on September 08, 2019

How Thomas Shows Clients the Bigger Picture – Creating a Marketing Strategy

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Thomas Dori and I'm a digital strategist who combines his 3 passions - contemplation, communication, and coding - into one business.

Is there one situation or project in which mind mapping helped you the most?

Digital Marketing (Strategies) is a very broad concept. Especially, when you are not working in this field every day, it can quickly feel overwhelming. To help my clients and me see the bigger picture including all the opportunities and necessities I start every project by presenting a mind map that gives a clear overview of what needs to be considered before and while doing digital marketing. We then use a copy of that mind map as a checklist to keep track of what we already thought about and what still needs to be considered. The final result is a clear vision of what the client’s company currently stands for, where it wants to go, and what needs to be done to get there.

How did you get your thoughts out of your head and into a mind map?

My current mind map for digital marketing is probably the millionth version of what it used to be several years ago. It started with the wish to have an overview of types of media (owned vs. shared vs. earned vs. paid). I continued to work on mind maps about branding, personas, social media marketing, and content marketing - and thought "Why not merging them into one huge mind map?" After moving everything around for hours and making it as MECE (mutually exclusive & collectively exhaustive) as possible, I tweaked the wording to get some nice acronyms (BRACES + 4C). The final but also essential step was the styling. I used the brand colors of my agency „Anwert" and the gorgeous stickers that MindNode has built in. Although I love the Auto Layout feature, I used the manual layout in my mind map because I wanted to give some nodes a bit more spacing than others.

How did it feel to finally see all your thoughts in a mind map?

Relieved. This mind map is like my external memory, and every time I look at it, I'm delighted that I have spent so much time to build it. It's like a cheat sheet that helps me to remember everything.

Once you were done with the mind map, what did you do next?

My mind map for digital marketing will never be final. It is the core of what I'm doing in my business every day. And like my business adjusts to new knowledge, trends and customer needs, so will this mind map. But even though it's a living document I use it all the time for myself as well as to support my clients in their (digital) marketing efforts. Most of the time people are stunned by how graspable such a complex topic becomes in a mind map - and how beautiful MindNode makes it look.