesn’t affect anything on the page — it just lets your analytics program know that someone arrived through a certain source inside an overall marketing channel, as part of a specific campaign.
UTM Tracking
UTM tracking entails adding a UTM code, a snippet of code, to the end of a URL in order to track the performance of your marketing campaigns and content as well as your website’s traffic sources. 
UTM Tracking Best Practices
Here are some best practices to keep in mind when creating and using UTM tracking URLs: 

Make your URLs and links are consistent, clean, and easy to read (you may create a standard for link tagging/UTM parameter guide to ensure consistency here). 
Keep a list of your UTM links so everyone on your team knows which tagged links currently exist. 
Connect UTM tracking to your CRM (like HubSpot) to gain insight into how your bottom line looks. 
Be specific with your URL UTM parameters so your tags clearly state what you’re tracking and where. 
Stick with all lower or upper case — UTM codes are case-sensitive. 
Keep names short but descriptive (e.g. “U.S.” versus “United-States”). 

UTM Parameter Examples & Use Cases
UTM codes can track a medium and a source within that medium. Where it gets more flexible is in the language you use to describe that source. Maybe you want to attribute website traffic to a social network, a type of content, or even the exact name of an advertisement on the web.
Here are the five things you can track with UTM codes and why you might track them:
1. Campaign
Campaign-based tracking tags group all of the content from one campaign in your analytics. The example UTM code below would help you attribute website traffic to links that were placed as a part of a 20% discount promotion you’re hosting.
Example: utm_campaign=20percentpromocode
2. Source
A source-based URL parameter can tell you which website is sending you traffic. You could add the example code below to every link you post to your Facebook page, helping you to track all traffic that comes from Facebook.
Example: utm_source=Facebook
3. Medium
This type of tracking tag informs you of the medium that your tracked link is featured in. You can use the example UTM code below to track all traffic that comes from social media (as opposed to other mediums, like email).
Example: utm_medium=socialmedia
4. Piece of Content
This type of UTM code is used to track the specific types of content that point to the same destination from a common source and medium.
It’s often used in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns or with two identical links on the same page, as shown in the sample UTM code below.
Example: utm_content=sidebarlink or utm_content=headerlink
5. Term
A term- or keyword-based tracking code identifies the keywords you’ve paid for in a PPC ad. If you pay for a Google Ads campaign to rank under the keyword, “marketing software,” you might add the following UTM code to the end of the link you submit to Google to run this ad.
Example: utm_term=marketing+software
The best part about UTM parameters is that you can make any combination you like of these codes — use the bare minimum (campaign, source, and medium) to track all of your links, or use all of them to get super specific about your tracking.
Clearly, you can use a combination of UTM parameters in lots of ways:

Track the success of certain marketing initiatives.
See how well your social channels promote your content versus when your followers promote your content.
Measure the effectiveness of guest posting referral traffic.
Track the same piece of content across multiple marketing channels.
See where most people click on your internal links in a blog post.

Okay, so you’re on board with UTM codes … but how the heck do you set them up? It’s easy.
Below are instructions for setting up and measuring UTM parameters in Google Analytics and HubSpot.
How to Build UTM Codes in Google Analytics
Here are the steps involved in building UTM codes in Google Analytics. 
1. Open Google’s Campaign URL Builder.
There are three different types of tracking tags you can create in Google, two of which help you track traffic to new apps on app marketplaces. You’ll be using the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder — the third option on this list.
2. Fill in each link attribute in the following form.
Visit the page linked above and click the link to see this URL builder. Then, you’ll see the UTM builder shown below. Add the URL, Campaign, Source, and Medium information into their respective boxes.

3. Use the link in your marketing campaign.
If you’d like to shorten it, you’ll need a tool like bit.ly … or just use HubSpot’s URL Builder if you’re a HubSpot customer.

4. Measure your success.
If you already have Google Analytics set up for your site, Google will automatically track incoming campaigns. Like in HubSpot, you can access them under “Audience,” then “Sources,” then “Campaigns.” Click on each campaign to view the source and medium.

And that’s it — you’ll have custom tracking codes set up and running in no time! In a few weeks, you’ll be able to make a case for what you need because you’ll have the right metrics available.
How to Build UTM Codes in HubSpot 
Here’s how you’d go about building UTM codes in HubSpot. 
1. Navigate to your Analytics Tools.
In your Marketing Hub dashboard, select “Reports” on the top navigation bar. Then select “Analytics Tools” in the dropdown, as shown below.

2. Open the Tracking URL Builder.
In the menu of analytics tools that appears, look to the very bottom-righthand corner. You’ll see the option, “Tracking URL Builder.” Click this option at the bottom of the page, as shown in the red box below.

