I’m always curious to see how other people do what they do, including but not limited to the technology they use to make their day-to-day happen.
With that thought in mind, here are the 23 pieces of technology we use to bring TMM events to you. Hopefully, there are a couple of bits here you hadn’t heard of, but will help you!
Hubspot – Email Service Provider and CRM.
How we use it: We recently moved to Hubspot, having previously used ConvertKit and Mailchimp. It’s very expensive, but given the number of people now involved in running local events, moving to Hubspot will now give us better team permissions, automation, and flexibility in how we create these emails for you. It was a big call to commit to Hubspot, but I’m definitely putting it in the ‘investment in the future’ category.
Attest – Market research.
How we use it: Attest is a fab market research platform where you set the questions you want to ask, then choose the audience you want to ask it to. They then do the hard bit and find you the answers. This is a godsend for someone who has spent way too much time trying to get survey responses from folks.
Anchor.fm – Publishing The Marketing Meetup Podcast.
How we use it: We publish the TMM podcast from here. Now owned by Spotify, I’ve been pleased how easy Anchor is to use and upload your podcast to all platforms. I would say that other platforms, such as Acast have better options for inserting ads into your podcasts, and Chartable have better analytics. I would consider moving one day for sure.
Ahrefs – SEO.
How we use it: I’ll regularly dip into Ahrefs when we’re writing our blog posts, and even when we’re curating seasons, to determine demand for a topic and also optimise the content for SEO purposes. I also really love their weekly keyword tracker email which lets us know how we’re doing on specific keywords, as well as any new/losts backlinks.
Notion – Organisation.
How we use it: Having previously used Trello and Asana, we settled on Notion for organising the team and our internal documentation. We found the flexibility better than the other platforms – especially as we look to build out more processes that can be shared with people both internal and external to the team as we apply for B Corp status
Superhuman – Email.
How we use it: For me a real game changer in how I respond to email. Superhuman’s ‘reason d’être’ is to make responding to email much quicker – and they certainly do that! More than that however, is that it makes emails much harder to ‘lose’ in your inbox – something that most certainly suits me! They run on a referral basis, so if you want to use it, drop me an email and I’ll refer you (you and I will get a free month!)
Canva – Graphics.
How we use it: We have a few Canvases templates set up to send to local organisers to make it easier for them to produce graphics for their events. Canva is definitely for quick and easy graphic creation, but it’s totally amazin’.
Photoshop – More complex graphics.
How we use it: Especially for TMM new season announcements, we’ll create the graphics in photoshop as we’ll use a wider array of features that Canva doesn’t have.
Lightroom – Photo editing.
How we use it: From time to time we share actual real life photos. Lightroom makes it super easy to edit photos, particularly with its inbuilt presets. I probably would seek out an alternative if I didn’t already have an Adobe subscription for which Lightroom was included although I’m not sure what this would be!
iMovie/Premiere Pro – Movie editing.
How we use them: I’m a noob with movie editing, so will happily stick with iMovie. It’s quick, easy, and relatively intuitive. James (my co-founder) knows what he’s doing, so uses Premiere Pro for more complex edits, and frankly… it shows.
Snappy – Screen grabber.
How we use it: One of those little things I use every day so would be remiss not to mention. If I need a screen grab, this is what I use! 🙂
Zoom – Webinar platform.
How we use it: We use Zoom as our platform for our webinars. While there are a lot of alternatives, Zoom is pretty much the ‘Ronseal’ of webinar platforms – it does what it says on the tin. It’s stable, I like it’s live transcription, YouTube integration and folks are generally familiar with it. I dislike their automated emails (how they look) and the fact that we often have to make up for their shortcomings with workarounds (such as using Zapier and Gravity forms to enable us to have on-site registration pages).
Google Slides – Presentations.
How we use it: For me, it’s a best-in-class presentation software when judged against the metric of how people can use it to collaborate. Would love more font options, though.
Contentcal – Social scheduling.
How we use it: We had a long-standing relationship with ContentCal and use the tech daily to schedule posts. Now they’re post-acquisition and being moved into Adobe, we’ll take a look at some others including Hootsuite and Buffer
EZGif – GIF creation.
How we use it: As a fan of GIFs, I use EZGif most days to create and optimise the gifs we use.
SHIELD – Linkedin analytics.
How we use it: For my mind, the best Linkedin analytics platform out there. Linkedin is an important channel to TMM, so understanding how we’re doing is equally important!
Drift/Wistia Video – Embeddable videos.
How we use it: Sometimes typed words aren’t enough. Whether it’s for a demonstration video of how to do a thing, or to place a bit more humanity into an email, I will quite regularly record a 1/2 minute video as a response to an email rather than just typing out a long one where nuance and tone of voice can be lost.
Tango – Easy demonstrations.
How we use it: Tango is a brilliant browser extension which allows you to easily send through click-by-click instructions of ‘how to do a thing’ to folks. Simply start tango up, then run through the process. Tango captures your clicks and inputs and creates a very easy to follow instruction guide for anyone trying to do something they haven’t done before!
Eventbrite – Event listings.
How we use it: We list our events on Eventbrite. As an observation, since covid it feels like Eventbrite’s organic discovery of events has also improved dramatically, meaning new people are likely to find your events when listed on Eventbrite – exposing you to a wider audience.
Memberpress – Member functionality for website.
How we use it: When we built TMM+, we wanted a place where we could gate specific content, run memberships, and do it all on our existing website (rather than a third party platform). As we run on Wordpress, Memberpress came out trumps. I have to say I don’t find it a-m-a-z-i-n-g, but it does the job.
Niceboard – White-labeled jobs board.
How we use it: The TMM jobs board is run on a platform called Niceboard which we run on it’s own domain (themarketingmeetupjobs.com). Not only is it best in class – their founder, Olivier, has bent over backwards to help us. Much recommended!
Descript – Transcription.
How we use it: We use Descript to transcribe our videos, simple. 🙂 If you haven’t seen their ad, I think it’s possibly the best one I’ve ever seen.
Slack – Internal comms.
How we use it: We’re slowly getting used to using Slack internally, but it has been a game changer. Despite their price rise later in the year, I’m still a fan, and think it’s worth the price of admission.
There are a few more, but I’d be interested if there are some not listed here that you consider a real game changer! 🙂