As you enter the New Year and begin to plan for your strategic needs, you should take into consideration the biggest trends we're currently seeing in the creative and marketing sectors.

TRANSFORMATIVE TEAMS

In order to keep up with the pace of change, it is important to make sure your teams are diverse and able to adapt quickly. Top performing companies achieve this flexibility with a blended workforce. Leaders today recognise the value in pairing full-time permanent employees with freelancers.

In fact, 93 percent of companies depend on Transformative Teams to ensure they have the capabilities and capacity to execute multichannel campaigns that yield results.

With a pool of vetted and ready-to-go talent, both freelance and core staff, you can easily choose the right skills and quickly scale to deliver customer value.

THE AGILE WAY

It can’t be denied that Agile is in vogue, and for good reason. But it goes way beyond that. Agile is how you gain the most from your teams and streamline workflow.

94 percent of executives agree that agility is critical to competing and winning in today’s environment, but achieving that agility is easier said than done. Most companies are still struggling in this arena.

Agile will allow your organisation to embrace speed, but only if your teams evolve and self-organise. You need team players who can deal with the ambiguity of Agile and its rapid pace. But the effort is worth it. When your team and processes are sound, you can innovate like never before.

MARTECH MOMENTUM

The journey toward a digital-dominant future is marching on. Companies are all focussing on gathering the right tech stack and achieving marketing data integration that connects all their customer behaviour.

Only 27 percent of executives agree that they have harnessed technology to transform the way value is delivered to customers. The challenge—it’s impossible to do without the right skills and unrealistic to get it done without processes to support it.

You need a multi-disciplined team to help you achieve real momentum with MarTech. A team with an innate mindset of quickly picking up new tools, aligning those capabilities with business strategy and helping you gain a competitive advantage from their application. Highly measurable digital marketing has become mission critical.

UX++

User Experience is still a big focus for companies. And, with organisations aligning KPIs to the voice of the customer and employee engagement, the trend will only grow in 2018. We live in an on-demand society where everyone expects speed, performance and personalisation right in the palm of their hand. Marketing is evolving to be responsible for living up to those expectations and for the entire Customer Experience. UX, more and more, is how it’s delivered.

In short, creative and marketing leaders consider hiring more UX designers a top priority. 87 percent said that hiring UX talent was a prime concern.

UX has become a way of thinking. One that positions the satisfaction of the ‘end user’ as the main priority. This customer-centric approach isn’t just a fad—it’s a mandate. Finding the right UX talent who can not only create wireframes but who can also drive customer value isn’t easy. While “UX” is a skill touted by many, not every UX talent can yield results. Finding a partner with the expertise to know which ones can? Invaluable.