Idea Sprints: A day ticket to marketing innovation
It’s good to experiment. Especially when it comes to your marketing mix. With the world changing at such a rapid rate – with new technologies, evolving consumer behaviours and shifting buyer journeys – it’s harder than ever for businesses to keep up with the best ways to connect with their audiences.
As a rule of thumb, marketing teams should be ring-fencing 10% of their budgets to testing, learning, on going innovation and experimentation.
It all sounds good, but that’s easier said than done. With businesses putting increasing pressure on CMOs to tighten their budgets, suddenly saying you are giving yourself 10% to play around with may not sound like it’s going to sit too well with the business.
So where do you start? Well, one way could be by running an Ideas Sprint – a one day workshop where you work to rapidly come up with a series of tests projects to run.
Starting with a brief and an inspiration session (giving an overview of the great and good of what is going on in your industry and beyond) the day is spent, using various methods, coming up with a long list of ideas that span different technologies, different media channels and different audiences.
At the end of the day the ideas will ruthlessly be whittled down to a few select projects that the elusive 10% ‘skunk works’ budget can be spent on – and may even pave the way to your next big campaign.
At Earnest Labs we have run successful ideas sprints with everyone from the likes of Indeed who wanted to get more businesses signed up to the world’s biggest online job board, to the National Museum of Scotland who wanted to change the way people donated to bring in revenue for the museum.
If you are interested in finding about more about running an Ideas Sprint then please get in touch here.
