The most common marketing mistake startups make

I ’ve seen the same basic marketing mistake play out at some of the best software companies in the world: If your marketing team needs help from engineering to update their website (publish new posts, edit copy, upload images, etc.), then they have been set up to fail.

This mistake is most often made when executives of companies (often engineers themselves) are unfamiliar with the day-to-day job of the marketers, website designers and developers they employ. I know of software companies with hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars of revenue on the line where marketers are simply unable to do their jobs and have to wait on engineering for days/weeks/months to make updates to their websites.

Launching new online campaigns can mean waiting for the engineering team of the company to de-prioritize working on product features to create time for marketing’s needs. It can become a large-scale organizational dysfunction.

This is insane (making the same predictable mistake over and over again) and it should stop. It’s 2016 — we should not still be having this debate.

In this post, I want to dive deep on how this problem gets created, why it can be ignored for so long and what marketers (and enlightened startup executives) can do to fix it.

What is a website?

There is a reason one of the first marketing investments your company made was building your website. When companies first get going they will often put up a website before they print business cards. Your website is literally the face of your company — it is instantly accessible by anyone in the world via the Internet, putting them at the strategic center of any digital marketing effort. For this reason, more dollars are spent on websites ($190 billion) than all of the digital advertising ($154 billion).

The website at early startups often is seen (and built) literally as an extension of the product — with flat HTML/CSS and deployed on the same code-path as the company’s core product. This makes sense when the same team that designed and built the product has all the marketing responsibilities themselves.

But some day you need to grow up, hire marketers and build a proper website. I know of multiple startups with >$50 million revenue where website updates require a new deploy of their core product. This means every time marketing wants to update their website copy, they have to convince engineering to make a new deploy.

A good marketer obsesses over messaging, writing, branding, SEO, SEM, analytics, etc. Some of them can code, some of them are analytics engineers — but they are not software engineers (they are marketers!). Requiring marketers to learn how to submit a GitHub Pull Request and go through your engineering approval pipeline to do their job is taking dogfooding a few steps too far. You are now needlessly bottlenecking their work and making it needlessly challenging for them to do their jobs.

What is a website?

There is a reason one of the first marketing investments your company made was building your website. When companies first get going they will often put up a website before they print business cards. Your website is literally the face of your company — it is instantly accessible by anyone in the world via the Internet, putting them at the strategic center of any digital marketing effort. For this reason, more dollars are spent on websites ($190 billion) than all of the digital advertising ($154 billion).

The website at early startups often is seen (and built) literally as an extension of the product — with flat HTML/CSS and deployed on the same code-path as the company’s core product. This makes sense when the same team that designed and built the product has all the marketing responsibilities themselves.

But some day you need to grow up, hire marketers and build a proper website. I know of multiple startups with >$50 million revenue where website updates require a new deploy of their core product. This means every time marketing wants to update their website copy, they have to convince engineering to make a new deploy.

A good marketer obsesses over messaging, writing, branding, SEO, SEM, analytics, etc. Some of them can code, some of them are analytics engineers — but they are not software engineers (they are marketers!). Requiring marketers to learn how to submit a GitHub Pull Request and go through your engineering approval pipeline to do their job is taking dogfooding a few steps too far. You are now needlessly bottlenecking their work and making it needlessly challenging for them to do their jobs.

Let engineers code, and let marketers publish their content! Marketers who can’t control their content can’t do their job.If you delay too long and take this to the extreme, you end up with a marketing team of dozens of employees where they can’t update and control the content themselves. How would you like to work on an engineering team where in order to deploy code you had to wait in line in the copyediting queue to get marketing to approve the grammar and sentence construction of your code’s comments?

Enter content management

Simply put, content management software enables marketers to update the content of their websites themselves via a graphical interface. No coding, no pull requests, no code-review — no engineering intervention required. Content management works. Content management enables marketers to do their job.

