Marketing Strategy Developed on an iPhone Near You

Some marketing tools are distractions, and others are essential.  It is important to observe and learn marketing strategy from others who are doing a product launch, social media campaign, or simply having people subscribe to a newsletter.  What you’ll soon find is that these online marketing activities require creative energy and a hefty dose of strategy.  A great tool that might be worth your time, is a mind-mapping software.  It allows you to build your ideas into branches, designate items as tasks and more.  I have been using one for some time with clients, and they just released  an update that I thought I’d share here.

Marketing Strategy Developed on an iPhone Near You

I have been a user of MindMeister (Free version) for some time, this online service allows me to put a mindmap together that might consisting of social media strategy, email marketing strategy, traffic and conversion strategies, or anything I want, and share it with clients-all through a web-browser.  From there we brainstorm over the phone, and can update the mindmap in real-time.  A major timesaver, it allows us to get down to crystallizing a given marketing strategy and less time describing it.

The folks at MindMeister have had a steady stream of enhancements since I started using it, but the most recent one is particularly interesting.  As stated on their blog, MindMeister for iPhone is now available in the App Store.  By all accounts it is pretty feature rich.  As it says in their post, features include:

• Create, view, and edit maps online and offline
• Seamlessly sync maps with your online MindMeister account
• Share maps directly from iPhone
• Full drag & drop support
• Zoom in and out
• Add children and sibling nodes
• Support for icons, colors, styles
• Favorites and pending maps
• Geistesblitz (quickly insert ideas)
• Use with or without MindMeister account

Advantages to iPhone Access to Marketing MindMaps

The question the becomes, how necessary is this mobile capability anyway?  I asked myself that and come up with a couple quick answers:

• Creativity is Inconvenient and an idea can hit you at the strangest of times.  How many great ideas come to you when you are working at the office.  If you are like me, likely few, because you are in task mode. Free thinking comes when you are at the mall, the zoo, church, or mowing the grass (I get a lot there).  Got a new idea for the upcoming marketing campaign, fire up your iPhone/iTouch and update the mindmap.
• Memory Loss is Inconvenient and frustrating when you are out of the office, standing in line at the grocery store, or on a walk.  Open the mindmap program, and remember what you forgot by reviewing the mindmap for your next email marketing campaign.

I’m not advocating using the iPhone as a primary device for developing marketing strategy, rather to have access and tap into it conveniently, away from your desk.  The iPhone app is only $6.99, and even works with the free version of their online software.

Note: Software can actually inhibit the creative flow because one can easily get distracted with the software experience.  A great starting point may be white-boarding, or mapping out marketing plans out the old fashioned way with pen and paper, then move to a tool like MindMeister.

What about you? Do you use mindmapping the old fashioned way, or do you use mindmapping software?  If software, which one?  Could you see value in having access to an online mindmap from an iPhone, or is that overkill?  Chime in below with your thoughts and ideas.