By Sean Willey
Marketing can be an intense profession, but also a very fun and creative one. There’s nothing better than seeing one of your projects captivate your customer’s emotions and build a positive perception for your brand. You might have heard that marketing is where type-A personalities really thrive, but I’m here to tell you, as a non-type-A personality, that success in this field can be achieved by anyone. A world of tech companies galore is also a world of personality types galore. With that comes numerous amounts of companies and humans (just like you) building tools to help everyone. I have compiled a list of tools that I use as a marketing manager, and that I would recommend for anyone working, or interested in working, in this field.
Salesforce (or HubSpot)
Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) are essential for any for-profit company or organization. How are you supposed to efficiently track leads, contacts, pipeline movement, internal communications, and macro and micro details of the sales pipeline? My favorite thing about CRMs is how you can manipulate visual dashboards to show the critical results for your company’s bottom line. This helps me pinpoint potential market needs (this discipline needs more attention, etc.).
Asana
Task management is a battle any marketer faces. But, when you breakdown tasks, your confidence to get projects done skyrockets. Take a webinar – getting from creation to launch isn’t a one-and-done process. From invitation email copy, to who you’re inviting, to creating the registration site, to rehearsals with speakers, to the actual webinar, to the follow-up emails, and everything in between. Asana (and there is a free version) allows you to schedule overall tasks for their due date. It also creates subtasks with due dates to keep you on track. And as a bonus, it gives you short bursts of accomplishment and visual high-fives when your project is on-track.
Canva
Canva offers professional design templates to take away the intimidation of needing to be a professional graphic designer. For example, here at Wiley, we have templates and brand images available for quick plug-and-play for any graphic I need to build – webinar/event invitation, social media post, etc. Canva helps me too by pinning graphics into the place where they are most visually appealing. A bonus – while I’m building out branded images for Wiley, I’m translating these ideas for my personal brand.
Camtasia
Marketers are not video editors, but are more like “brand editors”. We are building perception for the products/brands we represent. Camtasia video editing allows me to build videos that capture emotions. These videos capture how our products work and why they were built (for customers) and training videos (for the internal sales force) for what features resonate and are important to highlight with customers. For example, I often take our webinars and splice them up through Camtasia to create short videos that sales reps can learn from and send to their customers.
LinkedIn Learning
This isn’t a marketing tool, but my role as a marketer (and proactive human) is to always refine my skills. For example, when I first started at Wiley I had very little experience with interaction design (graphs and tables). But that’s an important skill to helping both my customers “see” why our products work and “how” they’re impacting the market. Internal stakeholders also benefit from me knowing this skill. I’m able to create presentations that help understand our market’s perception on our products and how that’s translating to revenue-growth. LinkedIn provides hundreds of free courses to enhance any skill. Marketers must constantly be adapting and evolving their craft. Your customers and markets aren’t static, and you mustn’t be either.
Sean Willey is a marketing manager of the physical science list for academic learning at Wiley. If you have any questions or want to reach out, feel free to contact him at seanw@wiley.com!
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