A year on from the announcement of the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK, it’s estimated that 60 percent of the population are still working from home. Across Europe, this figure has risen from the five percent it’s been for a decade to 12.3 percent in the past year and Finland boasts the highest share of remote workers in the EU.
The global pandemic may have forced a shift in this attitude towards home working due to social distancing guidelines often making this essential for a number of sectors – but is it here to stay?
This rise in working from home has not only forced a shift in attitude to remote working itself, but also the ability for firms across a range of sectors to be agile and creative. In order to keep the wheels of business in motion, many companies have had to adapt to an unprecedented business climate, global landscape and ways of working they’ve never experienced before.
The role of digital transformation
So, what about creativity? Pre-pandemic, many marketing teams will have relied on in-person collaboration for much of their creative inspiration. Being catapulted into this new remote working environment will have impacted many businesses initially. Why? The simple answer is the lack of digital capability.
This is why globally, businesses had to pick up the pace of their digital transformation efforts. In fact, a McKinsey study highlighted that Covid-19 sped up digital interactions with customers and suppliers by around four years for businesses. Meanwhile, another study showed that the pandemic actually advanced digital transformation by 5.3 years.
With businesses implementing appropriate digital systems and processes, the capability for remote collaboration both internally and externally is drastically increased.
Creativity and in-house marketing
When it comes to marketing creativity, business structure can play a huge role. Bannerflow’s State of In-housing report takes an annual view of in-house marketing teams, the pain points and which elements can create success for a brand.
The 2021 report shows that 58 percent of the surveyed in-house teams noticed an increase in creativity during the pandemic and only eight percent noticed a decrease.
Bringing the marketing efforts of a business in-house can create the opportunity to be more communicative and collaborative, plus creativity with in-house resources is heightened.
The role of creativity for success has been more than evident during the remote working situation placed on many industries during the pandemic. In fact, the report shows that two-thirds of the surveyed in-house marketing teams have increased their creative workshops or introduced them for the first time during the past year.
Not only this, but cross-team collaboration has risen according to 65% of the marketers Bannerflow spoke to.
What about tools and technology?
We’ve seen the importance technology can play, considering how many businesses saw it essential to speed up the digitisation of their processes during Covid-19.
When implemented and used correctly, tools and technology can be invaluable to the creative output of a digital marketing team. The benefits of enforced increases in using tech was highlighted – more than half of Bannerflow’s surveyed marketing teams admitted to benefiting from technology in a remote working landscape.
Creativity and harnessing available data also go hand in hand –58 percent of marketers say that increased tech usage translates into increased data usage. Improvements in production efficiency and using data more effectively have had positive impacts for in-house teams. Plus, remote working saw more marketing teams use cloud-based software for their creative output.
Key takeaways
Remote working could be here to stay as businesses have access to a wider pool of talent. This will provide benefits for both the environment and financial positives for both employee and employer. Therefore, ensuring your marketing team can create jaw-dropping campaigns from the comfort of their home offices could be vital.
There are many ways in which marketing creativity can be boosted in a remote working landscape – focusing on giving your employees the tools for creativity may be the key to success. Ensuring your business is up to standard from a digital transformation perspective is the best place to start, in addition to considering the positives of bringing your marketing efforts in-house.
Once you have a tech-enabled, collaborative team, your talented marketers will be able to harness the power of tools and cloud-based software to ensure your marketing creativity can flourish and thrive.
