10 Must-Have Resources For Every Marketer

As a small business owner or a beginning marketing manager doing it all on your own, you need some support to help you succeed at your job. And thankfully, there is a wealth of resources out there specifically created to give you tips, tricks, and trends that will help you stay on top of your game. With these, you’ll be able to understand what works in marketing, what’s trending, what your competitors are doing, and what changes you need to know about. 

Dialing in on your favorite resources will offer your inspiration, information, and education to help you take your marketing to the next level making your efforts more effective.

It can take years of scanning the internet and checking out different websites to build up your personal collection of favorite resources. But don’t worry – we’ve done all of that hard work for you and put together a list of essential resources all marketers and professionals promoting their business should know about. 

Learn about them below and bookmark each one so you can lean on them from today forward to have success promoting your business. Take notes on how you could join the conversation on these trending business topics, no matter how big or small your business is.

The Marketing School Podcast 

Podcasts are more than just a way to entertain yourself while walking or driving to work. They are also a highly powerful educational tool, with podcasts in almost every industry – including marketing – that can teach you tremendous amounts of helpful information.

By regularly tuning into professional podcasts, you can make the most out of your free time to continually educate yourself about marketing so that you’re constantly improving as a marketer, learning industry secrets and best practices, and staying up to date about changes in the field.

What you need: A podcast that will guide you on the new trends, tips, dos, and don’ts of marketing.

Promo’s pick: Marketing School 

One of our favorite marketing podcasts is Marketing School, hosted by two of the top marketers in the industry, Neil Patel and Eric Siu. Whether you’re just getting started or know the ins and outs of marketing, these two professionals will educate and inspire you. While these two professionals have a wealth of information to share, they’re also determined not to waste your time, with each episode clocking in at no more than ten minutes.

Best of all, there is a back catalog of nearly 2,000 episodes that you can listen to, meaning that you’ll never run out of content to always keep learning.

Marketing School covers nearly every marketing topic under the sun, but some of our favorite episodes we recommend listening to include:

• 7 Highly Effective Habits to Make You A Better Marketer | Ep. #1142
• 7 Tools For Running A Successful Content Marketing Campaign| Ep. #984
• How to Sell Anything on Facebook and Instagram | Ep. #880

Marketing Examples For Copywriting Help 

An important building block of marketing is copywriting, which you need to do every time you write an email, a caption for an Instagram post, a product description, and anything that goes on your website. But writing requires creativity and inspiration, which can be threatened by the all-too-familiar enemy writer’s block. 

What you need: A resource that will give you inspiration, tips, and examples of winning marketing copywriting.

Promo’s pick: Marketing Examples

Marketing Examples is an absolute dream for offering inspiration and examples of successful copywriting. You can either browse it regularly to keep your eye for good copy sharp or search it for specific types and styles of copywriting when you need inspiration for something in particular, like a header or an ad. 

Promo’s Marketing Blog 

If you prefer to get your information in written format, blogs are one of the best sources for online education. Made specifically to bring small business owners and marketing managers like you valuable information that they can use to help market their businesses, marketing blogs are a go-to bookmark that will keep you constantly learning, growing as a marketer, and updated with new knowledge and ideas.

What you need: A blog that focuses on small businesses tips, social media, and social media marketing.

Promo’s pick: Promo blog (we’re unbiased, we promise!)

For a gold mine of educational marketing content and resources, look no further than the Promo blog (it’s where you are right now!). From actionable advice about social media marketing to reviews of marketing products to video marketing inspiration, the Promo blog offers a variety of articles to help you promote your business. It even releases a monthly round-up of content marketing ideas so that you never run out of digital marketing content to post.

Creative Market For Design and Aesthetic Inspiration 

Design is a huge part of promotion and marketing. The visual look of your website, social media pages, and marketing materials play a significant role in the first impression your brand makes to potential customers. Indeed, a whopping 94% of customers say they would quit visiting a website with poor graphic design. 

But design is also one of those things that can be challenging to learn, requiring knowledge of design principles and a good eye. So while you may not have time to go to art school or take a course in graphic design, you can certainly keep your eyes open for design inspiration that you can look to when designing your own visual materials.

What you need: A source of reliance for design assets such as fonts, graphics, themes, photos, and social media templates.

Promo’s pick: Design Inspiration

Additional resources: Creative Market

To find a consistent stream of inspiring visuals, check out Design Inspiration. This website functions almost like Pinterest, giving you the ability to browse and save various images and visuals, including web design, typography, and photography. But, unlike Pinterest, it’s specifically focused on showcasing exceptional design, so you won’t have to look through irrelevant fluff. Plus, you can explore by topic, allowing you to hone in on the particular type of design you need inspiration for, like logos or packaging.

Another resource to check out if you’re in the market for design assets such as fonts, graphics, and Instagram templates is Creative Market, an online marketplace. Here, some of the most talented designers in the world list products for sale that give you a helping hand, so you don’t have to try to be a graphic designer on top of being a marketer. There’s also a section for design inspiration where you can check out staff picks and design trends.

Awwwards to Inspire Website Design 

Potential customers use your website as a way to learn about your brand and find information about your business and products, meaning it plays a significant role in consumers’ decisions to purchase from you. An aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-understand, informative website is an invaluable marketing tool for building a brand identity and making sales: 75% of consumers admit to making judgments on a company’s credibility based on the company’s website design. And while your website can be as simple or complex as you feel is right for your business, the choices you make for it should be strategic and well thought out.

What you need: A site that hosts and promotes the best innovative web design and gives you industry-specific insight and inspiration.