3. Open the Tracking URL form to create a new UTM code.
Whenever you create a web campaign that includes at least one UTM code, you’ll see this campaign listed on the page shown below.
This page outlines a tracking tag’s source, medium, term, content, and creation date, which you can see along the bottom of the screenshot below. Click “Create Tracking URL” in the top-righthand corner.

4. Fill in each attribute of your UTM code and click “Create.”
In the form that appears, fill in the URL, Campaign, Source, and Medium fields. If you’d like to add Content and Term, you can do so in the bottom two fields of this form. When you’re done, you’ll see an orange “Create” button become available at the bottom.
Click it, and HubSpot will log your UTM code as a new campaign, and this link will be ready to include on any webpage from which you want to track the traffic.

5. Use the shortened link in your marketing campaign.

6. Measure your success.

You can track your UTM parameters in your Traffic Analytics dashboard under “Other Campaigns,” as shown below. Click on the individual campaign to break down the source and medium.

As you can see in the second image, below, the name of the campaign appears to the left — based on the text in the UTM code you created — with the traffic from people who used each URL to arrive at your campaign’s main webpage.

Start Creating UTM Tracking URLs
Use the steps, best practices, and tools above to start creating and using UTM tracking URLs so you’re able to track the performance of your marketing campaigns and content. 
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in September 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

“Where do you see yourself in five to ten years?”
Of all the job interview questions out there, this has always been one of the most difficult.
These days, the next steps in your career aren’t always linear. The age-old corporate ladder model of putting in a few years as an associate contributor, becoming a manager of a small team, and climbing your way to the senior management or director level is not right for everyone.
And considering you’ll spend roughly one-third of your life at work, it’s critical you take the time to reflect and choose the best career path for you.
To help you figure out your short and long term career goals, I spoke with four career coaches. Here, we’ll explore how you can determine your own career goals for long-term professional fulfillment. Let’s dive in.

What are career goals?
Career goals are any short or long term milestones you hope to achieve throughout your career to get you where you want to be. While your personal goals might include starting a family or buying a house, your career goals are entirely focused on the trajectory of your professional life. 
Your long term career goals are the adult answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Perhaps you hope to become CFO, business owner, or VP of Marketing. Alternatively, maybe you want to become a lecturer at a college, open your own private practice, write a novel, or own a yoga studio. 
Once you’ve identified your long term goals, you’ll want to create a strategic vision for how to get there, which is comprised of lots of short term goals. For instance, maybe in your short term plan, you’d like to get your MBA, speak at conferences, take a writing course, or get your yoga certificate. All your short term decisions should be made, at least in part, with your long term career goal in-mind. 
Let’s dive into the difference between short and long term career goals, now. 
Short Term Career Goals 
A short term career goal is any professional goal that will take you a few months or few years to achieve. Your short term goals should fit into the roadmap you need to follow to eventually reach your long-term goals. 
Short term goals can relate to education, professional development, personal development, or leadership. For instance, a few short term goals might include: 

Taking an Excel course to become more proficient in data analysis
Signing up for your company’s professional development workshop to master new skills related to management 
Enrolling in a Toastmasters class to become a more confident public speaker 
Increasing your monthly sales by 30% 
Collaborating more efficiently across departments 

From these examples, you can begin to see that short term goals are not the end-all, be-all of your professional development — they’re just a starting point. It’s often easiest to determine your short term goals by first discovering your long term goals, and then working backwards. 
For instance, if your long term goal is to become the VP of Marketing, you’ll want to identify an appropriate leadership roadmap and start with relevant short term goals, like taking a public speaking course, strengthening your leadership skills, or networking within the industry to find appropriate mentors. 
When devising your short term goals, you’ll want to ensure you’re following the SMART framework: Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. 
The SMART framework can help you create more specific goals that are typically easier to achieve — for instance, you might modify your short term goal, “I want to create a stronger team culture” to “I will improve our team’s culture by implementing weekly team lunches and facilitating various ice breakers or games during these lunches. At the end of the quarter, I’ll send out a survey to team members to measure employees’ satisfaction levels with team culture.”

Long Term Career Goals 
A long term career goal is your long-term vision that drives your career and professional development decisions, and typically takes years to achieve. 
Oftentimes, your long term career goals can be the motivating factors in your day-to-day. For instance, perhaps you don’t love your current role as a content marketer — but it’s necessary for you to learn the ins and outs of marketing, since your long term goal is to become a VP of Marketing. 
A long term goal should drive your professional decisions and career conversations with your manager, since long term goals are only achievable once you’ve crossed off a series of short term steps. Of course, you’ll want to ensure the long term goals you articulate with your manager are possible at your current company. 
For instance, if you’re in a marketing-related role, it’s appropriate to communicate to your manager that your long term goal is to become a VP of Marketing. It’s less appropriate to tell her that your long term goal is to write a science fiction book, since that demonstrates to your manager that you don’t plan on staying at your current company for the long haul. 
A few examples of long term goals include: 

