With the new year comes talk of reflection and resolutions: building more, selling more, maybe even exercising more. Last year, I noted thatself-awareness is the key to the best resolutions and committed to four goals as a leader of my company. As the year progressed, I found that one of the most effective ways to successfully reach my goals and hold myself accountable to them was something surprisingly simple: writing things down.
Of course, the act of writing won’t magically make all your dreams come true. (If only!) However, writing notes forces you to think through what you want and why, and writing can actually help you become a better leader. That’s because documenting your ideas and goals allows you to process them in new ways, refer back to them, share them with others, and commit to them.
For me personally, documenting certain things makes all the difference. Here are three reasons to start writing down your goals and ideas now:
1. The success of your marketing depends on it.
It’s no secret that content marketing is one of the best ways for brands to reach and engage their audiences — but to be successful, you need a plan to guide your efforts.
According to Content Marketing Institute, 62 percent of the most effective, successful marketers have a documented strategy. Simply writing down your strategy won’t solve all your problems, but working with your team to identify and document your most important priorities, processes, and success metrics is critical.
That way, your team members can all work toward the same goals, understand what’s expected of each of them, and hold themselves to account. Developing a written content strategy is something you should probably do every year or so, and the beginning of the year is as good a time as any to revisit your approach. To help ensure your strategy sets you up for success, you can use a content marketing strategy checklist.
2. You can move your brand from your contacts’ short-term memory to their long-term memory.
Most business relationships begin with small but meaningful moments and gestures that can, admittedly, be easy to forget — things like a check-in at the right time, a phone call, a text, a small gift, a thank-you note. When you’ve been in touch with someone, take the time to jot down ideas for next steps or note ways to express your appreciation. The smallest details can initiate a new relationship or strengthen an existing one, so documenting your encounters with people as they happen can help you act on those next steps down the road.
Now, before you get defensive, this isn’t to knock your memory skills. This is simply to say that writing things down as they occur can help ensure you won’t miss out on chances to build relationships and be helpful.
Remember, it’s not just your short-term memory that can only hold a few pieces of information: Your potential partners, clients, and customers can only hold so many pieces of information in their short-term memory before they forget who you are or what you last talked about. Your ability to consistently hit the right touchpoints can help you move from your audience’s short-term memory to long-term memory and become top of mind.
3. Written notes fuel relationship-building.
As someone who loves meeting new people, I often found myself collecting stacks of business cards at events only to stare blankly at them later, racking my memory for the details of a certain conversation or the face behind a name.
This led me to begin writing down things I wanted to remember on the backs of business cards. When I reached out later to some folks I had met at a conference, I had all those notes and names together, not just names alone or dimly remembered miscellaneous details.
Listen intently during your conversations, identify the most important pieces of information, and write them down for later. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t use your phone to take notes like this, but I’ve found more success with physically writing down notes on people’s business cards to use long after our initial introduction.
Whether you opt for more juice cleanses or Twitter impressions in 2018, as you consider your goals and tactics for improvement, I’m sure you’ll find value in writing them down. Have any content-related goals for the New Year? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
John Hall is the CEO of Influence & Co., a keynote speaker, and the author of “Top of Mind.”