Content management software has been around for more than 20 years but, strangely for such a large ($190 billion) industry, it has only recently matured. Drupal and WordPress between them now command 65 percent share of the market (going to 80 percent quickly). WordPress and Drupal have won the market primarily because the industry of professional website designers and developers have, by and large, standardized their work on the software. Increasingly over the last few years, if you are professional website developer you won’t get hired by marketers unless you use Drupal or WordPress.

Most marketers by now know how to use these tools and are comfortable using them (just ask them!). There is an increasingly robust vendor ecosystem (in which Pantheon competes) that specializes in operating — hosting, scaling, tuning, developing — WordPress and Drupal sites. But it is a specialized industry with its own tools and vendors, connected but separate from the wider software engineering industry. I’ve found many engineers at startups who are pulled into website projects but often are not up to speed on the content management industry, which contributes to this disconnect.

How website technology decisions at startups go down

Does this sound familiar?

• Pre-seed: The engineering and product design team for the company’s product own the website. It’s often flat XHTML/CSS hanging off product code base. Life is simple and engineers manage the content themselves. This works!
• Seed stage: You have your first marketer on staff. You try to teach them how to update the website. It’s pretty hacky, but it kind of works. You know you are bottlenecking them, but who has time to go implement a whole new website?
• Series A: You are now scaling up your marketing team. You have a marketing executive who keeps bringing up the website and how they can’t really update it themselves. They want WordPress. You suddenly remember how much a PITA that last WordPress site was that you had to manage, so you plead “I hear you, but I don’t think we can prioritize this right now.”
• Scaling: You now have a sophisticated marketing team built. Content marketers, writers, editors, designers, demand gen, the whole shebang. The marketing team has given up on owning the website. You’ll hear the odd grumbling now and then, but “it is what it is.” Your product team (designers and engineers) must be heavily involved in any new marketing campaign launch. Things seem to move much slower than they should, but the thought of re-building the website feels totally overwhelming to everyone involved. At this point, nobody wants to own it.
• Then: One night you are browsing a competitor’s or sister company’s website and you realize how much you hate your website. Your website may be well-designed, but it is incredibly thin on content. You know it doesn’t fairly reflect the quality and depth of your product and your company . You know demand-gen is suffering and you can see why —  the volume and quality of publishing on a proper website is incredible. You’re sitting in a (stunning) 1967 Camaro to drag race with a Tesla. Your website may look cool at first blush, but you are being left in the dust.

Even if you are convinced that marketing needs content management, it’s not like you can just snap your fingers. Let’s get into the real horse-trading that happens when it comes to managing your company’s website. And let’s make sure marketing is properly armed because it’s not always fair pitting a marketer against your world-class engineers weighing in on a technology decision.

Top reasons engineers will use to try to explain why you don’t need content management software (and what to tell them)

We can’t run WordPress or Drupal because it’s insecure.

This is a very lazy excuse. While it’s true that you need to manage Drupal and WordPress security updates, that is true of all software for which engineers are responsible. It would be like a marketer saying “We can’t invest in PR because it may result in bad PR.” Technically true, but wrong nonetheless.

It may be true that the engineer may not want to take on the security burden themselves, which is fair, but there are a number of great options for outsourcing this responsibility.

My follow-up question for your security-minded engineering: Do we really want to run our public, Internet-accessible website on the same infrastructure as our product and user data? Breaking out your website from your product can improve security via security in depth.

Our website developers don’t want to use WordPress or Drupal.

This often happens if you are borrowing engineers from your product team to develop your website. Engineers who build products for a living are more familiar with tools for software engineers — React, Ruby on Rails — as opposed to the tools professional website developers use, such as WordPress and Drupal. This can be especially tricky if these developers are shared between product and marketing; it is hard to ask engineers to flip back and forth between two very different kinds of environments.

However, to be fair to marketing, you are making an implicit trade-off. You need to sit down and decide what’s more important: for your front-end engineers to use the tools they prefer or for your marketing team to be able to manage their content. That’s a decision that requires thoughtful weighing of trade-offs.