Become an executive at a company 
Lead the financial team at a start-up 
Become a thought leader in the SEO space 
Start your own company 
Take courses to switch career paths and become a product manager 
Build a consulting business

Ultimately, your long term goal is the desired end result of many strategic, short-term decisions. 
If your long term goal is to become a product manager, some short-term decisions might include taking a college course on product management, conducting informational interviews with product managers to learn more about necessary skills for the role, and taking a few courses related to the core requirements. 
If your long term goal doesn’t relate to your current role, consider how you might level up outside of work to break into a new industry. For instance, if a long term goal is to become a novelist, perhaps you take some fiction workshops outside of work. Alternatively, if your long term goal is to start your own business, maybe you create your business plan on the weekends.

How do you know what your career goals are? 
It’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? Many of us hope to know what our career goals are as soon as we graduate college — but, as we try out certain roles and uncover our professional strengths and weaknesses, these goals likely change over time. 
To get some insight here, I spoke with Nicole Palidwor, a certified career coach and resumé specialist at Ama La Vida.
Palidwor told me she typically urges her clients to focus on the following five areas when considering a career change: 

Values: What do I care about? What is important to me?

Interests: What topics do I find fascinating or intriguing?

Work Environment: What industry and/or company type interests me?

Status: What is my desired professional recognition and achievement?

Compensation: What is my long-term desired income?

Palidwor says, “Different priorities will lead you down different paths. For example, if interests rank highest, you’ll look for careers that allow you to explore your passions or reflect your training. If overall compensation is your motivator, you’ll pursue titles and qualifications that move the salary needle.”
She adds, “It’s also important to recognize potential tradeoffs. High compensation doesn’t necessarily align with working for social causes. Ideal work environments may not always provide the status you’re looking for. Non-profit work, tech startups, Fortune 500s, engineering firms, and executive opportunities all await you, but they may not all make sense.”

Senior Director of Student Affairs for Penn State University and career development strategist for Mentor Me Ashley A. Adams, PhD, agrees that figuring out your values is a critical step in choosing a career path.

Adams told me, “The first step in determining career goals is to focus on your values. Values serve as a compass and should guide your decision-making in all things, but particularly in your career.”

“For instance,” She adds, “if you value family, identify industries that have structured or predictable work schedules that allow you to plan appropriate family time. Alternatively, if you value wealth, find organizations that have lucrative benefits, high % matching 401K, and above-average salaries. Once you’ve identified your values, then you can focus on your strengths and weaknesses.”
Once you’ve made a list of your values and interests, you can begin to identify your most powerful professional skills. You’ll then want to determine a career that aligns all three of these areas. 
Additionally, Sho Dewan, who was listed one of the top career coaches globally on LinkedIn’s Top Voices list and is CEO of Workhap, recommends breaking down your goals into three parts: 

What is the result I want? (Example: “I want to earn a promotion in six months.”)
What is the action I have to take every day or week to achieve that goal? (Example: “I will arrange feedback meetings with my manager, learn new skills, organize team-building events, etc.”)
What is the thought I need to remind myself to achieve that goal? (Example: “I am skilled at what I do, my manager wants to see me succeed, and I am a valuable asset to the team.”)

Dewan says, “If you can think these thoughts consistently, then you will be motivated to take the required action — which will lead to you getting your desired results.”
Heidi Siegal Kogon, Founder and Career Coach at Kogon Coaching, also encourages her clients to understand their core values and innate strengths. She says you can do this by asking those closest to you, leveraging personality or strength assessment tools, or thinking about what you most enjoy doing. 
She adds, “You’ll want to take the time to figure out what you truly want — not what someone else wants for you, or what you think you ‘should’ do. Many people live their lives based on what other people think they should do. Those people may think they have your best interest at heart, but it still may not be the best decision for you.”
If you currently work at a company, or you’re interviewing for a new position, follow these tips to decide what your career goals are:

Look at the organizational structure
Know the company’s hierarchical lingo
Ask what a typical career trajectory might look like in your role
Consider long term goals such as becoming an executive or owning your own business
Think about what motivates you

This means that you’ll want to think about what motivates you and then consider what the next step would be at the company you’re working for. You should know how the organization structures its hierarchy and the lingo that’s used.
Then, you can lay out a basic plan for a career trajectory from one role to the next. Once you have an idea of the roles you want, then you can focus on deciding what skills and education you might need to get there.
5 Career Goal Examples
Now that we’ve explored what career goals are, let’s put this into practice. Here are six examples of career goals to get you started writing your own.
Alternatively, here’s how you might want to answer the question, “Where do you see yourself in five to ten years?” during a job interview. 
Example One: A Leadership Career Goal 
“Over the next couple of years, I’d like to enroll at a university to earn my MBA in finance. I hope to one day become CFO at a company, and I believe my MBA will help me achieve that goal. I have always been interested in a career in finance, and I also have strong leadership skills. Becoming an executive for a financial department would combine these interests well.” 
Short Term Goal: Get an MBA in finance
Long Term Goal: Become CFO at a corporation
Use Case: Interview or performance review

