Once in a while, you see a mind map that makes you go, “Wow – that’s cool!” For me, this is one of those maps. It features an elegant design that communicates with impact, but doesn’t overwhelm with too much detail or too many adornments. Its content is clear and unambiguous, which makes it possible for anyone to look at it and immediately understand what it means. In this new Effective Mind Maps report, we’ll look at what works well in this excellent mind map, as well as a few areas where it could be improved.

This report is only accessible to Mind Mapping Insider members. Why not make a commitment to make a bigger impact in your life and work? The resources in this program will help you to become a better planner, problem solver and project manager. You’ll triumph over information overload, and discover a clarity that will help you to make better decisions, faster. Sign up today to join the growing group of MMI members who have made selected the option to be more influential and creative in their lives.

One of the lesser-known applications of mind mapping software is to utilize it to develop your company’s marketing messages. Why would you want to do that, you may be asking yourself? Can’t you just start writing copy based upon your customer’s needs and your product’s benefits?

Not so fast. When it comes to influencing a prospect to buy your product or service, it’s best to know more about what motivates them. For that reason, it makes sense to map out the interests, behaviors and beliefs of your target customers – in essence, to create a detailed persona of your ideal customer. So says a recent article in Website Magazine.

One of the common problems of many marketing campaigns is that they treat prospective customers as if they are one monolithic group of people, with identical interests, behaviors and beliefs. This approach tends to result in lukewarm marketing messages that aren’t very persuasive – and ultimately don’t generate adequate sales. A much more effective tactic is to subdivide your target audience into sub-groups, based upon demographics and the three aforementioned criteria, as shown in the example mind map above. This gets you much closer to your prospect’s “hot buttons” – enabling you to develop customized messages that are much more tightly aligned with the needs of each sub-group. And if you’re successful in doing that, your campaigns will probably generate better sales results.

Here’s another thought, which the article doesn’t cover: If your job involves the development of online or offline communications, one dominant school of thought says that you should relentlessly “A/B test” it. In other words, create two different versions of the message, varying one factor (such as an e-mail subject or call to action) and then send each version to a small sub-set of your target audience and measure the results. In Darwinian fashion, the version that performed better will survive, while the one that didn’t work as well is discarded. A mind map is an excellent way to develop your A/B messaging, and to show a side-by-side comparison of the elements and variations you plan to vary as part of your testing process.

You can use this visually-based prospect definition method to drive the messaging for your organization’s web pages, e-mails and other online and print campaigns. If you work for a marketing communications agency, a messaging mind map can be quite useful for developing your marketing plans and tactics, as well as an engaging tool for showing your thinking to your client.

But don’t just think of it in this context; the creative brief is a useful tool that can be adapted to almost any type of small project where you need to get a team of people on the same page.

In this new Mind Mapping Insider report, I will explain how to create a creative brief, and some of the ways in which you may adapt it to your needs.

If you cannot see the link to this report, that’s because it’s accessible to Mind Mapping Insider members. Why not make a commitment to become a more effective mind mapper – which will enable you to become a better planner, problem solver and project manager? Sign up today to join the growing group of MMI members who have made the decision to be more influential and creative in their jobs.

One very practical application of mind maps is to use them as a checklist, a reminder of thing we need to do on a regular basis. A case in point is Dana VanDen Heuvel’s excellent content marketing map, which outlines actions that aspiring thought leaders need to do in different time periods to effectively market their content and expertise.

Since I’m a publisher, I found this mind map to be particularly valuable. It’s something I can pin to the bulletin board next to my computer, as a reminder of the activities I should consider incorporating into the planning for this blog. It’s also an inspiration to me to think about what my readers need to be more effective, and to develop content like this mind map that people will WANT to share because it’s so interesting and valuable to them.

Here are a few things that I think are notable about  this well-designed mind map:

Note how the time horizons start at “daily” and then grow progressively longer as you walk around the mind map in a clockwise direction, eventually ending at things you ought to do on an annual basis.

I also like how Dana has incorporated colorful icons into this mind map, to add visual interest.

The central topic includes the logo of Dana’s company, MarketingSavant, as well as some descriptive text in several sizes. This ensures that his branding will be carried far and wide as people share this interesting mind map. The text sizes are fairly easy to do in many mind mapping programs – I’ve tried it, but don’t use it often enough. The process is simple: You drag your mouse to select the text you want to resize, and then pick a new font size. Line breaks are accomplished by holding down the shift key and then hitting “Enter.” That’s all there is to it.

One suggestion: If I was Dana, I’d put his name on this mind map, so he promotes his personal brand as well as that of his marketing consultancy.

Nice job, Dana!

The company has a very talented artist who can translate my ideas into polished, professional looking finished products. But I needed a way to communicate my ideas clearly to him. And I was looking for something a bit better than a simple pencil sketch.

My tool of choice for prototyping my marketing and promotional ideas during the last year has been SmartDraw. Although it has been designed to help users to create many types of business diagrams, I have found it to be equally adept at creating mockups of marketing materials. I simply open a new flow charting diagram, which gives me access to the shapes and tools I need.

As you can see from the examples in this blog post, it’s very easy to import images into the workspace, and resize them as needed. I haven’t found a way to crop them to remove extraneous elements, however, so I do that in Photoshop and them import the trimmed images.

Examples of what I’ve created in SmartDraw

Frames of an animated GIF ad: Each frame is represented by a separate rectangle, so the artist can see the wording I’d like to appear, in order, from top to bottom (shown at the top of this blog post).

