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Central to all marketing campaigns is the strategy the team intends to use for marketing the product. Is the product going to be advertised on the television or on radio? Is the campaign going to target a specific age or gender group? These questions are important to any marketing campaign. Developing the strategy for a campaign requires brainstorming to best determine the way to get the product to the targeted consumer. Mind Mapping can be instrumental in “mapping out” one’s marketing strategy, and organizing the best path from product to consumer. By using a Mind Map’s visual, color and image components, marketers will find it easy to translate brainstorming thoughts and ideas into actionable marketing strategies.
Using Mind Mapping to Develop a Marketing Strategy
So you’ve identified your target consumer for your product: teenage boys age 13-15. Now, it’s time to come up with a strategy for marketing your product to them. You and your marketing team begin the process of brainstorming ideas for this strategy by using a Mind Map. The central item you might list on the Mind Map is the product itself, represented as the main image of your map. To the right of the central image, an image or words depicting your target group, the teenage boys, might be shown. Flowing from this image depicting the target group, on the “child branches”, could be the main channels used to reach this group, such as MTV television commercials, or ads on radio stations who play the Top 100 songs. The next depiction on the map might be an image representing channels that reflect your audience, when marketing your product. For instance, if your product requires it to be explained using visual images, a radio station ad would not be a useful marketing channel. The channels most intuitive to your product could be listed on “child branches” attached to this image. Lastly, you might add a “branch” depicting the overlapping marketing channels between the obvious channels for marketing your product, and the channels used most often to reach teenage boys. After looking at your initial map, you realize that television ads and Internet commercials are natural channels for marketing your product and channels that commonly reach your target group. You and your team then decide to focus on television ads as part of your marketing strategy. Since your target group watches MTV most often, you decide that this is the channel on which to air your ads.
In this simplistic example, the Mind Map diagram helped organize some preliminary thoughts surrounding the target group and common marketing channels. By using a Mind Map, the marketing team are able to develop one facet of their marketing strategy. Attached is a Mind Map diagram that shows the brainstorming notes alluded to in the above example. As the diagram exhibits, even a simplistic map can help formulate an actionable marketing strategy.
Continuing to Develop the Marketing Strategy Using Mind Mapping
As the process continues for developing the marketing strategy, the marketing team may want to add more images, target groups, pictures, or colors to the Mind Map described above. Or, the team may want to put together a new map for each facet of their marketing strategy. Either way, a Mind Map’s spatial and extremely visual layout can allow a marketing team to “map out” their thoughts surrounding a marketing strategy. In the above example, the Mind Map helped organize these thoughts in a manner that showed the natural flow of the product to the target group. And, identifying this natural flow is a crucial step in developing a great marketing strategy.