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Why We Have a Day-Long Brainstorming Session Every Quarter

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Picture sitting around a conference table overlooking the Hudson River with your entire marketing team in sweatpants, plowing through a carton of munchkins, ignoring your emails/Slack/phone calls/calendar alerts, and daydreaming out loud for 8 hours.

We know—it may not sound like work, but it’s arguably the most productive day of the quarter. 

Every three months, we sit down and go through every single client one by one to come up with as many new strategic initiatives as possible. Nothing’s off limits—we don’t think about man hours, production capacity, or retainer size. We come up with our wildest dreams for our entire roster, and at the end of the day, we have one of the main ingredients of Hudson Fusion’s Secret Sauce. 

So why do we do it? Well, there’s a reason the sauce is secret, but we’ll give you a little insight. 

It may seem like a waste of a day at face value, but these day-long brainstorming sessions allow us to bring our clients fresh, exciting concepts and proposals that we may not have come up with if we stuck to the day-to-day. 

Keeps Things Fresh

What’s the biggest marketing challenge companies face? According to 63% of marketers, it’s generating traffic and leads.

What’s the entire foundation of inbound marketing? Coming up with engaging, effective content that organically attracts clients.

The solution? Find a way to generate new ideas, intuitive strategy, and successful campaigns consistently for every stage of the buyer’s journey.

One of the hardest parts of creating quality content on a timely basis is finding ways to keep things fresh. As much as each client has unique goals and challenges in their given industries, there are a lot of consistencies in approach that marketers fall back on.

Here at Hudson Fusion, we take those traditional tools and tactics—blogs, eBooks, resources, whitepapers, social media campaigns, email marketing, ABM, sales enablement collateral—and combine them with the ideas we come up with during the day-long brainstorming session. What we get is innovative, creative approaches to client marketing strategy that maximize long-term value.

The top five challenges marketers face today are time, content quality, creating content, scaling content, and generating new ideas. When we take a day to sit down and brainstorm, we end up solving all five.

1. Time. When you take the time to flesh out a good idea, it makes it great. Instead of quickly mentioning a thought you had in the shower that morning and figuring out whether or not it would be effective as you worked on it, you’d likely hit a dead end. Talking out a strategy with your whole team gets everyone’s input at once and creates a solid strategic approach. When you go back to start working on it, it ends up taking half the time it would have.

2. Content Quality. If you take the time to get everyone’s input, you’re inevitably going to have a far superior outcome. A member may have a great idea for an infographic, but design will pipe up and add their own creative twist, and then tech will mention, “Hey—if we do it this way, we can even make it interactive!” Before you know it, you have a team of people on the same page for a high-quality piece of content.

3. Creating Content. This goes back to the content quality. If you have three people executing a single piece of content that they helped conceptualize from the start, you’re going to spend less time going back and forth on the details and more time focusing on completion. 

4. Scaling Content. When your whole team is collaborating, it’s easy to take what would’ve been a limited three-blog series from the content team and turn it into a 10-part content series with audio, video, and visual elements produced by content, design, and tech.

5. Generating New Ideas. I mean—it’s called a day-long brainstorming session. Do we really need to explain? 

Encourages Collaboration


Collaboration is key at Hudson Fusion—and that’s not just because we enjoy bouncing ideas between departments to get a fresh set of eyes and a new perspective. It turns out that the highest performing marketing teams are 12.8 times more likely to heavily coordinate efforts across channels than their low-performing counterparts.

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You may have a copywriter that comes up with a great design concept, or a strategist who comes up with an innovative tech solution. When you’re in a creative, collaborative space to pose off-the-wall ideas, you’d be surprised how many times they end up being not only feasible, but some of our best work

Clarifies the Big Picture


Here’s a staggering number for you: More than 80% of marketers believe marketing silos prevent them from having a comprehensive view of campaigns and customers across channels.

The solution? Forcing yourself to stop, back up, and look at the big picture. It’s easy to get used to thinking in terms of short-term goals—publishing an eBook, launching an ad campaign, mocking up web pages—but understanding the purpose and impact of your work for the client is a welcomed reminder for any marketer. 

We don’t do a day-long brainstorm just to come up with great ideas—although that’s obviously a big part of it. When you’re knee-deep in day-to-day minutia, it’s good to take a step back every once in a while, and take a look at a client holistically. 

Unifies the Team


Look, it’s no secret—teamwork makes the dream work, y’all.

Here at Hudson Fusion, we know how to build a stellar marketing team, and we come up with our best concepts, approaches, and strategies when we’re doing it together as a cohesive unit. The reason we focus so hard on having expert representation for every element of our services—marketing strategy, content creation, web development, SEO optimization, tech direction, print/graphic design—is because a team of specialized experts is stronger than a single marketing master.

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Our day-long brainstorming session is just one way that we invest in the office culture employees want. We take an entire workday to sit back and brainstorm because it allows us to do what we do best: work together to come up with exceptional ideas.

Interested in working with a team of experts that brings not only the latest, but the greatest?

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