How to Successfully Brainstorm for a Content Shoot

The Importance of Original Content

It’s hard to ideate great original content with your team when people don’t understand why you need original content in the first place. The modern marketing environment is dynamic, diverse and demanding. Stock photos, AI visuals and copy-pasted campaigns have all been through the wringer. What today’s audience craves is originality. They want to see brands’ creativity and novelty—not what they can type into ChatGPT.

Original content piques interest, builds trust, boosts brand identity and allows your product or service to stand out in a sea of been-there-done-that. Branded images and videos can capture the attention of your audience and entice them into the conversion funnel.

And, for the record, when we say “original content,” we don’t mean—to quote Lady Gaga—”talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, showstopping, spectacular, never-the-same, totally unique, completely not ever been done before, unafraid to reference or not reference” content. It can be an idea that’s been executed a billion times before, as long as it’s done in your voice with your visuals in the way that you want to do it.

How to Brainstorm New Content

Your best visual and video content will come from complete and thorough brainstorming and planning sessions. Having your people, props, scripts and sets ready to go will support you in hosting visually powerful photo and video shoots and maximizing your time in the studio. This will not only improve the quality of your content, but also give you extra time to fine-tune your plans as they are put into action.

To do this, you need your ideas ready and well-developed before you plan your content shoot.

1. Define Your Purpose and Core Goal

No brainstorming session can be successful without knowing where the finish line is. Start by defining exactly what you want to achieve with your content. Do you want to dispel a misconception? Show off a new product or feature? Appeal to a specific demographic? The photos and/or videos should have a purpose.

Set a core goal, reference it often, and let it guide your brainstorming direction.

2. Bring the Right People to the Table

A good brainstorming session includes people who are invested in the project and have different perspectives. The right people can work together to come up with the best and most original ideas. To avoid having a brainstorming sesh with you and all of your clones, we've found that identifying certain roles can help, such as:

1. The Leader
2. The Artist
3. The Outsider
4. The Critic
5. The Dreamer

3. Review Analytics and Keywords

You might be amazed what content ideas can be inspired by your keyword research and marketing analytics. For starters, search data shows you what your audience is already looking for so you know what to deliver. And secondly, keywords give you spectacular prompts so you don’t sit around going “uh” and “erm” for five minutes before really getting started. Consider the following as you look at keywords for your brainstorm:

• Long-tail keywords reveal audience thoughts, questions, and challenges.
• Analytics reveal how customers have interacted with your previous campaigns.
• Keyword clusters tell you what your audience is interested in.

4. Draw a Content Matrix

Use brainstorming tools like a content matrix. One of our favorite tools for ideating content at scale, a matrix is a grid that draws a cross-hatch of your various brand elements. One axis, you may have your buyer personas, and on the other axis, you may have your core values, product lines, store locations, etc. In the squares at their intersections, you identify how each buyer persona relates to each of the elements on the other axis. It’s a simple exercise that allows our clients to expand one idea into multiple.

5. Inventory Your Props, People and Places

Take inventory of your resources. Consider the props, people and places that you can add to the shoot at little to no cost, as well as the resources that would be affordable and easy to obtain to spice up your content. Maybe someone can get you into their dad’s country-western bar to shoot Instagram Reels on a mechanical bull. Maybe someone else has a pet parrot they could teach to say your brand name.

Don't forget that your company is composed of various industry experts whose genuine insights could be very compelling content. Everyone has skills and talents you may not know about.

6. Play Games and Shift Focus

It may sound counterintuitive, but sometimes the best thing you can do to achieve the task at hand is to forget about it for a minute. Engage the brainstorming team’s imagination and sense of wonder with a game of charades, a doodling challenge or even a game of office hide-and-seek. Doing something outside of the norm builds and unlocks new neural connections and gets you in the mood to be creative.

Just don’t get so absorbed in playing Doomlings that you forget to brainstorm at all.

7. Watch Trends and Poll Your Audience

Lastly, keep an eye on the trends. When all else fails, hop on the bandwagon and make a meme or social media challenge your own. Watch industry trends and pop culture news, and then poll your own audience to learn what they are most interested in from season to season. Discover if current trends can inspire a few innovative new content ideas. 

Be sure not to stray too far from the path. A viral challenge may get you views, but will those be the right views from the right people? Use discretion and be relevant.

Elevate Your Next Content Shoot

If you want to cultivate and engage your audience to elevate your brand, then creating content is a marketing must. Brainstorming original content isn’t easy, though. In 2024, sometimes it feels like there’s nothing new under the sun.

The good news is that lots of brands are developing great, original content—and you can too with the right team and the right direction. Our team excels at coming up with concepts and unlocking our clients’ hidden creativity to make magic with photo and video content. We’re ready when you are!