Everyone appreciates an upgrade, but especially marketers.
If you’ve got someone in your life who works in marketing — especially if they’re part of a start-up or small business, or an independent worker — there are definitely some business-building and cost-saving tools that they’d be pretty happy to receive as a gift this holiday season.
Here are a few suggestions:
1 One thing that marketers always need is more storage space. You can be the holiday hero they didn’t even know they needed by giving your friend the gift of more space on their Google Drive. Many marketers rely on Google, whether it’s hosting their business email or a convenient place to share files with clients, or co-edit with collaborators. But anyone who uses it more than recreationally can attest that your storage fills up way faster than it seems like it should. Google Drive starts you off with just 15 GBs of memory, but you can make their day by bringing them all the way up to 10 TBs!! (OK, that might be overkill for most people, considering it’s 10,000 gigabytes… a heck of an upgrade from 15. But, hey, it’s an option!)
2 Similarly, Dropbox is a great idea for online file storage and sharing purposes. Even if your gift recipient already has the highest possible amount of storage available to them, you can pay for a renewal once their expiration period is up; otherwise, a cool thing to do for someone with a lot of file-hoarding to do is give them an upgrade. Dropbox Professional gives users a sturdy 2TB!
3Another option is to buy your marketing pal a web domain, somewhere such as GoDaddy. Sure, you can just go for it and gift them something like their own name, or a variation on their company’s URL (if it’s still up for grabs). You can even get creative with it! Secondary domains can always be redirected to the main site, and prevent unwanted competition for web traffic, while providing another opportunity for marketing via search results and SEO. Web domains can be pretty cheap to start, but if you want to load up your gift, you can always add extras like security (that all-important “https://” qualifier), web hosting (which can help them easily design the domain), or things like a unique email address ending @ their URL. Of course, you can also just let them choose to use the web domain for business, but then you won’t be able to register an actual site for them directly.
4In marketing, networking is key. Whether you’re an account manager who’s out there shaking hands with new clients or a business owner trying to share news about their company, LinkedIn is an essential tool when it comes to following up on potential connections in a professional capacity. It’s free to use, but you can also upgrade to unlock even more tools with LinkedIn Premium. For example, with Premium Career, which is for individual accounts, you’ll have the ability to directly connect with important individuals you meet — without getting lost in their busy inboxes. With Premium Business, you can see who’s looking at your company’s page (which could be another sweet lead generation opportunity). You can gift someone an entire year at once for their account or pay by month, making it easier to customize the amount you’d like to spend.
5Another gift that makes every marketer’s life easier is access to plenty of high-quality, high-resolution photography to help them design and envision the best possible content for their clients. While there are plenty of options out there with free stock photography, there’s also a limit to what’s available — and no one wants to be caught using the laughing lady from some internet meme as the face of their campaign. Getty Images has recently acquired ThinkStock, meaning your dollar will go even further when it comes to gifting access to photography from real-time events, as well as a seemingly endless amount of artist-generated images.
Pro Tip: If you aren’t sure whether or not your gift recipient already has any of these account types or extensions, or you don’t feel entirely confident setting one up for them on your own, you can always send a standard gift card for something like Visa, and simply add a cute card outlining your intentions. Trust us, most marketers will approve if you get creative.
Or, better yet, link them to this article and just tell them to go ahead and pick!