 Most people see workshops as a skill that is a must in the UX and product design world. But actually, it can be used in other areas of the business as well. For example, in marketing, you can use it to define an entire marketing strategy, organize promotional campaigns, or craft-strong content ideas for your team. Here at AGM Smart, we use workshops to define our marketing strategy for our six-figure campaigns that we run a couple of times a year. You might have seen our Black Friday or Summer Sale campaigns. A workshop is a great way to align our team with our goals and challenges and come up with an entire strategy in just four hours, without any of the endless discussions and brainstorming. Hi, I'm Dom, Growth Marketing Lead at AGM Smart. The video you're watching right now is part of our marketing workshop series, where you're going to learn how to facilitate an entire marketing strategy workshop and boost any of your campaigns almost immediately. However, every video in this series is a standalone as well, teaching you workshop exercises that you can use to solve all kinds of problems. The marketing strategy workshop uses exercises from the tried-and-tested design sprint method, while adapting it to the specifics of working on a marketing challenge. Over the next few videos, we will cover how to select the right team for a workshop, how to properly introduce a challenge to your team with the what, why, how formula, how to get inspired by other company solutions with the lighting demos exercise, how to sketch a concept without amazing drawing skills or without having to be creative with the concept sketching exercise, how to make decisions in a group without discussions with multi-layered voting, how to visualize every step and asset in your campaign with the user test flow, and how to assign responsibilities to your team properly to make sure that the outcome of your workshop gets implemented. For this specific example, I will run you through our marketing campaign for our Black Friday sale from last year, where we discounted some of our educational courses. Black Friday is very important for us because it brings in 30% of yearly revenue and allows us to expand our customer pool and reactivate parts of our old audiences. Black Friday is a hyper-competitive time of the year and we won't only be competing with our direct competitors, but with all the deals and offers available out there as well. Now what we noticed is the biggest challenge from the previous year's campaigns is that people during the Black Friday period, they just get way too overwhelmed by all the ads, the deals, all these emails in their inboxes. So it's very hard for us as a company to stand out. Now just like with any other workshop, if you want to achieve solid outcomes, it's crucial you get the right team. Marketing is not a standalone discipline, so you'll likely need a cross-functional team here. So the first person you'll need and probably the most important one is the decider. A decider has authority to make decisions on the project and a decider can ensure that the outcomes of the workshop get executed and implemented. What often happens at companies is that a group of very smart people come together, run a workshop, but they fail to have a decider. So at the end, they have this great action plan, they take it to the director or the CEO who says, nah, I have other priorities right now or I have a better idea or yeah, sure, we'll get to that. And at the end, it just turns out to be a waste of time, which you don't want. So make sure you get a decider, so you get immediate buy-in and the project doesn't get shut down after. Next up, you'll need some people who work in marketing, of course. These can be people in performance marketing, affiliate, content, PR. They might not have a direct connection to the project, but they have this specialized expertise in setting up ads, for example, or writing a compelling landing page. So make sure you involve someone from marketing as well. The next participant should be a designer, including a designer is important because you don't want to just take all the actions, all the assets and the brief from the workshop and pass it on to a designer and just let them figure out what to do, actually. If they are part of the decision-making process and they see the whole strategy pan out, they won't just give you pretty-looking designs, but they can actually make design decisions, taking the goal in mind, the whole strategy, because they just sat through the entire workshop, they know what it's about. Also, they will be able to better estimate how long it will take for the assets to be designed and have a more realistic timeframe for the whole project. Next, you need somebody who's facing customers on a daily basis. This can be somebody from customer support or a salesperson. The important bit here is that they can tell you all the questions that might come up when somebody looks at this new product or when they look at this campaign that you're running or the page. And this way, you can preempt a lot of questions that might come up if you didn't include them in the workshop in the first place. Lastly, you need a so-called expert in the room. This is the person who has a lot of knowledge about the product that you're selling. Depending on the workshop you're running, this can be a different person. So in our case, for example, during our Black Friday campaign, where we are promoting one of our online educational courses, this person would be somebody who worked on the content of this course or they worked on a previous Black Friday campaign. The main thing is that they have an extensive knowledge of the product itself and what we're about to sell. For this workshop, you'll need the following materials. If you run it in person, you can of course run it remotely. In that case, you'll need some kind of online whiteboard like Miro, Muro, Fig Jam. You will need a plain surface to write on, such as a whiteboard, if you have, it's great. Or a flip chart will do. And you also need a plain surface where you can put things on. Then you'll need, for each participant, two blocks of square sticky notes of different color. We use blue and yellow, but the main thing is that it's a contrasting color so you can tell them apart for different exercises. You'll also need a rectangular sticky note block for each participant. We use yellow. You'll need some markers. We use Sharpies. They are great. The main thing here is that the marker is thick enough so participants don't write too much on these sticky notes, but it's not too thick. So you can still read them properly. You'll need some voting dots. A smaller one and the bigger one. We use red and green. Then it's good to have a few pairs of scissors, glue sticks, and masking tape. Cleaborts for each participant is useful with some A4 sheets of paper. And something to measure time with during your workshop. We use the Timetimer. It's great because participants can see the passing of time. So it will show you how much time is left from a certain particular exercise. And for each participant of this workshop, it will be important to have a device that can connect to the internet. That can be a smartphone or a laptop as well. It doesn't matter, but something to work with in one of the exercises. And for the facilitator, it's probably good to have a working TV, a projector, or some sort of a screen. That's also for one of the exercises. And there you have it. Now you know what a marketing strategy workshop is and what it's for. And you also learned how to gather the correct team to maximize the outcome. However, if you still have questions about this particular workshop, leave them in the comments below or head over to our free facilitation community and ask your fellow facilitators for any insights or experience. The link to the community is in the description below. Okay, now that you have the correct team, the next thing you need to do is introduce the challenge and make sure that everyone on your team is aligned and moves towards the same goal. It's actually more complicated than it sounds. If you want to learn how to do that properly, make sure you click the video that's on the screen right now. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video. Okay, is that too loud? Yeah. Okay. The importance of having the designer in the room while you're running this workshop is high.