Long term, obviously, the real answer here is to get marketing their own resources for developing the website. The sooner the better, because it will become increasingly hard for the product teams to carve out time to help to market; they have their “real” jobs to do, of course.

This flat-file website technology I use to update my personal website is way better than Drupal and WordPress, so we should use it instead. I’ll teach you how to make a Pull Request, it’s easy!

This is pure hubris. Marketers, not your engineering team, are experts in evaluating marketing software. What would happen if your marketer went up to your CTO and told them “I went to this conference and saw a demo of this data-center management software from Oracle that is SUPER powerful? I am really concerned that we are missing the boat here.”

If an engineer ever tells your marketing executive they know how to evaluate marketing technology better, your marketer should smile politely and stay firm (and feel free to send them to this post).

WordPress and Drupal are overkill, our engineers are going to build you a custom CMS that will work way better.

This is beyond hubris. It’s really stupid. Anyone planning to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (let alone millions) building a custom CMS is on a fool’s errand. I am not understating the risk. In extreme cases (e.g. at digital publishers) I have seen these decision derail companies.

What would you say if your CTO came to the conclusion that in order to build your product they needed to develop their own proprietary replacement for the Linux kernel?

WordPress and Drupal are huge, established open-source projects with thousands of contributors and ecosystems of hundreds of thousands of professional developers, marketing users, and vendors. In terms of successful open-source projects, they are right up there with the Linux kernel. They have leveraged hundreds of millions of dollars of open-source engineering effort. They are incredibly robust products.

Your engineering team may be talented, but they are not going to build a replacement for WordPress or Drupal overnight. They are going to build you a complicated, buggy website money pit that your marketing department will be married to indefinitely. For a marketer, this can be job-ender.

If your engineering team came to this conclusion, you need to push them hard — your company cannot afford this mistake.

We are too invested in our current website stack right now and there is no way we can prioritize rebuilding it right now.

This is a tough one as it’s a high-level and high-stakes prioritization decision for your company.

You first need to answer for your company, how important is our website? I would start this exercise by finding out what percent of your leads originate on your website. (For software companies this is often as high as 95 percent.)

You will then need to weigh the cost (time and money) of rebuilding your website against the opportunity cost of having a high-functioning website. To be fair, you will need to weigh in the project risk of the transition itself as these projects can be complicated.

Finally, you need to answer: If we don’t rebuild our website now, then when will we?

Slowly, but surely rational business decision making will win the day.

 

 Source: http://tcrn.ch/1QWhGTW

Social Media Strategy: where to begin?

Social media are a necessary part of any marketing strategy, but they should also be a part of your SEO strategy. As social media become more popular, Google and other search engines can’t ignore them any longer. Tweets and Facebook posts don’t get the highest rankings in Google, but Facebook pages and profiles for sure do. But how do you know which social media to use? In this post, I’ll walk you through the first steps of determining a social media strategy: finding the social media that suits both your business and your audience best.

Which social media suit your business?

The first step in determining a social media strategy is whether that social medium is one that you’d want to be found on. In other words, does the social medium suit the message and branding of your company? And on top of that: does this social medium offer the options and reach you’re looking for?

Social media like Facebook and Twitter offer a lot of ways to advertise and make your brand and company known beyond the scope of your followers. With other social media, this can be more difficult and would require a lot of hard work to get the same results. Make sure to think about what presence on the considered social media would mean for your company. Make sure that this aligns with how you want your business to be branded.

Which social media does your (desired) audience use?

Different kinds of people use different kinds of social media. So you have to know what social media your audience uses. And for you to know that, you’ll have to get to know your audience. This requires some effort and research, but it will definitely be worth it. For instance, if your company mainly works in the business-to-business area, you should definitely be active on LinkedIn. And if you have a young audience, your business is best off using social media such as Snapchat, Vine, Tumblr and Instagram:

Social media you can’t ignore

At the moment, there’s basically only one social medium you really can’t ignore and that’s Facebook. Why? Let me show you:

Facebook currently has nearly 1.5 billion active users every month. That’s over 20% of the entire world population being on Facebook at least once a month. So you can see why this is one bandwagon you’ll want to get on.