Example Two: An Independent Career Goal 
“My ultimate dream has always been to write a book and become a novelist. To help myself achieve this goal, I am going to sign up for a local writer’s fiction workshop so I can receive feedback on my writing from my peers.” 
Short Term Goal: Take a fiction workshop 
Long Term Goal: Write a book 
Use Case: Personal 
Example Three: A Skill-based Career Goal 
“Over the next five years, I’d like to gain enough experience to transition into a role on the SEO team. During my conversations with SEO strategists, I’ve learned one weakness I have is minimal knowledge of Excel, so I’d like to take an Excel course to strengthen my skills. This excel course, along with seeking out collaborative projects with the SEO team, should help me achieve my goal.” 
Short Term Goal: Learn Excel 
Long Term Goal: Become an SEO consultant 
Use Case: Performance review 

Example Four: An Outside-of-Work Career Goal 
“Within the next five years, I want to open a yoga studio. To accomplish this, I am going to start by getting my yoga teacher’s certification. This will enable me to break into the yoga industry, and after a few years working at a yoga studio, I can learn the ins and outs to better equip myself to open my own studio.” 
Short Term Goal: Get my yoga certificate 
Long Term Goal: Open a yoga studio 
Use Case: Personal 
Example Five: A Business Owner Career Goal 
“I’ve always dreamed of one day opening my own public relations firm. This goal influenced my decision to attend X University and get a degree in Public Relations with a minor in Management. In the short term, I’d like to join your team as a public relations associate and work my way up the ladder. Experience at your company would be invaluable to me as I begin my career.” 
Short Term Goal: Get a job as a public relations associate
Long Term Goal: Open my own public relations firm
Use Case: Interview 

How to Write Career Goals 
Once you’ve determined what your career goals are, you’ll want to write them down. Perhaps you’ll mention them on your resumé if your goals align with the role for which you’re interviewing.
Alternatively, maybe you write your career goals down before a performance review with your manager for a more constructive, guided conversation. 
Finally, even if your goals don’t align with your current role, you’ll still want to write them down for personal reflection. 
Here are four steps you can follow when writing your career goals:
1. Consider where you want to improve your career.
2. Use SMART goals formatting.
3. Write short term and long term goals.
4. Be detailed with your plan.
1. Consider where you want to improve your career.
Before you write your goals, think about the areas you want to advance. There are four main categories that I like to think about:

Improving work performance.
Developing skills that will help you become a leader/manager.
Self-improvement focused goals.
Learning about something new and different in your field.

When you write out your career goals, think about each of these areas. 
How can you improve your work performance? What kind of skills do you need to develop to get where you want to go? How can you improve yourself and grow? What can you learn about that’s new in your industry?
Thinking about these questions will help you begin brainstorming if you’re not necessarily sure where you want to end up.
2. Use SMART goals formatting.
An easy way to write out your career goals is to format it like a SMART goal, like mentioned above. Your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
Being as specific and relevant as possible is important for you to communicate with your manager or a potential employer.
3. Write short term and long term goals.
When you’re writing out your goals, write out a few short term and long term goals. It’s important to consider what type of goals you want to achieve in the next few years, as well as goals for the distant future.
You can come up with a career trajectory, and then write out short term goals that will help you get there. Additionally, when writing out your long term goals, consider why you want to become an executive or own a company. Thinking about what motivates you can help you maintain focus.
4. Be detailed with your plan.
Writing out your goals doesn’t just mean writing out a wish list. You should also come up with a plan of action for how you’re going to achieve your goals. This plan will consist of a basic trajectory, and the short term goals you need to achieve to get there.
I asked Nicole Palidwor about the “do’s” and “don’ts” when it comes to writing career goals.
Palidwor told me, “You’ll want to write career goals that make sense for your current lifestyle, available bandwidth, and the urgency of a professional change. People often get ambitious, but come to realize sending out 50 applications a week isn’t realistic.”

“Instead, create action steps that reflect what you can and want to do by establishing smaller, but still relevant, achievable, and appropriately ranked goals.”

Palidwor adds, “Don’t make too large or ambiguous goals. Break them down. Additionally, I’d quantify your expected results to hold yourself accountable, and give yourself deadlines so that you stay on track to achieving your goals. The more you break down and organize your goals, the easier they seem (and are!) to accomplish.”
When writing career goals for a resume, however, you’ll also want to ensure you make it clear how you plan on helping the company hit its own business goals — not just your own.
As Marcy Williams, Founder and Career Coach at Coach Marcy Life Coaching Services, tells me, “When writing out my career goals for a performance review or for a resumé, I make talking points of what I contribute to the role within the organization first. I discuss how I love working as a team to improve processes and the experience for all versus speaking of just myself.”

