5 Ways You Can Use Mind Maps in the Content Development Process

Creating content has always been a daunting task. But creating content for digital marketing is even more challenging. You are required to come up with fresh and quality ideas for social media and other digital platforms every day.

Whether you are working as an individual or a team, you need to get organized. Otherwise, you could end up dismissing good ideas or implementing them poorly. 

Mind maps can solve this and many more challenges for content creators. You can use them to organize your content creation tasks right from idea generation to post-marketing analysis.

Before delving into its amazing features and uses, let’s briefly explain what is a mind map.

Mind maps and how they work

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central keyword or idea. Other ideas are added around the central idea, similar to spider diagrams. 

The design keeps you focused on the central topic. It also helps you notice a misplaced or irrelevant idea because it will not fit into the existing web.

Traditionally, mind maps have been used to brainstorm and organize ideas by various professionals, from journalists to R&D technicians.

Mind mapping has recently gone digital and incorporated tools that increase its functionality. Mindomo is one of these tools – it offers digital mind maps whose features will improve your team’s work immensely. You can access and edit the Mindomo mind maps on any gadget, both offline and online, as well as share your mind maps with team members for collaborative discussions and task management.

Below are some content creation tasks you can accomplish using digital mapping tools such as Mindomo.

1. Brainstorming using mind maps

Marketing teams need to come up with new and effective ideas every time. Brainstorming sessions allow you to come up with ideas for new content. The team can then debate on the shared ideas and work on improving them.

Mind mapping is the most suitable technique for carrying out successful brainstorming sessions. The structure of a mind map helps you see the connection between the main and supporting ideas. You may also notice that some of the supporting ideas are connected in a way that you couldn’t see by just listing them down.

You can therefore brainstorm during any stage of content development that requires new ideas.

2. Identifying hot topics

Most topics that come out of the brainstorming phase will be great. But some of them may be ideal for use at a certain period.

You could even identify content that you had used earlier that matches current trends.

Using mind mapping, you can identify the content that would be a hot topic right now. Additionally, you can use mind maps to match content with the period in which you expect them to be hot.

For instance, every Christmas period, Coca-Cola’s content has the theme of gifting, family, and togetherness. These themes are popular both online and offline during the festivities, thus Coca-Cola’s marketing team pushes them to maximize sales.

3. Organizing and scheduling the content

Once you have been creating content for a while, your material could easily get disorganized. You can create an index for all your content using mind maps. 

You can categorize the content by topics, and the time it was created or released. Alternatively, you can create an index based on the clients – if you are a freelance content creator.

With organized content, you can easily identify the topics you have covered and those you could explore in the future. Such an index could therefore be useful during the next brainstorming session.

You can also use mind maps to schedule your content. Beyond the quality of the content, a good marketing strategy also involves planning when the content will be released.

With a mind map, you can identify the peak periods to share certain content with your audience. This may be a particular time of the day, or even a special occasion – such as holidays.

4. Content upgrades 

Your content is not just intended to entertain your audience. It needs to convert the readers to customers, subscribers, or regular visitors to your site.

Content upgrades are features you include in your content that compel consumers to share their email addresses. Once they are on your email list, it is much easier to convert them to customers. Content upgrades have been shown to increase conversion rates by over 700%.

With mind mapping, you can design content upgrades that match specific topics. For example, a podcast may offer listeners transcripts of the show. On the other hand, a how-to article may compel the reader to subscribe to similar content or a course.

5. Repurposing content

A lot of time, effort, and resources are used in creating good content. Therefore, there is no harm in repurposing some of your content, especially if it did well the first time. 

It is even encouraged. 

Your team can use mind mapping to repurpose past content in the following ways:

• To identify the topics that did well 
• Identify a new audience that you can reach using the repurposed content
• Strategize on how to get more out of those that did not do so well
• Identify the information and features of the content that would need to be modified before reposting it. This may involve updating information that may have now become obsolete or outdated.

Conclusion

Mind mapping is an exceptional tool for generating ideas for content creation. But it has proved to be useful in almost all other phases of content development, including evaluation.

Adopting digital mind mapping in your workplace also helps you collaborate on your ideas and processes. Such remote collaboration is especially important now, as many workers are working from home.

In response to the mass adoption of their tools, mind mapping service providers have also been outdoing themselves in terms of the features they offer. The modern digital mind map is versatile and easy to use, yet can be used for complex tasks. 

You can use the software to organize your personal goals or even to manage your business.

Check out Mindomo to learn how to use mind mapping software.

This post was written by Silvana Carpineanu, an enthusiastic Marketing Specialist who works for mindomo.com. Driven by passion and creativity, she’s responsible for copywriting, advertising, SEO, and content creation. She does all of this knowing that for every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.