A blog or website should thus definitely have its own Facebook page. And your posts should all be shared on Facebook. That way, all the people who follow your page see new posts in their timeline. WordPress can do this automatically for you when you publish an article. Some people will like, share or comment on the Facebook posts, be giving them, even more, exposure.

Think about your social media strategy!

The main thing you should take away from this post is that you should determine your social media strategy, before your start. It’s easy to waste time, effort and money on the wrong media and/or the wrong goals. So bear in mind these 3 key questions:

• Who do I want to reach with social media?
• Which social media suits my business?
• On which social media do I find my target group?

 Source: http://bit.ly/1pR9SNO

10 Time Management Hacks Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know

Entrepreneurs lead a busy and overwhelming life, whether you’re just starting out or already leading a company – you know how much your time is worth to you. But do you know where your time goes? Turns out, most people don’t, we all end up staring at our phones way too often and wondering just how we spent all day working without really achieving much. With life getting out of hand daily, everyone wants more control over their time. This is where time management comes in, a topic much raved about but still rarely practiced. Here are ten tips to get you started:

1. Track your time

The more you know about where your time goes, the more you’ll be able to hold yourself accountable. If you’re into time sheets, block out your day in a notebook and start writing down what you spend time on. If however, you’d rather save time tracking time, try one of the time tracking tools available out there and finally get a sense of your time. Time management expert, Laura Vanderkam suggest tracking all of your time for a week (precisely, 168 hours) to get a better sense of your habits. It’s a great start and the results are bound to dazzle you.

2. Stop guesstimating

Now that you’re tracking time, you have a lot more insight into what tasks take the most of your time and how long certain tasks take. Set goals for every week and try to estimate how long will these take to accomplish. Your goal for next week will be bringing estimates as close as possible to reality. If you’ve ever worked in a management position, you know how hard it is for some people to estimate the time it’ll take for certain tasks. Now, try it for yourself and don’t worry if you’re way off – you’ll get better, that’s what time management is about anyway.

3. Plan ahead

Apparently, every minute you spend on planning saves you at least ten minutes in execution. If this sounds too good to be true – try it for yourself. Start your week on a Sunday, grab a pen and paper and think thoroughly about everything you want to achieve this week, think about bigger goals but also try to line up the steps needed. Make sure you’re ready to start work on Monday, rather than spending your morning trying to figure out where to start from.

4. Make a smarter to-do list

Don’t just list our everything that needs to be done and expect to cross things off the list as they come. Organize your list by priority, make your goals realistic, and set a daily focus for each day of the week. This will help you clear your head and make your to-do list a bit more bearable, it also will help focus and stop wasting your time on reorganizing the list.

5. Batch related tasks together

Since focus is key to productivity, be smart about the things you choose to dedicate your time to and what time of day you spend on these. If you try managing your company internal stuff while emailing investors and discussing new feature requests, you’re bound to lose focus on at least one if not all of those things. So try to divide your weekly tasks in categories – internal, fundraising, development etc. Your brain can’t do context switching full time, try to keep focus on similar tasks to stay on track and save time.

6. Schedule time for interruptions

You have a team of employees depending on you, you have a hundred unread notifications on your phone, you have meetings that require follow-ups, and the cleaners also need you to let them into the parking lot once they arrive. You’re an entrepreneur, you get interrupted a lot. This is why you should never schedule your day 100%, make plans for being interrupted. This might sound counterintuitive make sure you to optimize your schedule so the interruptions don’t disrupt your entire workflow.

7. Make use of prep time

Whether it’s a meeting or a phone call – anything that might go on forever and eat out your time while you helplessly try to get back to work – plan it out. Make an agenda for every meeting or phone call you have scheduled, make sure you lay out the goals you want to achieve with this, start with an introduction to everyone involved, be a leader of every conversation you’re in, and once everybody’s gotten what they wanted from it. Start with your exit strategy and don’t let small talk take over.

