The Executive Suite: 7 Creativity Tools for Inspired Marketing

At the core of a great marketer lies a truly creative being. When marketing becomes formulaic, it falls flat. When it’s creatively tailored to meet the needs of the audience and express the brand authentically, marketing can actually feel like art.

A marketer’s job is so constant, however, that staying in the creative flow is a humungous challenge. That’s why a lot of marketing feels so generic; it was either drafted by someone who isn’t truly passionate about the field, or by a great professional who is simply tapped out.

When you reach your next “marketer’s block”, turn to these apps and services for inspiration. Each fills a different need in creating a stellar marketing campaign, and each can infuse new life into what would otherwise be a dull campaign. In other words, they each could be your new best friend.

#1: A Global Network of Experts
Gathering credible quotes from experts in your industry can be marketing gold. By using the honest statements of professionals, you can manifest a deeper sense of credibility and expertise in your industry. Finding these folks can be a headache, but sites like Media Diplomat offer an immensely efficient and simple way to connect with the people you need. Media Diplomat is a global database of experts from a myriad of specialties, and journalists and marketers use it daily to nab the exact quotes and info needed to write brilliant blogs, content marketing pieces, and articles.

#2: Animated Videos You Can Make Yourself
Infographics have been all the rage for some time now, but what if you could make animated videos in a snap, all by yourself? If this sounds like just what your marketing efforts need to reach the masses, GoAnimate is a must. This fabulous tool is essentially a drag and drop dynamo that produces high end videos that are do-it-yourself but look totally professional. It’s affordable, intuitive, and super fun too.

#3: Go Beyond the Average Email
Email marketing is still a highly effective means to reach your demographic, but let’s face it, it could use some creative juices to jazz up the mundane. Movable Ink is a fabulous way to take your email newsletters from boring to unforgettable. Movable Ink helps marketers make email feel personal, and yet still reach the masses. The tool makes the entire email setup process easy and intuitive, from email creation to the analytics. This lets you spend more time conceiving snappy copy and headlines, as opposed to endless hours setting up and analyzing results. Content can be streamed in real-time into your blasts as well, making a stale email a thing of the past.

#4: Visually Organize Your Thoughts
Murally is a genius marketing tool that helps you visualize the goals and ideas you have about each campaign. This app helps you draw meaningful insights from your list of must-haves, and when used with a team, can get you all on the same creative page. Murally speeds up the creative process significantly by creating a visual map of ideas and needs, which can spark creative solutions in a jiffy. So much better than an old school white board.

#5: A Brilliant New Way to do A/B Testing
Almost every marketer lives to test their ideas against each other, finding the most successful method to sell their goods and services. Tools like Convert make the process far more entertaining and effective. Convert is an A/B testing application made specifically for agencies and marketers. Its greatest gift is simplifying the technical process so creativity is held as the shining star. Convert also seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics, and it really is a godsend for split testing and optimization.

#6: Let Your Fonts do All the Talking
Typography in online and print materials can make all the difference in the world to a successful campaign. If you’re running low on inspiration for the text styles you’re using, check out MyFonts. This site has a gorgeous selection of varied and eye-popping fonts that can truly jazz up your marketing materials. You can even use it to help define your corporate design.

#7: Collaborate in Style
Marketing efforts are often a joint collaboration between marketing teams and clients. If your campaigns are created by a team in any fashion, Notism is a fantastic new tool to help you meet your potential. Notism is platform that facilitates efficient and inspired collaboration on design and video creations. It streamlines precise and comprehensive feedback, lets teammates communicate via text or sketches and artwork, and even allows for video timelines and communications within the workflow. It has genius task management and is an overall magnificent tool to get marketing teams on the same page.

Great marketing starts with great ideas, and sometimes it takes a brilliant tool to help you generate your dream campaign. Technology is all about making our lives easier, and for marketers, sometimes that means streamlining the mundane tasks and giving you more time to get imaginative. These tools are just a small sampling of the awesome suite of options you have, but employing even just one of them can make the difference in your marketing magic.