the best creative ideas ever

As a business leader, giving talks and presentations is par for the course. But one bugbear that even the most experienced speaker tends to struggle with is the infamous Powerpoint presentation. Used well, Powerpoint can be an effective tool for engaging your audience and illustrating your point. But all too often these slideshows become unwieldy, repetitive and text-heavy. The outcome is a presentation where your audience is focusing on what's on the screen rather than what you're saying - or worse, they're nodding off.

A solid content calendar is critical to the success of your company's content marketing program. And there's no one better to prepare that content than your employees. They know the information your customers want to know, and what kind of questions are being asked of you. Blogging is also a great way to keep your employees on top of industry news and trends.

Unfortunately, actually getting your employees to write those blog posts can be like pulling teeth. Even assigning blog posts to specific employees often doesn't help. Too often they struggle with motivation, with structuring their posts, and with writing something that doesn't require multiple rounds of revisions.

While there are various studies looking to determine exactly how many hours a day the average person spends on their phone, they all draw a similar conclusion – around 3.5 to 4 hours. That's nearly a quarter of time spent awake, not to mention phones are usually the last thing we connect with before falling asleep. 

What does this mean for businesses? 

It means everything must be designed with mobile in mind. There's a very high chance that when your target market sees your website, e-newsletter, or digital advertisement, it will be from their phone or tablet. So from marketing strategies to user experience, to graphics, mobile design needs to be a priority.

Good news! This shocking amount of 'screen-time' = a massive opportunity for your business to shine and to connect – as long as you're thinking ahead and staying up to date on trends in the mobile design world.

The commercial real estate business has been making some huge changes and is flexing some market muscle when it comes to end-user innovation. There are so many different office space configurations and ways to lease those spaces it can be hard to keep up. 

Really, it's almost crazy. There are more options than ever for business owners to get into real estate space and each seems to be uniquely oriented toward each a specific niche. 

There are traditional long-term and short-term office leases, service agreements, coworking, flex office spaces, and the list just keeps growing.

Thanks to Marie Kondo, people across the world have been asking themselves, "Does this spark joy?" And if the answer is no, the item goes out the door. She has taught us to tidy up not just our homes, but our lives.

So what does this have to do with marketing? We can learn a lot from this philosophy of simplicity. Marketing designers often reference KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. It's a little more brash than Marie Kondo's advice but expresses the same important idea: that many times, less is more.