8. Take breaks

Contrary to popular belief and modern business culture, breaks are not a waste of time. Breaks help restore focus and give you a fresh start for any task you have on hand. Be generous to yourself and take breaks often, don’t let the feeling of burnout get to you. Whether it’s a walk to the nearby park or a quick round of Candy Crush, you’ll feel refreshed and as good as new when back to work. Alternatively, try the Pomodoro method and see how it fits into your workflow.

9. Make use of incubation

Incubation, in terms of psychology, is one of the four stages of creativity and it starts when you’re not actively thinking about whatever problems need solving or ideas you’re trying to develop. Don’t think about work all the time. I know it might seem hard for someone that is supposed to always be working toward their goals but you’re actually more likely to get new ideas and think of solutions to problems you’re facing when you’re not actively thinking about the solutions. Many entrepreneurs boast about not taking weekends off or bringing their work home. The truth is you’re far more productive when not constantly keeping busy.

10. Calm down

Have you ever noticed how time goes by so slowly when you just calm down, clear your head and stay in the moment? Yoga, meditation, mindfulness are all methods of taking back some control over present, rather than planning for the future or thinking about the past. However, you don’t have to turn into a zen guru to feel the moment. It’s enough to try and not think about anything for a few minutes, enjoy a view, play with a pet, enjoy artwork or simply gaze at the sky. Be present and don’t let your time be taken over by the numerous distractions of the modern world and you’ll be happier and more productive in no time.

Source : http://bit.ly/1Q5eI3W

The Secret to Predicting Startup Success in 2016

When it comes to investing in startups, one thing is clear ... nobody knows the outcome. This can change that.

What's the best way to measure a startup?

Profit is non-existent for most startups. Even revenue can be elusive at the early stages. And what's the magic number for users or customers? 100? 10,000? 100,000?

In the book Startup Wealth: How the Best Angel Investors Make Money in Startups, Josh Maher interviews many legendary investors including Brad Feld, Mark Suster, Catherine Mott, Christopher Mirabile, Allan May, Joanne Wilson, and more. What heuristics did they use to know whether or not to invest in a startup?

Right now the answer is all over the board. There are no standards. Some people invest purely based on their relationship with the founders and do little to no due diligence. Others spend months or even years tracking a startup before taking the plunge.

I'd argue that Net Promoter Score (NPS) should be a required foundational metric behind measuring startups of every size. If you are a startup founder, it should be used as a KPI. If you are an angel investor, you should request it for due diligence. And if you are a venture capitalist, you should be requesting your entire portfolio to be reporting NPS figures to you.

Here's why:

Universal Applicability

Whether you are running a consulting company or a high tech mobile app... whether you have just one customer or tens of thousands ... whether you have no revenue or millions in profit ... you can still run NPS campaigns.

That's because fundamentally all businesses have customers. Even if you don't have revenue yet (maybe you are still building out your user base) you still have users. And with users you can have an NPS score.

With NPS, you ask just one question: How likely (from 0 to 10) are you to recommend my product or service to a friend or colleague? As long as you have some kind of product or service, you can measure NPS.

This makes NPS an ideal key performance indicator if you are trying to evaluate a startup.

TIP #1: Don't fret about the exact score.

If your potential investment is running an NPS campaign for the first time, the chances are that their score is not going to be that great. Many products find that their first score is not what they expect. That's what makes NPS such a powerful survey technique. It gives you an honest assessment of how well you are turning users into fans.

You might be hoping that they are in the high +70's like Apple. But as long as they are positive (and not net-negative), it should not be raising any big red flags at this point.

(After all, the real power of NPS is in the follow-up process)

The score is just a starting point on a journey.

So if you aren't overly concerned with the NPS score, how do you use NPS as a metric for evaluating a startup? Good question! That brings us to our second point.

Honest Customer Feedback

Most investors ask for customer references as part of the diligence process before investing. But this has always confused me. Whenever you ask for a reference, the people given as references are intrinsically likely to tell you good things, since they are often friends with the person in the first place.