Williams adds, “Do not talk about yourself first when jotting down career goals because it will give the employer the feeling that you are only in it for yourself and not for the betterment of the organization.”

And there you have it! You’re well on your way towards creating more actionable, tactical career goals to get you where you want to be. Keep these tips in-mind, and don’t be afraid to iterate over time as you learn more about what you like — and don’t like — about your current career path. 

We’re all familiar with traditional brainstorming as a way to produce new ideas. You sit in a room with a whiteboard and work with whatever comes to mind. Maybe you play a few rounds of word association to strengthen your ideas, or pull up Google and use research to flesh them out.
But there are many alternative exercises for tackling problems and developing new ideas, both individually and in a group setting.

Ranging from structured to silly, here are the best creative brainstorming exercises and techniques to help you get your problem-solving juices flowing. This list is a modified excerpt from my guide Creative Ideation for Digital Marketers: Theory to Practice.
1. Storyboarding

If you’re trying to design a process, storyboarding can help you see where your collective understanding of a problem supports or conflicts with a proposed solution, and where more thought/research is needed. By developing a visual story to explore the problem as a narrative, your team will be able to see how ideas interact and connect to form a solution.
Sticky notes are your friend. Take a few minutes to write out your ideas as individual notes. These don’t have to be complete thoughts — physically pinning up quotes, pictures, user info, and the like can help you see new relationships between different components.
Once you have a group of sticky notes to work from, start arranging them on the board as a progression: first this, then that. Organizing your ideas as a continuous series will help you see new connections and eliminate extraneous material that doesn’t support your end goal.
Why This Brainstorming Technique Works

Storyboarding allows you to see your ideas in a sequential pattern.
You’ll be able to see an overarching overview of a new or current process — without digging too deeply into the details.
You can start from anywhere — the beginning, middle, or end — then fill in the blanks.

How to Use It in Marketing
Storyboarding is particularly useful for marketers. With it, you can:

Outline the sequential process of a marketing campaign from beginning to completion.
Improve an internal process such as backlink-building by drafting specific steps.
Storyboard a marketing video from beginning to end.

2. Mind Mapping
Mind mapping is a fairly common term nowadays — in fact, many types of software provide automated mind-mapping templates so you can better organize your data. Well, it also happens to be a great way to organize your ideas.

To create a mind map for creativity purposes, write down the task or problem you’re trying to solve at the center of your idea sheet (feel free to do this on your computer, but whiteboards are ideal).
Then, expand on this problem by surrounding it with terms that better describe what you need. If your problem is low website traffic, for example, some terms to write around this phrase might be “organic traffic,” “trusted content,” “SEO,” and “video strategy.”
Once your mind map has this first layer, add a second layer to each of your needs describing how you might be able to solve for these individual challenges. Around “SEO,” you might write “topic clusters,” “dedicated SEO strategist,” and “video marketing course.”

Keep adding to your mind map using the steps above until you’ve sufficiently broken down your problem into manageable parts. It’s a fantastic problem-solving technique that fosters creative answers to subjects that might otherwise seem uninspiring.
Why This Brainstorming Technique Works

Mind mapping allows you to start from any point and create clusters of potential processes.
You don’t need to have an order in mind; you can prioritize later.
You can add a myriad of topically relevant ideas as you go; with mind mapping, you never feel boxed-in.

How to Use It in Marketing
In marketing, you can use mind mapping to solve problems, like in the example above. You can also use it to:

Draft content maps for your entire blog or website. You can begin with an overarching topic, then begin creating branches for each subtopic.
Come up with marketing campaign ideas divided by major topics and subtopics.
Create Yes/No scenarios for placing different lead segments into specific drip campaigns.

3. Word Banking
If you assume “work banking” is a fancy term for “word association,” well, you’re right. But in a word banking session, what you do with the words you come up with is much more sophisticated.
While word associations often focus on pairs of words, word banking asks you to form big groups of terms that all describe just a few themes or topics. Creating word banks in a business setting can help you dismantle a project into manageable parts — kind of like a mind map.
Then, when your work bank is complete, you can retroactively form connections between the terms you came up with, and use those connections to craft ideas that are guaranteed to include all of your most important characteristics.
Why This Brainstorming Technique Works

Word association is a relatively natural, low-effort task — simply begin with a big idea, then begin jotting down anything that comes up for you.
It doesn’t require you to know the when, why, or how of an idea.
Word banking will surface gasps in your knowledge. If you find yourself stuck, it’s time to complete additional research.

