Top 10 Gifts for the Marketer in Your Life – Phonexa Canada

Marian Sahakyan

Senior Brand Marketing Manager

6 minute read

The days remaining in 2023 are few, and the new year is just around the corner. And with that grows the pressure of finding the perfect gift for the special marketer in your life.

In this year-end roundup, we’re giving you a gift lineup you didn’t know you needed, directly sourced and curated by the marketing team at Phonexa – IYKYK.

We like them all, we want them all, and we’re sure your favorite marketers will do – especially our last suggestion.

Happy gifting!

Actual footage of a marketer ending the year.

1. Marketing Courses & Education

If you know anything about marketers, it’s that we are very, very competitive, which means that we are also always trying to stay on the cutting edge of information and education. So why not feed our professional desires with great educational content?

Here are some top marketing courses we’d recommend:

• Skillshare: Online classes for creatives
• Coursera
• Udemy

Recommended by: Anna Avetisyan

2. Good Reads That Elevate Perspective & Knowledge

There are the course-takers, and there are the bookworms. There’s something for everyone. Here’s a list featuring some of our favorites:

Crucial Conversations

Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation – especially difficult ones – leads to progress and sought-after results. Written in an engaging and witty style, the book teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person.

Strategies within the book can be applied to personal and professional scenarios.

Building a StoryBrand

In marketing, we talk about on-brand content, off-brand content, and just about anything that slightly correlates to the idea of brand identity and awareness. But there’s a huge gray area. This book, written by New York Times bestselling author Donald Miller, explores ideas and strategies behind how brands connect with their customers, how they position themselves in saturated markets, and what it takes to effectively tell a brand story.

99U Essays: Manage Your Day-to-Day

Marketers are creative; we are hustlers; we work at a breakneck pace all-day, everyday; we are a lot of things. But if there’s one thing that many of us are not, that’s organized. This reading experience gives an actionable tool kit for tackling the new challenges of the 24/7, always-on workplace.

The Art of War

The Art of War is a renowned ancient Chinese military treatise written by Sun Tzu, a military strategist and philosopher. The book provides valuable insights into warfare and strategy, emphasizing the importance of careful planning, understanding the enemy, exploiting weaknesses, and employing tactics to achieve victory. It covers various aspects of warfare, including tactics, intelligence gathering, leadership, and the importance of adaptability.

How does it apply to marketing? Ex-U.S. Air Force Officer and well-respected email marketer Nate Wright explains here.

Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

Packed with proven strategies, frameworks, fun examples, this is another marketing masterpiece, an essential guide to becoming a masterful marketer, writer, and storyteller.

It explores topics like resources needed to write well and create deeper, richer customer relationships; the value of great writing; creating a unique brand voice; creating original stories; and specific approaches to the top 20 types of content that marketers write.

Recommended by: Marian Sahakyan

3. reMarkable Notebook

Remember what we said about marketers and being (un)organized? Well, we’d prefer nothing more than an assistant to transcribe and organize our notes and ideas, and make sure that we don’t lose them.

But since the idea of a real-life assistant may be a little far-fetched, the second best option is a reMarkable Digital Notebook that takes our handwritten notes and turns them into typed and organized documents that can easily be stored in the cloud.

Recommended by: Kyra Keh

4. All Coffee, Everything

Members of the Phonexa Marketing team collectively spend an average of $1,100 per month at Starbucks (yes, we actually did the math), and we’d love nothing more than somebody to sponsor our survival habits for a month or two.

It’s needless to say that anything coffee-related will not only be a huge hit, but it’ll automatically make you their favorite person. Trust us.

Recommended by: Talar Malakian & EVERY PERSON IN MARKETING

5. Premium Version for the Artist Formerly Known As Twitter

The perfect gift for the social-crazed marketer in your life can be a paid version of X – formerly known as Twitter. A Basic plan begins at $3, Premium is $8, and Premium+ is $16.

We’re also hearing Premium+ gets you a free weekend stay on Elon Musk’s yacht and a new Tesla Cybertruck.

Recommended by: Manouk Akopyan

6. Marketing Conference Tickets

We love to travel for conferences. You can never go wrong with signing us up for the next INBOUND, HubSpot’s annual marketing conference. If the marketer in your life focuses on a niche marketing area, you can give them tickets to MailCon for email marketing; MozCon for SEO; Adobe Summit for user experiences, among so many others.

Recommended by: Astine Ohanyan

7. Subscription to AI & Digital Tools

The focus of the year – AI – has proven to make everyone’s lives so much easier, especially that of a marketer. Here are some of our favorite AI and other digital tools:

• Jasper AI aids content creation and editing for bloggers, marketers, and businesses.
• Brandwatch tracks everything from your own channels to hashtags to specific phrases and keywords you want to look at.
• Hemingway App highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors.
• Brand24 monitors what’s being said about your businesses online, gets customer insights, engages communities, identifies sales leads, improves social customer service, reaches out to influencers, and monitors competition.
• Grammarly reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and delivery mistakes in English texts, detects plagiarism, and suggests replacements for the identified errors.
• Canva gives a great graphic design platform and allows you to create social media graphics and presentations with smart templates and other design elements.

Recommended by Germain Palacios

8. Vector Desk Robot To Get Through the Long Hours

Vector is an adorable little robot assistant who loves to just hang out and greet its owners when it hears or feels them come around. Powered by voice recognition, AI, and advanced robotics, Vector the Desk Robot comes alive with personality and is engaged by sight, sound, and touch. It answers questions, takes photos upon request, tells the weather, and so much more. It even comes with a built-in Alexa functionality and automatically updates with new skills and features.

Recommended by: Alexandra LeBrun

9. Entertainment

Whether it’s for music, podcasts, films, shows, or documentaries, a good marketer always appreciates the power and value of access to a vast pool of things to listen to or watch.

Some of our team’s favorite streaming services include Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Max, Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, ESPN+, DAZN, and more.

Recommended by: Astine Ohanyan

10. Marketing Swag & All the Nice Things

There’s something very special about knick-knacks, stationary, and other marketing-themed items. A quirky marketing joke, a T-shirt with a marketing-related meme, or an item to make us more organized would be much appreciated by any marketer. Here are some of our favorites:

1. It’s Giving Future Marketing Guru Soy Wax Candle
2. The Marketing Millennials Merch
3. Anti-Social Social Media Manager Crewneck
4. Intelligent Change Productivity Planner
5. Corporate Email Lingo Mug
6. Corporate Jargon Lingo T-Shirt
7. Funny Social Media Manager Mug
8. Ugly Coughing Cat Meme Mug
9. Team Meeting Meme T-Shirt

Recommended by: Armen Karaoghlanian

BONUS FROM PHONEXA!

‘Tis the season to be merry, so we’re also spreading some serious holiday cheer.

Phonexa is offering a 10% OFF SUBSCRIPTION FEE DISCOUNT to all new clients and a 10% OFF UPGRADE DISCOUNT to existing clients.

Please note the discount is only applicable to the monthly licensing fee for the 2024 calendar year. The promotional discount expires on January 31, 2024.

Yup, you read that right.

Power your performance marketing to a new level heading into the new year, and take advantage of our all-in-one suite of products.

Merge your tech stack all under one roof.

Finally close the loop between leads, calls, clicks, revenue, and so much more!

Seize this amazing stocking stuffer for your business by contacting [email protected] or your Customer Success Manager to get started today.