 You don't need to be creative or have any drawing skills to create a concept. In this video, you will learn how to run a concept sketching exercise. Let's do it! Hi, I'm Dom, growthmarketinglead.ajnsmart. Concept sketching is an easy exercise that will help you make your ideas tangible and visual enough so that everyone can understand them without you having to explain it with words. In this video, we will take our Black Friday campaign as an example to show you how the exercise works. The video you're watching right now is part 4 of our marketing workshop series where you will learn how to facilitate an entire marketing strategy workshop by yourself and boost any of your campaigns immediately. However, every video in this series is also a standalone video where you will learn a workshop exercise that you can use later to solve different problems. If you missed the previous video, check out this playlist and learn how to get inspired by other successful companies solving the exact same problem you have by running a lightning demos exercise. If you have any questions about running the concept sketching exercise, please leave them in the comments below. The idea behind concept sketching is that by the end of it, each participant will have created a clear, self-explanatory concept solution to the problem that you're working on and that can be executed upon by the team or someone else if this concept gets chosen. The outcome of this exercise is almost like a short pitch deck that clearly communicates the idea and its most important features. This exercise is an adaptation of the four-part sketching exercise from the design sprint process and we've been using it in this form to create all our marketing campaigns in the last few years, especially when creating landing pages for our Black Friday and Summer Sale campaigns. During these campaigns, we usually sell our online courses at a discounted price. We would recommend using this exercise to sketch out the most important assets of your campaign. For example, where your customers will see your product for the first time or the place where your customers will have to complete your desired target action, like buying something or subscribing to something. Concept sketching works best if you run it right after the Lightning Demo's exercise, because you would have gathered a lot of ideas of how other companies solve your specific problem and then you can take those examples and build it into your concept. If you want to learn how to run the Lightning Demo's exercise, click on the playlist here. Okay, so for a concept sketching exercise, you will need approximately 60 minutes in total. However, keep in mind that this exercise tends to go over time, so make sure you build a buffer in your planning to give participants extra time if they need it. So here are all the materials you will need for the exercise. Each participant will need some sheets of A4 paper, maybe a clay board as well. You will need a pair of scissors, a glue stick, a block of rectangular sticky note for each participant, thick sharpies, but not too thick, different color pens, masking tape and also some square yellow sticky notes. Now, before you run this exercise, there are a few things to remember and emphasize to your participants. First of all, ugly is okay. A lot of participants often worry about, you know, them not being able to draw perfectly, they won't create a beautiful concept, but actually, more often than not, it's people who understand the challenge best, who create the best concept, as opposed to people who have really good drawing skills. Your participants might also feel worried that they don't have the most groundbreaking idea, so make sure you emphasize that the point of this exercise is not to have the most original ideas. It's actually quite the opposite. You should draw inspiration from the Lightning demos you did earlier and combine the elements that you like the most. Next, words are important. The concepts will be presented anonymously. This means participants won't be explaining or presenting their concepts, so the drawings and the text on your concept should be self-explanatory. Let me show you what I mean. I actually have a concept here on the wall that I made from an earlier campaign. What I mean by words are important is that you should encourage your participants to write as many words as possible on the concept. Now, this won't be the final text, of course, but it will give your concept enough depth so that anyone can understand it very quickly when they look at it. So, as you can see here, there are no fancy drawings here, actually just some squares, triangles, and the handwriting is a bit messy. It's not the most beautiful. Some colors were used to highlight the most important part. The main thing is that it's clear. It's very easy to understand what the concept is about, what it's trying to say. You can encourage your participants to use the square sticky notes as annotations if they want to give further context to a specific part of the concept. And as you can see, these are actually A4 sheets of paper stuck together with some masking tape. So, it's not the most beautiful, but once it's put on the wall and chosen, this is actually what's going to be the landing page for this campaign. So, to sum up, no squiggles, but actual words and used sticky notes for giving it more depth. Now, remember, because the concepts will be presented anonymously, they should all have a catchy title just to tell them apart. So, I have a few examples that should give you some inspiration. So, the reason we emphasize the concepts being presented anonymously is that it removes bias from the whole process. So, for example, employees will not feel the need to vote on their boss's concept. And one more thing to add. Just like with the lightning demos, in this exercise, your participants should work individually and in silence. And of course, don't forget to put on some non-distracting music in the background so that the silence doesn't get too awkward. And here are three pro tips for you. Number one, announce the time. So, you gave participants 45 minutes, but will they actually know how much time is left? So, instead of leaving them to measure their own time, announce what's left at regular intervals. So, in case of 45 minutes, announce the time at 30, 15, 10 and 5 minutes. Tip number two, encourage your participants to get up and look at the lightning demos, the ideas that others put on the wall as well, just to remind them what you're actually about to do. And then you can also encourage them to find their own space in the room or even go to another office, put on their own headphones, listen to their own music. The main point is that they can concentrate now because for the next 45 minutes they will have to work hard. Tip number three, encourage your participants to first make a draft on one single A4 sheet and use just a normal pen because oftentimes when we use a sharpie and start just drawing, giving a line, we feel like we need to finish that concept or it has to be the final touch. First, making a plan on this small space can actually give you an idea of what your concept will look like and then you can transform that plan and even still make some tiny changes to it later when you stick the papers together. At the end of the 45 minutes, ask all your participants to come back, bring all their concept to the main workshop room and put them on the wall and ask them to spread it out evenly. So later on there's enough space for each participant to look at each other's concepts. And there you have it, now you know how to create a concept without having any drawing skills or being creative. If you have more questions about the concept sketching exercise, leave them in the comments below. You can also head over to our free facilitation community and ask your fellow facilitators for more insights. The link to the community is in the description below. Okay, so now that every participant has created a concept solution for your problem, it's time to decide which concept to go forward with and which one will become the center part of your marketing campaign. It's time to vote. If you want to learn all about voting and all its different kinds, so straw poll voting, heat map voting, decide a vote, then check the video that's on the screen right now. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video.