But ideally, you would want a way to get a more critical eye for some honest customer feedback rather than just talking to the one or two best references that a startup can provide you.

If you have an NPS campaign as part of due diligence, spend most of your time evaluating the individual responses rather than obsessing about the overall score. And if you are not given all the individual responses, insist on seeing them.

The second question in a NPS survey is: What was the biggest reason for having given that score?

This open-ended question lets customers praise and vent about what they care about most. Reading through these responses will give you the most independent and honest feedback you can get when evaluating a startup.

Often, these responses will include the best and worst of a startup. People who love the service will tell you why they love it. People who are having trouble with the service will tell you why they are having trouble. Those problem areas can then be used as starting points for further diligence.

Many people underestimate how powerful NPS is, especially because it is so simple to implement with just two quick questions. But done correctly, these two questions really are the only two questions that need to be asked.

Implicit Accountability

Although I've already said that the first NPS score doesn't matter, I don't want you to come away with the impression that none of the NPS scores matter.

In fact, tracking NPS scores over time is a fantastic way to audit that progress is being made to improve the product or service.

After the first NPS campaign, you will know the top three biggest problem areas. The next time an NPS campaign is sent, if the same problems come up again in the same frequency (or worse), then it is a sign that something is deeply wrong.

Ideally, as an investor in startups, you should be able to keep track of all your portfolio's NPS scores over time. Comparing them to each other is a possible way to keep an eye on the investments that might need more of your attention. However, a better indicator is to make sure that all of your portfolio's NPS scores are steadily improving over time.

No other score that I know of can provide this kind of warning system no matter the underlying business model or source of revenue. NPS gives you a tool that uniquely can predict breakout success or imminent failure for venture capitalists.

 

Implementing NPS as a key performance indicator can easily be done whether you are a startup founder, an angel investor or a venture capitalist. And done properly, the results can be amazing. For example, after we implemented just one sales technique into our NPS process at Promoter.io, we were able to increase MRR by 32%. You can even use NPS to drive a marketing campaign. So add this tool to your diligence worksheet and ensure that all the startups you work with start tracking it today.

Source : http://bit.ly/1OCrAt6

6 CREATIVITY HABITS FOR PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY'RE NOT CREATIVE

EVERYONE IS CREATIVE. (NO, REALLY.) HERE'S HOW TO UNLEASH YOUR BEST IDEAS.

Think about the roles and responsibilities in your office. There are probably people you think of as "creative"—maybe those in product or graphic design, marketing, and even sales. Then there are those who don’t immediately spring to mind when that word is used.

But thinking about people—or yourself—as "not creative" could be hurting your company, because you’re discouraging them from thinking in innovative ways before they can even do so, says Mark Prommel, a partner at Pensa, a Brooklyn-based design and invention firm.

"Ideas and the creative execution of those ideas comes from anyone, anywhere," he says.

Does your workplace have creative designations? Use these six tips to create a culture where everyone’s creativity is stoked.

HABIT NO. 1: BANISH "YEAH, BUT"

If Leslie Ehm, president and "chief fire starter" at Toronto creativity training firmCombustion, could give organizations only one piece of advice to encourage creativity, it would be "to ban the phrase ‘yeah, but,’" she says. "'Yeah, but’ is just ‘no’ in a dress." Change the phrase to, "Yeah, and." That simple change suddenly confirms the original person’s contribution as valuable and builds on it. People don’t feel shut down. That’s collaboration in action, she says.

HABIT NO. 2: GET NEW PEOPLE AROUND A TABLE

One of the quickest ways to get people who think they aren’t creative to shed that viewpoint and start to contribute is to get them around a table brainstorming and coming up with solutions with a diverse group of people, says Jay Mathur, founder ofvalueideas, a creativity and management consultancy. The interaction with new people can bring perspectives never before considered and spur new ideas within the group, he says.

"If you bring a diversity of ideas, this is where a collision of ideas happen and the energy that releases new ideas. It can combine ideas. It can create more refined ideas," he says.

