The customers and prospects you market to aren’t holding still, and you can’t afford to either. Continuously gathering insights about your marketing efforts will put you in a strong position for more engagement. Coming up with new and creative ways to engage your audience and drive growth is an essential part of any marketing team’s responsibilities. This ideation process is the kernel that sprouts into marketing programs or campaigns. On a more tactical level, ideation can include identifying new content ideas, sales tools, or techniques to reach prospective customers and move them through your funnel.

Fielding New Requests While Staying on Track

As as marketer, you’re regularly receiving cross functional requests from customer-facing teams that need information, assets, or other materials to best represent your company’s brands and products. You might get a Slack message from someone asking for a case study or new marketing program that seems like a great opportunity for your team, but you already have a ton of goals and objectives that would be sacrificed if you choose to work on this new idea instead. What do you do? How do you field the request and not sacrifice your roadmap? It can be difficult to capture and organize all the incoming ideas and requests that come your way — not to mention deciding on the ones to implement. Because everything is coming from different groups and channels, you may struggle to track it all with manual tools such as static documents or spreadsheets.

From Overwhelm to Action Plan

This is where adopting a holistic approach to managing ideas can ease your struggle and put you in command of that flow of incoming ideas and requests. A solid idea management process gives you a way to capture and review every request so you don’t become overwhelmed. You can embrace all the incoming data and use it to improve your marketing efforts. For example, you might think of a way to counter a new competitor after a colleague in sales asks you to analyze a specific tool. Or you might learn that customers need additional training after a teammate in customer support requests a webinar on certain functionality.

Democratizing Idea Generation

Inviting your entire company to share their ideas is not only empowering but your roster of ideas will be richer by casting a wider net. You’ll want to gather input from executives, your marketing teammates, and customer-facing teams that hear from users firsthand about the problems they’re trying to solve.

Incubating the Next Big Idea

Ideas need a dedicated space to mature and incubate, a standardized process of evaluation, and transparency as to what is happening with that feedback. Idea management software can integrate with many of your existing tools, such as Jira, Asana, Slack, and Teams, and give those inside your organization as well as your partners and customers a portal to submit ideas and requests. By systematically collecting, evaluating, and prioritizing relevant insights to improve your existing marketing programs and inspire new ones, you’ll capture the strongest ideas, so you can include them on your marketing roadmap and ultimately improve what you deliver to customers.