How to Use It in Marketing
Word banking is ideal for content projects and can be a precursor for more in-depth keyword research. Use word banking to:

Surface everything you know about a topic you’re thinking of tackling in your blog or website.
“Word vomit” blog post ideas without feeling boxed into a formal keyword research process.
Uncover where you and your teammates may need additional training. For instance, if you choose to start a word bank for “conversion rate optimization” and the term “A/B testing” never comes up, it may be time to sign everyone up for a CRO course.

4. S.C.A.M.P.E.R.

S.C.A.M.P.E.R. is essentially a process for expanding and improving upon ideas by testing and questioning them from different angles. For each letter of the mnemonic, ask yourself a related question about your project or the problem at hand:

Substitute: What would happen to the project if we swapped X for Y?

Combine: What would happen to the project if we combined X and Y?

Adapt: What changes would need to be made to adapt this project to a different context?

Modify: What could we modify to create more value on this project?

Put to another use: What other uses or applications might this project have?

Eliminate: What could we remove from the project to simplify it?

Reverse: How could we reorganize this project to make it more effective?

This method forces you to approach your project or problem in unexpected ways. Each question asks you to dig a little deeper into the issue and consider new possibilities.
Why This Brainstorming Technique Works

S.C.A.M.P.E.R. will get you to think beyond predefined assumptions about your product or project.
The series of “would” and “could” questions let your mind run free with minimal commitment to any actual change or alteration.
It allows you to improve a process even if you believe the process has reached its optimal form.

How to Use It in Marketing
While S.C.A.M.P.E.R. might seem like a brainstorming activity for product development teams, it can serve marketing teams just as well. Use it to:

Improve a current process — such as keyword research or market research — by substituting, combining, and adapting tasks.
Optimize the copy of a blog post or campaign by crafting hypothetical changes that could improve the piece. These changes could make it easier to “template” the piece.
Build a drip campaign that effectively gets leads to convert by modifying and substituting certain email messages.

5. S.W.O.T. Analysis
Entrepreneurs and business leaders know exactly what a SWOT analysis is. Well, it also happens to be a helpful brainstorming exercise.
S.W.O.T. stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. When launching a company, it’s your textbook starting point (literally — there isn’t a single business school textbook in the world that doesn’t have a version of it).
But while a company’s founder might use a SWOT analysis to create his or her business model, brainstormers can use the same diagram to better organize their ideas.
Your SWOT analysis doesn’t have to be all that complicated when brainstorming. In fact, it can simply be four columns on a whiteboard during your average “shout it out” ideas meeting. When thinking of a new logo design, for instance, ask yourself what you like most about your current logo (strengths). What do you dislike about it (weaknesses)? What should it have more of (opportunities)? What other company logos should you be mindful of (threats)?
Why This Brainstorming Technique Works

A S.W.O.T analysis will effectively put you in problem-solving mode before problems ever arise.
It takes into account competitive advantages and disadvantages — a consideration that often comes long after brainstorming.
You’ll get a much more detailed and comprehensive overview of what can be improved.

How to Use It in Marketing
S.W.O.T analyses are typically used in business and entrepreneurship, but marketers can use it to:

Improve a social or search engine campaign before launch and find out where you may have opportunities or be facing threats.
Create a much better project plan for clients by analyzing the project’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Audit an existing process within the team, such as handoffs to sales or content creation.

6. Zero Draft

The Zero Draft is an ideation technique often used by writers and is essentially a form of focused free-writing. For marketers and agency professionals, it can help focus the first stages of a new project by establishing what you currently know and getting your initial ideas out of your brain and onto paper.
Taking your central theme or topic:

Write down everything you currently know about the subject.
Write down what you need or want to know about the subject, but don’t currently know.
Reflect on why the subject is important.
Add anything else that takes your fancy — this is a chance to get whatever’s floating around in your head out into the world.

The Zero Draft method is all about getting everything you can think of relating to your topic down on paper, so don’t be concerned if it looks messy and unfocused. The goal is just to get past the initial block that often plagues creative professionals in the early stages of a new project.
Why This Brainstorming Technique Works

The Zero Draft method has minimal constraints while allowing you to make sense of your ideas in coherent sentences.
It’s especially a good fit for those who like to write their ideas down.
As opposed to a whiteboard session, Zero Drafting allows you to document your thoughts in a more permanent format.

How to Use It in Marketing
Zero Drafting has ample uses in marketing. Use it to:

Draft a blog post, article, or page from start to finish without stopping.
Create a preliminary outline for a marketing video or video advertisement.
Map the sequence of a new client project or internal project.