A 2015 study by researchers at Rice University and elsewhere backs a similar concept. The researchers looked at sales representatives at a pharmaceutical company in China. Those with wide networks of contacts came up with more creative solutions to sales and marketing challenges.

HABIT NO. 3: GIVE YOUR EMPLOYEES FREEDOM

It’s important to have job descriptions so that people can get things done and know the benchmarks by which they’re being measured. However, leaders who are trying to create a culture of creativity also need to reward—or, at the very least, not discourage—people from contributing beyond the confines of their roles, Ehm says. She cites a team she’s currently training where employees are worried about whether they’ll actually be allowed to contribute once the training is over.

"We keep saying to them, ‘Leadership is saying yes,’ [and they say,] ‘But, when we get back to the regular kind of workflow, and we have to do things fast, are they going to allow us to do it?’" she says. Make sure your own culture isn’t causing this type of creative hesitation. And encourage people to question processes, Prommel says. Let people know that if they see a better way to do something, it’s not only okay to speak up—it’s valued.

HABIT NO. 4: REWARD THE EFFORT EVEN IF IT'S A FAILURE

Ehm defines creativity as "combining previously uncombined thoughts and ideas to create new thoughts and ideas. Once you’ve gotten people to do that, you need to reward the effort, rather than the outcome," she says.

"Hierarchically, everyone is rewarded for coming up with the right answer, to sort of smooth the rough spots in the process. There's not a lot of room for rewarding or celebrating the risk and the failure. You can't have creativity without failure," she says.

HABIT NO. 5: WORK ON NEW PROJECTS

Grinding out the same old projects every day can burn out even the brightest creative light. At Pensa, Prommel and his team try to carve out time to think about projects on which they’d like to work, or areas in which they’re interested and think of ideas. Give employees time to think about the projects on which they’d like to work and try to get them involved on those teams, he says. Letting employees be part of projects that excite them is going to stir creativity. Plus, contributions from people who have fresh perspectives can help bring forth new ideas.

Source : http://bit.ly/1RPk6bK

Do you like marketing?

10 Ways Creativity Can Completely Change Your Life

“Life is a great big canvas. Throw all the paint you can on it.” ~Danny Kaye

I’ve had those days when I felt like my life was in the doldrums. When I felt stuck in the same-old, same-old and wondered how to get a pick me up. When I wished I had more passion or purpose or maybe just a jolt of joy to shake things up.

Sometimes there were things I thought might make me happy, but I couldn’t have them just because I wanted them. Like, I couldn’t just snap my fingers and meet the man who sweeps me off my feet or become a kazillionaire.

But there is something that’s always at my (and your) fingertips. Something we always have that will instantaneously make us happy, right now in this moment.

And that is (drum roll please…) our creativity.

Creativity is not just for artists or making art. Creativity is life making. It’s anything we do that turns us on, invigorates us, or offers a simple moment of pure merriment.

For me, I love to paint and write. I knit while watching my favorite movies. I have a blast cooking and sharing my recipes. I let myself go wild in dance class.

All of us have something we enjoy doing. Or something we think we would enjoy but don’t do because the bigger, more major things in our daily lives take priority. We just don’t make the time for it.

Or we judge it as “a little hobby” (like crafting, kickball, or learning magic tricks).

Or we think it will never become something significant or important (like changing the world.)

Or we deem it as just plain silly. (Why pick up singing when we don’t even know how to stay in harmony?)

But the things we enjoy are far more important than we could ever realize and can make a significant impact on our lives.

Here are ten reasons why (and there are so many more):

1. Creativity makes us present.

Because we’re doing something we like to do, we’re engaged in the moment. Time passes in an instant ‘cause we’re just having some good ol’ fun.

When I paint, write, knit, dance, or cook it’s like active meditation. Being present with myself dials up my knob of attention and wakes me up.

Creativity stimulates us to be more mindfully in tune with our overall lives. It also calms our nervous system, decreases anxiety, and helps restore balance.