Promo’s pick: Awwwards

One big part of making thoughtful website decisions is looking at other inspiring websites to help you figure out what you want your own to look and read like. That’s why Awwwards is such a helpful resource. This site is all about honoring the best in web design and creativity by highlighting a superior website of the day. You can also get more targeted inspiration by going to their Collections page, where you can view website inspiration by category, focusing on things like the best in web typography or contact pages and business type, so you can see what works for others in your industry.

Really Good Emails For Email Inspiration 

Think email marketing is old-fashioned? Think again. Research shows that email is 40% better at converting than Facebook and Twitter. And while it may only take a few seconds for a consumer to scan an email, so much thought has to go into a successful email marketing campaign. From the subject line (47% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone!) to the email’s content (including both design and copy) to the all-important calls to action (CTAs) encouraging the email’s reader to take steps that will move them through your sales funnel, a good email is like a work of art. 

What you need: A showcase of email inspiration, design, and resources from all over the web.

Promo’s pick: Really Good Emails

So, want to find inspiration by looking at examples of excellent emails? Look no further than Really Good Emails, a website dedicated to highlighting precisely that. Similar to many of the other resources we’ve listed, Really Good Emails gives you two ways to browse. You can either scroll through their homepage for a wide variety of email examples, or you can look at specific email categories (think welcome emails, giveaway emails, and product launch emails) or industries (like education or health and beauty).

Lapa Ninja For Landing Page Optimization 

A landing page is a single web page on your website where a visitor ends up after they click a link in a marketing email, an online ad, or a search result. Basically, it’s where potential customers go if they’ve shown some interest in your brand or product, meaning that a good landing page can turn somebody from just a lead into a buying customer. Once you’ve got their attention, your landing page can be the closer, giving users that extra push they need to actually take action. And the more landing pages you have, the better, with companies who have 15 landing pages getting 55% more leads than customers with only 10.

What you need: Landing page inspiration to help learn and improve your landing page design skills, no matter your industry.

Promo’s pick: Lapa Ninja

For inspiration of great landing pages, check out Lapa Ninja, a gallery featuring examples of over 4,000 landing pages. They have examples from a wide variety of industries, including fashion, real estate, and insurance, meaning that chances are high you’ll be able to find useful landing page examples relevant to the small business that you are marketing.

Fantastic Texts For Text Message Marketing Inspiration

If you’re not using it yet, text message marketing is a highly valuable marketing channel to try out. While people don’t necessarily open all of their emails, a whopping 98% of sent text messages are opened. So even though you can’t fit as much information in a text as you can in an email, it’s still a great way to reach your customers and get their attention. That being said, text messages can be even more complex to craft than good emails since they require you to be much more concise.

What you need: A bank of text messaging marketing examples from brands doing it the right way.

Promo’s pick: Fantastic Texts

Fantastic Texts is a great resource to see how other brands have succeeded with text message marketing. They operate as many other resources here, showing a general gallery of texts that you can look through or filter by text message type or industry.

Know Industry Trends With Trendsetter

A big part of successful marketing is keeping up to date about the latest industry trends. After all, change is a constant in the digital marketing realm, and falling behind can do everything from making you look out of touch to damaging your search engine rankings and lowering your follower counts. Making a habit of staying interested in and up to date on the latest marketing trends is a great way to ensure you won’t miss any critical updates to your favorite social media platform, SEO algorithms changes, or relevant promotional opportunities.

What you need: A resource that constantly enhances itself with innovative and altering industry trends.

Promo’s pick: Trendhunter

Additional resources: Small Business Trends, TLDR (too long; didn’t read) Marketing

There’s no better place to go for trend updates than Trendhunter’s marketing trend section. This website is dedicated to delivering weekly updates about new developments in advertising, highlighting how various brands are participating in new and hot trends. It may be a bit overwhelming when you first enter the website; you’ll get the hang of it quickly.

We also recommend bookmarking Small Business Trends, which offers news, advice, and ideas relevant to small businesses, including marketing advice, as well as Search Engine Watch, which will help you keep up to date on SEO news and insights.

Another great way to stay up to date on new trends in the marketing field is to subscribe to a marketing newsletter. That way, you can sit back and let the industry updates be delivered straight into your email inbox instead of having to hunt around for them on your own. Our favorite marketing newsletter for trend updates is TLDR (too long; didn’t read) Marketing, which is all about offering specific, fluff-free information to not waste your time. They’ll tell you about everything from eCommerce predictions for the coming year to updates to your favorite social media platforms to new marketing tools you might find useful.

AI Marketing Resources

Have you ever wished that you didn’t have to deal with the limitations of your human brain when writing copy? What about when coming up with content ideas, proofreading, and figuring out how to improve your existing marketing strategy? Well, it is 2022, after all, and many resources use artificial intelligence to save you time and effort on marketing. 

What you need:  Artificial intelligence tools to leverage your marketing strategy and take your content creation to the next level

Promo’s pick: Grammarly

Additional resources: Hubspot, Market Muse

One resource we couldn’t live without is Grammarly, a web extension that uses AI to correct any errors in your copy’s spelling, grammar, and even tone. It’s like having a proofreader and editor living on your computer, making sure that everything you write sounds perfect. 

In addition to correcting for human error, AI is excellent at analyzing data, which is especially useful for SEO optimization, involving massive amounts of data that can be hard for a human to process on their own. Hubspot’s SEO tool uses artificial intelligence to scan your website for keywords and develop a list of relevant topics for you to write about, so you never run out of content ideas.

And suppose you want to get really fancy. In that case, there’s also Market Muse, an AI-powered content strategy tool that uses artificial intelligence to help you with multiple facets of content marketing, including research, optimization, and even writing. 

You’ve Got This

We know that marketing can be a bit overwhelming. But we’re here to make sure that you have all of the best information and resources to help you succeed in promoting and growing your business. So go ahead and bookmark the tools on this list and use them as you find necessary. They’ll be the helping hand you need to find marketing success.