Michael Jones
Mind maps are a popular and easy-to-understand tool that can be used to visually present ideas to customers, followers, coworkers, or anyone else. You can find mind maps in various places, including social media, blog posts, presentations, and reports, making them great for planning projects and brainstorming. However, creating a mind map that is clear, attractive, and effective can be challenging.
In this article, we will show you how to create beautiful mind maps that effectively communicate your ideas when explaining a concept, organizing information, engaging your audience, and visualizing a process to improve your marketing strategy.
1 – What is a Mind Map?
A mind map is a type of graph that explains complex concepts and processes by organizing information and ideas visually. It connects and expands core concepts into supporting ideas so that you can see the big picture and the details at a glance.
A mind map always starts with a central point and develops outward, with new ideas branching out from supporting points. That’s why mind maps are great for outlining strategies.
Marketing Mind Map
Marketers use mind maps to share on social media, newsletters, and blog posts. In such cases, they tend to have more decorative features and less information. However, when creating a marketing plan, you may want to focus on more informative and less decorative mind maps. More complex subjects may require extra information, like this business strategy map below. You can see the main goals introduced by a brief explanation under the title to contextualize and help the audience understand each branch.
A successful marketing strategy needs to set specific goals, and your mind map should address the steps required to meet them. When you have a large amount of information, it is recommended to choose a neutral background and few colors to highlight the main topics and avoid a cluttered design. A strategy should be simple and easy to understand, like this business strategy map that uses bubbles to explore three marketing strategies and indicate actions.
2 – Creating a Mind Map
To create a mind map that engages audiences, you should follow a few design principles. Take a look at this marketing strategy mind map, where different goals are branched out by the types of marketing and teams in charge of each goal. The supporting ideas are all different colors, so they stand out from one another and make information easy to scan.
Your mind map can present customers, KPIs, suppliers, stakeholders, internal team, and the tools they need to use.
Tips
To start creating your mind map, even without any design experience, consider using a template, which will help you organize your ideas, tasks, and goals and save you time. Since social media users are more likely to read short texts, creating an eye-catching mind map and other types of graphics is a great way to increase conversions on social media.
1 – Choose a design based on the purpose of your mind map.
Do you want to create a social media mind map or a blog post? Use a colorful mind map with more decorative visuals, like shapes and bullet points. If you are creating a mind map to show brainstorming sessions or internal presentations, choose a simpler design and neutral color schemes. In short, the purpose of your mind map will determine what supporting visuals you will include, your color scheme, and how you choose to layout your mind map.
2 – Start with your central idea and branch out.
If you don’t know where to start, put your main idea in the center of the mind map and start developing secondary ideas and topics from there. For example, if you are a career coach and you want to create a mind map that engages your audience on social media about time management, you could branch your tips around the central idea and then explain these tips using markers.
3 – Color scheme
Colors have a huge psychological effect, so the color scheme will play a main role in your mind maps. If you are creating a mind map you want to share on a restaurant’s social media, for instance, blue and purple are not suitable, and you should use green, red, and orange instead. You can also use colors in your mind map to draw the reader’s attention to specific information. Colors are essential to make the mind map design more beautiful and, even more important, easily readable. Creating contrast is an old design technique, and it is convenient when you want someone to focus on a specific point. Highlighting support ideas in different colors makes a mind map easier to understand at a glance. It also helps to separate ideas from each other. You can color-code different categories of ideas to help organize your information.
4 – Create a visual hierarchy
Using design elements to make it clear to the reader what the most important information is will give your mind map a sense of order. You can do this using shapes in different sizes and double lines to connect the most important concepts and single lines to connect extra support information. In this example, larger circles mean higher-level ideas.
Now that you have the concepts, you can start creating your mind maps from scratch with this free mind map maker.
Take away: create your mind map based on your audience
When designing your mind map, it is important to plan ahead and ensure that you are only including the information that your readers need. This can be the most challenging aspect of mind mapping as there are many templates available to help with the visual aspects such as colours, shapes and lines.
It is important to consider the level of detail in your mind map as what works well for an in-house team that requires a lot of data may not work for a social media post where your audience may not be familiar with the topic.
Furthermore, it is important to ensure that your mind map is both attractive and clear to your audience. You can achieve this by using the tips we have shared in this article to create a hierarchy, highlight the most important topics and contextualise information. However, it is important to avoid overdoing it and using only design resources that help to explain your idea without cluttering your mind map with excessive visual or written information.