7. Reverse Brainstorming
In certain corporations and government entities, data security is the highest priority. So high, in fact, that these organizations have been known to hire hackers — many of whom have committed internet crimes — to hack their systems and find out where the weaknesses are.
This “reverse” approach to security, wherein you hack your own company, is considered one of the best ways to secure a server from intrusion. And for us, it’s the inspiration behind this fourth brainstorming technique.
When you reverse brainstorm, you essentially work to create problems rather than solutions. “Why on Earth would you want to do that?” you might ask. Creating problems teaches you what not to do so you’re more intuitive to the needs of your project. Think of it like hacking your company to find out where the weaknesses are.
Say, for example, you want to drive awareness to a new product. As a marketer, you have many promotional channels at your disposal, but you don’t know how to use them or where to start. In a reverse brainstorming session, you might come up with the following:

Avoid hyperlinks to the product’s purchase page
Don’t tweet about the product
Criticize the features of your product

Obviously, these are all horrible ideas if your goal is to promote the product. But, take the reverse of these ideas, and you’ve effectively created three excellent starting points for a supportive campaign: Link to the product in a series of blog posts, develop a Twitter campaign around the product, and identify specific features of the product that prospects would be most interested in reading or hearing about.
Why This Brainstorming Technique Works

Reverse brainstorming tells you what to avoid from the get-go.
It’s easier to start with what to not to do rather than what to do — the latter of which can make us feel stuck.
It helps you avoid decision fatigue early on in the ideation process.

How to Use It in Marketing
As referenced above, you can use reverse brainstorming to come up with actions for promoting a new product. You can also use it to:

Come up with the top worst clients you could attract to your company, which would tell you the types of leads you should pursue.
Create the worst verbiage you could use in your ads, which would tell you the type of tone and wording you should use in your campaigns.
Outline what failure looks like for your team, which you could then use to come up with new goals and objectives.

Are you brainstorming with your group or team? While all of the activities above could be used in a group setting, there are a few exercises that are made specifically for groups. Let’s take a look at the ones you could use below.
Group Brainstorming Techniques
1. Group Sketching
You don’t have to be an artist or a designer to benefit from sketching. Visual thinking can help to trigger and develop ideas that discussion and writing might otherwise leave unturned. Similar to brain-writing, group sketching involves participants building on each other’s ideas.
Each member of your team will sketch an image related in a central way to a concept, idea, or topic you want to explore further. Each sketch is then passed to someone else, who sketches another related image on the same piece of paper. This is repeated multiple times around the group. The final images are then reviewed and discussed with the aim of discovering connections that individuals hadn’t spotted on their own.
2. Brain Netting
Creative exercises and ideas meetings always go better the more people you have in the room. Unfortunately, that means remote employees might not be solicited for their input as much as they should be. Brain netting is the act of connecting with folks electronically to make sure everyone can offer their input and feedback on a project.
Brain netting doesn’t just have to be a group phone call, though. Company messaging platforms like Slack are the perfect way to get everyone into a chatroom to spill their ideas. As ideas are submitted, each chatroom member can vote for their favorites and combine the best qualities of multiple concepts.
3. Questioning Assumptions
We all carry assumptions with us — assumptions about what’s possible, what isn’t possible, what people want, what will work, and what won’t. This exercise forces us to challenge these assumptions and put everything on the table.
Draw up a list of all the assumptions you can think of about your current project — true or not — and discuss the list as a group, questioning each one. Doing this at various stages in your campaign development can spark fresh ideas, as well as identify knowledge gaps.
4. Wishing
This technique encourages your team to let imaginations run wild. Ask participants to dream up the most unattainable, extreme, and impractical solutions they can think of to a given problem. Create a list of a few dozen wishes pertaining to the task at hand.
Focusing on a selection of wishes, consider and discuss the ideas in detail, with the aim of triggering new but more realistic concepts to pursue. What makes them so impossible? How can that idea be scaled down? Which features of that wish could we integrate into this other approach? You might be surprised to discover applicable, real-world solutions among your team’s wildest wishes.
5. Alter-Egos / Heroes
This is a fun exercise where small groups imagine how they would go about solving a given problem if their team were led by a famous character, fictional or real. How would Cat Woman go about positioning your brand as a thought leader in virtual reality? What would Steve Jobs do to improve your latest communications package? How would Don Draper get your core messages across to millennials?
You can either choose someone you think embodies the right qualities for the job to help develop your vision, or someone at the opposite end of that scale, to explore less conventional ideas.
6. Six Thinking Hats
There’s a whole host of problem-solving exercises and tools that help participants to put themselves into the shoes of another. This particular tool was invented by Edward de Bono, a psychologist, author, and consultant who pioneered the technique in his 1985 book Six Thinking Hats. The method involves breaking down ideas into six areas of thought:

Logic: The facts.

Optimism: The value and the benefits.

Devil’s Advocate: The difficulties and the dangers.

Emotion: Feelings and intuitions.

Creativity: Possibilities and new ideas.

Management: Making sure that the rules of the hat are observed.

