The three Cs to follow when planning your 2017 goals

As this year of unexpected election results and major celebrity deaths reaches its end, thoughts naturally turn to 2017 and what we hope to achieve next year.

As I’ve started thinking about 2017 goals for my business, I decided to review the most interesting research and reports I read this year to remind myself of the major marketing trends I should be considering.

Three major areas of focus stand out: Creativity, Context and Content. Here are some of the key takeaways about each area and how I’m thinking about them as I set 2017 goals for me and my team.

Creativity

The importance of creativity at work was highlighted in two illuminating pieces of research this year. According to an IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEOs across 33 industries and 60 countries, creativity is the most important attribute chief executives look for in new employees. This is backed up by Adobe’s State of Create: 2016 Report, which shows that creativity enables people to earn more, helps businesses to grow better and can even lead to better government.

Creativity – rather than technology or production capability – is what increasingly gives products and companies their edge. The Design Management Institute has shown that design-led companies such as Apple, Coca-Cola and Nike have outperformed the S&P 500 by 219% over the past decade. Yet only 41% of employees describe themselves as creative and just 31% feel they are living up to their creative potential. Organizations that can unlock this potential will reap rewards in the year ahead. 

Creativity goals for 2017

• Embrace the unfamiliar: A study by psychologists from the University of Utah and University of Kansas showed that spending a few days out in nature disconnected from all devices – an unfamiliar and unusual experience for most people – contributed to a 50% increase in creativity. I can attest to this first-hand. While doing a major rebranding project, our design team decamped to a country cabin for a long weekend of intensive creative work, which was remarkably productive. This year, I want to find more ways to refresh our creative thinking with similar experiences.
• Encourage cross-pollination: There is a considerable body of research showing that diverse groups are more creative. This often happens naturally at marketing organizations where creative work is regularly shared between in-house staff, freelancers and agencies. Making sure these diverse groups are connected and have an easy way to review and comment on each other’s work can lead to great results.

Context

This year confirmed something I’ve long suspected: context switching – jumping between multiple, unrelated tasks – is both unproductive and expensive. According to a 2016 report by the American Psychological Association, context switching can cost as much as 40% of someone’s productive time while Inc. estimates it accounts for $450 billion in lost productivity every year.

I know from experience that the constant interruption of emails and meetings can make it very hard to focus on tasks – and it’s easy to feel like you’re not getting anything done. Minimizing context switching can help you get more done and make your work more purposeful, productive and satisfying. 

Context goals 2017

• Embrace asynchronous communication: When I read a report by Boston Consulting Group that said managers spend up to 60% of their time in meetings, it seemed accurate to me. Yet, rarely does this time feel productive and I constantly have the feeling of being the bottleneck throttling the progress of multiple projects. Cutting down on meetings and dealing with certain types of interactions like creative feedback using dedicated apps (not email) helps ensure I have the necessary context for the project and improves our team's overall communication.
• Facilitating batch tasking: Research shows that “batching” like-minded tasks makes us able to take on, and finish, more work. When my team needs to focus on a specific creative project, I want them (and me) to be working in a digital work place that won’t distract us from the task at-hand and let us shut out the dings of new messages in our inbox.

Content

Recent research from the Content Marketing Institute demonstrates the growing importance of content marketing as well as the relentless pressure that marketing organizations are under to keep churning out great content.

• 88% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers agree that content marketing is an important part of their marketing program.
• 75% of B2B marketers are able to demonstrate, with metrics, how content marketing has increased audience engagement. The figure rises to 78% for B2C marketers.
• 70 percent of B2B and B2C companies plan on creating more content in the coming year.
• 87% of the most successful content marketers deliver content consistently.

As competition intensifies, it’s more important than ever that organizations are able to create the right kind of content. And research suggests that visual content – video, infographics, imagery and more – is the way to engage increasingly demanding audiences.

Content goals for 2017

• Think visual: Our brains typically process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. That means your audience is visual, so your content needs to be too. Studies have also shown that people will retain 65% of information if it includes a relevant image – compared to only 10% without – while videos on a landing page can lead to an 86% increase in conversions. In 2017, it needs to be visually interesting to get noticed.
• Ease the crush: Though many organizations plan on increasing the amount of content they produce in 2017, few will have a corresponding boost in resources to match. This has the potential to crush creative and marketing teams who, in the pursuit of quantity, will end up sacrificing quality. However, it doesn't need to be this way and a good 2017 goal is to find ways of easing the creative crush by making the collaboration process as innovative and effective as your ideas.

These are the three Cs that will guide my goal planning for 2017. By thinking now about how to address the Creative, Context and Content needs of your team, you too can ensure your business is in the right place to hit its goals over the coming year.  Here's to a great 2017!