Workshops and mood boards are top tools for generating innovative marketing campaign themes. Let's go over why Imarc uses them and discuss all the benefits!
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When thinking about your annual marketing strategy, an essential part of the process is figuring out each marketing theme. A theme can spread across all your assets (emails, banners, landing pages, videos, etc.) and is key to a successful, memorable campaign. Utilizing collaborative workshops and creative, visual mood boards is crucial in creating these themes.
Let's explore how these collaborative activities can assist in your theme-creation journey.
Workshops
The goal of a workshop is to set a clear direction for a campaign's theme. There are several ways to perform workshops. However, at Imarc, we prefer to use Figma's collaboration tool, FigJam.
FigJam has many templates and helpful tools that can be utilized as the base for a rewarding workshop. Collaboration tools, such as FigJam, are excellent for creating a space where all parties can work together on the same canvas. FigJam has great features within the tool to help with the flow of a workshop and brainstorming session. Some of our favorites include:
Timer – This feature creates structure and time limits to keep the workshop in motion.
Music – Tunes help to prevent uncomfortable silences while participants ideate and generate ideas.
Emojis – Smiles, upvotes, and other expressions allow users to react to others' ideas in an easy-to-use, trackable format.
Voting – Ranking allows participants to vote on their favorite ideas throughout the workshop. It also helps illuminate the strongest direction for the theme.
Commenting – This works well when asking questions or elaborating on ideas presented during the workshop. It also allows for participants to build on other people's ideas.
Templates – To establish the basis of a workshop, we like to use templates that include concept mapping, crazy 8s, this or that, and empathy mapping.
Here are a few additional things to remember before setting up a workshop session.
Provide all participants with baseline information to help prepare them for the workshop and allow them time to generate ideas and thoughtful insights in advance of the workshop session.
When possible, pick an energizing time of day. Avoid scheduling a workshop session first thing in the morning or the last time slot in the afternoon to ensure that participants aren't distracted or just starting their day.
At the close of a workshop, ideally, there will be a clear path forward for the campaign theme. If you have more than one concept that rises to the top, you can bring them all into the next stage: mood boarding. Creating multiple mood boards will help fine-tune the direction from a visual perspective.
Mood boards
Before we dive into the mood-boarding stage, let's discuss what a mood board is. A mood board is a type of visual presentation and collage that combines text, imagery, inspirational materials, and color to evoke an emotion, a general idea, or a style around a theme.
Mood boards can be high-level, which gives a holistic view of a theme direction. Here are some key aspects of mood boarding to take into consideration:
Format – There are multiple ways to present a mood board. Some of our favorites are an organized, gridded format or a more collage-like, organic format.
Timing – To save time, it's best to use found imagery that inspires the visual direction rather than spending countless hours creating unique imagery.
A number of visual directions – Showing contrasting variations of at least two to three mood boards creates multiple visual directions for the audience to react to.
Connect to the audience – The visuals should display an emotion, attribute, or feeling users can relate to. This will help create a connection to the campaign once assets are generated.
Purpose – When presenting mood boards to your audience, make sure there is appropriate context and reasoning about why they are utilized and the end goal for producing them.
Workshopping and mood boarding are vital parts of campaign theme ideation. Imarc has implemented these steps into our clients' campaign timelines to ensure fresh, innovative, thoughtful visuals and messaging are promoted to their audiences.
Are you ready to up the efficacy of your marketing campaigns? We'd love to collaborate on theme ideation. All you have to do to get started is say hello.