2. We better our relationships.

Simply because we enjoy doing something we love, we connect to ourselves more intimately. We develop a profound relationship with our inner selves.

The more we connect to ourselves, the more we’re able to connect to others and deepen all of our relationships. This secures healthier bonds.

And because we’re more fulfilled, the less we need others to fulfill us and the more we have to share. Our happiness expands and others feel it too and want to spend more time with us.

3. We’re playing again.

As kids we could create anything and have fun with it without worrying about what other people thought.

We could sing out loud in the car, turn a mud-pie into a monster, or let our stuffed animals have conversations. We were all free in one-way or another.

Creativity returns us to the innocence of our childhoods. And giving ourselves a break from the pressures of adult responsibility, we become lighter and increase our sense of humor as we delight in the pleasure of our amusements.

4. We’re led to new wonderful opportunities.

The current of creativity is like a river finding its sea. It always leads us to bigger waters. So even a small creative project might open us to whole new possibilities. We never know where it might lead.

On a whim I got this idea to make a board game. My friends loved to play it and soon, I was hosting game parties once a month at my house for up to thirty people. It became such a wonderful way to bring people together, a publisher picked it up and today everyone can play it.

But we don’t do it for product. We do it for pure joy and interest.

For sure with any kind of project, as our creative juices get flowing, there’s an infinite pool to draw from to keep our inventiveness growing.

5. Depression is lifted.

While doing the things we enjoy, even if it seems small or easy, the self-judgments we make (like we’re not enough, or bad, or we don’t matter) are suspended. We do it just because of the sheer delight of doing it.

It’s the permission we give to ourselves to do what we love that makes us forget we’re in the slumps. The more we engage, the more our spirits fly.

Doing something that is not demanding or to win is the antidote to any dreariness or blahs. My mood always uplifts when I’m creating something just for my own gratification.

6. It’s always new.

Every time we make stuff we’re embarking on fresh, unknown territory. Each time we begin and as we continue, we’re traversing on a new adventure.

Creativity has this awesome way of always changing things up. Even if it seems “mundane” like stirring a soup, or knitting a loop, or moving my body, it always brings a different experience.

A plus is it also initiates new perspectives.

7. We get out of our own way.

When doing something we enjoy, we’re focused on the act of doing it rather than self-ruminating. It immediately gets us out of our head.

So much of our unhappiness is bred from being fixed and consumed by our thoughts and behaviors. We tend to observe our feelings, words, and actions far too often.

But when we’re engaged creatively, we’re freed from any internal traps that say something about us, especially because it doesn’t have to be so serious.

It’s also the #1 best replacement for any addictions.

8. We become amazed by our intuition.

We may wonder what gives us pleasure when we feel stuck. But there’s always something whispering to us.

That’s the beauty of creativity. It might be telling us to take a pottery class, or sign up for a book club, or learn a new spiritual practice because it knows this will add some sparkle and enliven us.

When we listen, we realize that we’re being led by something much greater than us. The more we listen, the more astounded we are by what lives inside us.

9. We build character.

As we attend to our creativity, we feel better about ourselves. This simple act of showing up serves our self-respect and confidence.

The more we make pleasurable, creative acts a priority, the more we rejuvenate, strengthen, and grow.

Each time I sit down to write and my fingers get moving, I feel proud of myself for meeting the blank page head on.

The overall gain is a greater sense of gratitude.

10. Love begets love.

The more we cultivate what we love, the more love we accumulate. Our cup flows over.

Clearly there are days we may show up to do something we enjoy and it isn’t always enjoyable. Sometimes the cake doesn’t rise, the paint spills, or my muscles are sore. But finding creative ways to solve the problems can be fun if we continue.

When we don’t worry about how it turns out and we do it simply for the wonder of exploration, our heart expands and love abounds. And this spreads out into our entire life.

So, what’s compelling you to create? What might creativity be telling you to do because it’s sure you’ll gain from it? What if you just said yes to your freedom, fun, and happiness?

Source : http://bit.ly/1lEbxnz