Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge and Selection

I was working on a project to bring an offline coaching centre in a small town to a full online  integrated mode which would expand it country wide. A coaching centre in my country is a  place where students can get extra help in studying and clearing competitive exams. After  gradually setting up the technical tools needed to complete the transition to E-learning mode.  We had to generate a plan to attract students from all over the country. We needed to see  the segments and marketing of the whole process. We had a team of 7-8 people working on  content creation, technical aspects of the project and our team working on market research  and general sales. The project is of limited budge so we have to concentrate on organic  marketing. The project has a limited timeline as batches would be starting soon. So we  decided to use mind mapping to sort through the data collected and look for limited ideas to  make the project successful.

Application

I had to go through the modes through which organic promotion can be done. One of the  modes was online streaming sites, I decided to look through and collect data of popular videos  on the existing channels on the platforms and from other platforms. This content was of a lot  of variety, some informative, some redundant and some made only to attract traffic without  adding any real value to the viewer. Our aim is to create a brand that cares about students  and provides a comprehensive coaching, so we have sort through all this data to select the  content in a balanced manner that complete our objective of making a brand and also  attracting traffic in limited time and using limited resources.

I took a central theme of making a brand as that would lead to attraction of traffic even after  our campaign was over. Then divided it into branches of written content and video content.  Using a presentation software and online conference with the team. We sat down to sort the  ideas and also collect the ideas the team had brainstormed to map them. After this we divided  the content based on academic, general information, motivation and others. Here I gave each  category and their ideas a different colour. This led to brainstorming of more ideas and easing  in identifying what goes with our objective.

After this to increase appeal of our brand, we decided with the management to make their  program an exclusive one in which aspirants had to push themselves to get in along with pull  of our sales. So we also used mind mapping in how to make this possible. We got through  many ideas categorised and arranged on basis of the amount a student that can get in relative  to the amount of efforts they can put in. For this we also made some cold calls to potential  aspirants to gauge their reaction and made a plan by sorting through the mind map.

Insights and Approach

Having done these kinds of projects before using only traditional tools or even no tools. This  process was really a refreshing one and more importantly a fun one. Collecting and sorting  information has always been an analytical concept for me. But after using the tool of mind  map, I was able to carry out the process with more ease and less pressure. Moreover, with  mind mapping, I was able to brainstorm more ideas at the time of our discussion, as the  information was in front of my eyes with a beautiful representation. The choosing of ideas  based on our objective and from this flood of content was also made simple by mind map.

During this project our team used various tactics for promotion and applied them. This lead  to increase in our traffic. As the process described above, we classified the ideas into different  categorised chose the relevant ones and kept the other ideas on shelf for future. These ideas  are now being used to produce more content related to short courses offered by the  institution