When approaching a new problem or project, have each member of your team put on one of these different “hats” for the discussion. Each “hat” represents a unique set of priorities and perspectives that will help focus your discussion and consider the project from a wide variety of angles.
For example, if you’re wearing the “Devil’s Advocate” hat, it’s your job to consider the project’s limitations and challenges. It may feel uncomfortable at first to temporarily adopt a very narrow form of thinking, but the extremes can help teams fully explore a project.
7. Forced Connections
This exercise involves bringing together ideas that serve very different needs or interests to form a new concept. You see this sort of thinking all the time in products like the Apple Watch, the Swiss Army knife, smartphones, or even sofa beds.
To put this method into practice, bring a bag of random items to your next meeting, or draw up two lists of unrelated items on the board. Ask team members to pick two or more items and explore different ways they can be connected. This technique can produce some silly results, but it’s ultimately a helpful way of getting your team out of a creative rut.
8. Brain-Writing
In this exercise, participants simply write down a few rough ideas for solving a particular problem on a piece of paper. Each piece of paper is then passed on to someone else, who reads it silently and adds their own ideas to the page. This process is repeated until everyone has had a chance to add to each original piece of paper. The notes can then be gathered, ready for discussion.
The big advantage of brain-writing is that it makes sure everybody is given the opportunity to have their thoughts and ideas thoroughly considered by the group. This avoids the loudest or most extroverted people unintentionally dominating the sessions.
For some teams, brainstorming might come easily — they might even have a process in place. For other teams, it’s not as easy, even if they have a handful of activities they know they’d like to use. Below, I’ll cover how you can get the most out of your brainstorming session.
1. Focus on quantity over quality.
Brainstorming is all about “vomiting” any and all ideas you have — no matter how silly they may seem. (And trust me, there are no silly ideas in a brainstorming session.) For that reason, don’t worry about coming up with quality ideas and instead focus on quantity.
Write down anything that you or your team have come up with. What may seem implausible now may be what your team chooses to pursue later.
2. Selectively apply constraints to keep the session focused.
While you should come up with as many ideas as possible, you shouldn’t run all over the place, crossing topics that are irrelevant or that are unattainable for various reasons. Consider creating budgetary constraints, establishing a timeline, and putting up guardrails that will keep your brainstorming session in line with your goals.
For instance, if your budget for a new marketing campaign is $2,000, but you know you don’t want to spend it on pay-per-click ads, you can spend your brainstorming power on other avenues.
3. Don’t prune ideas as you brainstorm.
Resist the urge to prune ideas as you come up with them. Even if you think you’ve got a much better idea at hand, let that old idea sit there — you might use it later on another project, or even in the second phase of your current project. Ideas that seem obsolete can also act as guardrails later on.
4. Never finalize or commit during the brainstorming session.
When you get an excellent idea during your brainstorming session, you might feel tempted to commit to it and set it aside, then continue brainstorming other ideas. The problem with that approach is that it limits you considerably, because now you’re brainstorming around that one idea rather than brainstorming freely. Without knowing it, you’ll anchor your brainstorming on that idea to make it come to fruition.
The goal of brainstorming, of course, is to finalize one final concept. But until you’ve tackled the concept from all possible angles, don’t commit to a certain idea until you’ve laid out all of the routes you could take.
5. Look to other sources for inspiration.
When you get stuck, it’s imperative to look at the competition to get inspiration — especially in marketing. What are they doing that you could imitate? Which ideas could you bounce off of? Even the most productive brainstorming sessions will come to a halt at one point, and inspiration will go a long way in jumpstarting your session again.
You might even print out certain images, articles, and campaigns to keep your team inspired as you work.
6. Use a whiteboard (and take pictures of each whiteboarding session).
Using a whiteboard might seem like the stereotypical brainstorming route, but it has its merits: It allows your team to get any and all ideas out in a seemingly impermanent way. No idea is too silly to write on a whiteboard because you can easily erase it.
Of course, I wouldn’t suggest erasing your sessions; take photos of your finished whiteboards to keep all of your ideas on record. Remember to pair whiteboarding with a creative brainstorming exercise. Instead of writing “[Topic] Brainstorming Session” up top and letting anyone chime in, create a chart for a S.W.O.T analysis, or list different alter-egos to detail how they’d promote your product.
7. Take breaks.
If you want to stay productive during your brainstorming session, it’s imperative to take breaks. Let your team take a walk, scroll through social media, or go out for a bite. Do brainstorming in short bursts, or do it in long blocks. Whatever you do, schedule breaks for your team to ensure everyone’s minds are as clear as possible during the process.
Use Creative Brainstorming Techniques to Ideate Better
Traditional brainstorming is dead. Your team no longer has to sit in a circle in silence while you try to write ideas on an empty whiteboard. Use the above exercises to come up with powerful marketing projects, advertisements, and campaigns that empower your team and your company to grow better.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in November 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.