How to refresh your ideation process and inspire your team's creativity

Looking to improve your ideation process for Digital PR campaigns? Successful ideation is about more than just brainstorming—it's about thorough research, the right preparation, and fostering a creative environment. This guide covers essential strategies to help you generate impactful and innovative ideas that resonate with your audience, align with trends, and deliver results. Whether you’re refining your current process or building from scratch, these tips will help you elevate your campaigns to the next level.

Do nothing

When you overthink something, it can stifle creativity and make it harder to develop ideas. In these moments, the best strategy is often to step away and do nothing. This downtime gives your brain the chance to seek inspiration elsewhere. It’s surprising how many ideas can emerge while you’re showering, grocery shopping, chatting with friends, or watching your favourite TV show. Letting your mind wander in these everyday activities can be a powerful way to unlock creativity.

Put together a brief

Before entering an ideation session, it’s crucial to create a detailed briefing form to ensure everyone understands the goals of your Digital PR campaign. The brief should cover key information such as:

• What products/services are you trying to push?
• If your client has done Digital PR before, what worked and what didn't?
• Do you want to stick to a specific topic?
• Do you want to avoid any topics?
• What publications are you trying to go after?

Research👏, research👏, research👏

There are two main types of research we complete before an ideation, and these are:

1. Research the topic
2. Research the news cycle

Researching the topic

Having a strong understanding of the topic allows you to identify the largest amount of potential angles and related sub-topic.

Read your clients content

Reading your clients content helps you gain valuable information into their key products or services as well as their tone of voice and positioning.This understanding not only helps your ideation process, it also ensures that your campaigns align with your client.

Leverage your clients expertise

Arrange a call with your client to get a brief training session on their core offerings, services, and key areas of expertise. This direct interaction allows you to ask specific questions, clarify doubts, and gather valuable context straight from the experts. It’s a great way to align your strategies with their goals and gain an inside perspective on their audience, products, and market positioning.

Researching the news cycle

Before starting an ideation, it is crucial to understand the news cycle and what journalists are covering on that specific topic. 

Research the News tab in Google

Entering relevant keywords into the Google search bar and reviewing the "News" tab allows you to see the latest topics and trends covered by journalists. This method offers insights into current conversations, key themes, and emerging stories in your client’s industry. While you don’t want to simply replicate what’s already out there, this research can help you identify gaps, spot fresh angles, or offer new perspectives on trending topics. This approach ensures your campaigns are timely, relevant, and differentiated from existing stories.

Browse through your target publications

Reading through your clients dream publications will allow you to get an idea of what they're covering and the journalists who specialise in this area. This will give you some inspiration, and some people to follow on socials to keep up to date with the industry.

Analyse competitors

Before working with any client, and especially before creating ideas it is very beneficial to research competitors and see what type of content they are putting out, what they're achieving links for and where they're getting coverage.

Browse Social Media

X and Reddit are great tools to understand the different things journalists and the general public are speaking out. TikTok is also another great source of inspiration, with leveraging trends and "TikTok' debunking being two incredible strategies to get coverage.

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Many successful ideas build on existing campaigns that have already resonated with audiences. Taking inspiration from what has trended or received a strong response can be a great way to spark fresh, innovative concepts.

Digital PR Newsletters

There are many newsletters now but they are great sources of inspiration so sign up and you will find a variety of different PR campaigns in your inbox, a super efficient way to see what other people are doing.

Idea Generation

Provide the research well ahead of the session

You should put together some notes and links to relevant articles/posts ahead of your session. As a rule of thumb, we give our team at least 3 working days to review this document and add to it before our ideation session. This allows everyone to get on the same page, and focus their efforts on areas we know will work.

Provide prompt questions

Sometimes it can difficult to jump into an ideation, so we provide prompt questions to help get the team started. These include:

• What are the first three words that you think of when you hear the word [keyword]?
• What is trending in the news cycle?
• Who is the customer for [client] and what are their most common pain points?
• What types of data does the client have that we can leverage?
• Can we tap into any seasonal or cultural moments to create timely campaigns?
• What makes [client] newsworthy?

Choose a creative environment

Choosing the right time and setting for your ideation session is key to fostering creativity. As a rule, we avoid running ideation sessions after 2pm and, where possible, conduct them in person. This approach significantly boosts both the quantity and quality of ideas generated

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The right environment will vary for everyone, so try a number of different times/environments before choosing your preferred one.

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Encourage bad ideas

Some people hold back, worried that their ideas might be bad. However, clearing out the 'bad ideas' frees up mental space for more creative thinking. Since embracing this theory, we now spend the first five minutes of an ideation session getting the bad ideas out of the way, which has noticeably increased the number of strong ideas generated.

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Sometimes, the strongest ideas come from an idea that was bounced around after a bad one. It's hugely important to embrace the bad ideas as part of the ideation session.

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Don't filter your ideas immediately

Creativity is a product of the right-side of your brain, but logic and reason is a product of the left-side. This means that if you try and filter your ideas as you come up with them, you may be bouncing between the two sides as opposed of letting your left-side to keep bouncing around ideas. When we started to separate the two processes, we found that we came up with a lot more topics during our ideation.

Ask questions

Rather than trying to come up with the headline or title during the ideation session, focus on asking questions that your final PR piece can address or explore.

Once you've come up with all your ideas, you can then filter out anything unrelated or unfeasible.

Step 1: Shortlist

Firstly, you want to get rid of any ideas that are clearly unrelated or unwanted.

Some of the questions you will want to answer during this phase include:

• Are there any ideas here that are "too rogue" or "risky"?
• How relevant is this to the client?
• Do you think this idea will get picked up by relevant publications?

You want to be left with all the ideas that you think you could pitch and/or cover.

Step 2: Run Feasibility Checks

It is imperative to run feasibility checks on all your ideas before pitching them to clients, otherwise you risk having them love campaigns that you can't actually run. To help make sure all our ideas are strong, we produce briefing documents for each one, inputting information such as:

• What publications would be interested in this campaign?
• What different angles does this campaign have? Does it have a regional angle? Or can it appeal to different niches?
• Data sources
• Potential methodology
• Estimated number of days required to run this campaign