A direct mailer for a new product: Note the wording and arrow to the left of the mailer design (red highlight in the image at right), which I used to ask the artist to make some modifications to this image. In this case, I used SmartDraw not only to “show,” but also to “tell.”

A wireframe layout for a web page redesign (not pictured here).

Why does SmartDraw work so well for this type of work? Because most marketing materials are based upon a grid type of layout. In other words, brochures, web pages, flyers and other marketing materials are designed using a combination of square and rectangular regions – which are very easy to approximate in this powerful business diagramming program.

Benefits

Here are some of the benefits I’ve discovered by using this approach:

• The artist has a clearer idea of what I want to see created.
• I’m able to bounce a rough prototype, including text headlines and major copy points, off of my boss – without tying up even an hour of the artist’s time.
• Once I have my boss’ feedback, I open up SmartDraw, make the necessary modifications to the mockup and then give it to the artist for further development and refinement. I encourage him to use his creative license to improve upon what I have created.
• This process eliminates a lot of back and forth iterations between me, my boss and the artist. What I give to the artist is much closer to the wording and design of the final piece – which enables the artist to use his time working on higher value added activities, rather than making repeated tweaks to the design and wording of the piece.

Other marketing applications of SmartDraw

I also use SmartDraw to develop illustrations that explain how a product works. In this case, I used the program to depict a high-level overview of a complex training curriculum. I was asked by my employer’s salespeople to create a new diagram (pictured at right) that drilled down into a single lesson, showing how all of its elements fit together.

In summary, I have found SmartDraw to be an essential tool as part of my job as the marketing manager for this safety training products firm.

All that changed in January when I took a new job as marketing manager for a small safety training products firm. My first major project has been to help this company to launch an ambitious, multi-faceted training curriculum to the mining industry. Based on a blended learning model, it incorporates web-based training modules, a PC-based simulator, and a variety of on-the-job training tools for trainers and trainees. It can also include a learning management system and several other elements.

The bottom line? This is a complex product. Obviously, it would take a mind-numbing volume of words to adequately describe how all of the pieces worked together to provide a powerful training solution. How could we communicate it quickly and simply to prospective customers?

Being a visual kinda guy, I realized almost immediately that one of the best ways to do that would be to create a visual that showed how all of these elements work together to provide a complete training solution. Using SmartDraw 2010, I created a series of diagrams that became awesome talking points with my boss, as we worked our way through successive iterations and came closer to a complete and accurate representation of the training curriculum.

Here’s what I learned about SmartDraw 2010 in the process of working with it during the past two-and-a-half months:

• It is intuitive and easy to use; all of its functions behaved as I would expect them to, and there were no ugly surprises.
• It makes great use of right-click commands, so you can accomplish common tasks without mousing over to the ribbon toolbar.
• The set of templates in SmartDraw 2010 is very impressive, and more importantly, very useful. You can easily take one of them and use it as a starting point for your own diagram.
• The straightforward, well-designed set of diagramming tools in this program made it easy for me to quickly create some compelling, great-looking diagrams that got incorporated into a number of planning documents, and could also be given to our developers and designers, to incorporate directly into sales brochures and web pages – or to inspire them to create something more polished and colorful in Adobe Illustrator.

The bottom line is that SmartDraw 10 has helped to make me look good to my new employer. I think they appreciate the fact that I’m able to think and represent my ideas visually – thanks to this excellent program.

• Map your customers and identify the most promising ones for targeted sales campaigns
• Develop new products to sell
• Create a map to clearly and more completely understand the evolving or unmet needs of your customers.
• Analyze and improve your company’s business model
• Identify opportunities to reduce waste in your business – the savings go straight to the bottom line.
• Map your current market segments, and identify adjacent ones with similar needs into which you can expand your marketing and sales.
• Brainstorm the content of a white paper or information product (e-book) that will help you to dramatize your product’s or service’s unique selling proposition to potential customers.

In what other ways are you using mind mapping software to grow your business?

Here are 10 ways in which you can utilize mind mapping software to rethink your business, leap ahead of your competitors and delight your customers:

1. Map out ideas to improve or extend your existing products and services.
2. Map your customer segments, including the development of personas to zero in on how their needs have changed in light of the current recession; identify the most promising ones for targeted sales campaigns and look for those that may be under-served by your competitors.
3. Map your current market segments, and identify adjacent ones with similar needs into which you can expand your marketing and sales.
4. Do a competitive analysis, and use your mind map to identify gaps you can fill in areas that matter to your most attractive prospective customers.
5. Use it to perform a SWOT (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats) analysis, with a particular emphasis on potential disruptive threats. Which emerging firms are you not taking seriously today? What if they suddenly got much better? Mind maps are great for outlining future scenarios like this one.
6. Look for opportunities to reduce waste and streamline business processes. The savings you uncover will go right to your bottom line!
7. Analyze and improve your business model. How are companies in other industries or markets creating sustainable value? What lessons can you adapt or learn from what they have accomplished?
8. Conduct research into emerging industry trends and “weak signals,” and use a mind map to capture, organize and analyze your findings for new insights and opportunities.
9. Brainstorm potential partnering opportunities – the more unusual, the better. Don’t forget your local universities, who can help you with market research and business planning!
10. Ask thought-provoking questions that to generate new insights into your business, its challenges and opportunities. Record both the questions and your answers in a mind map.

How are you utilizing mind mapping software to help re-think your business? Please share your stories in the comments area below!