407. New tools🧑💻
23 Martech tools to know in 2023
Hi there 👋
Thank you, all, for the positive feedback on last week’s email newsletter about AI marketers. It’s clearly quite the hot topic! As it turns out, I was doing some AI marketing myself last week, and I wanted to pass along some of the tips I learned, courtesy of — you guessed it — TikTok. Apparently, this is the best way to do “prompt engineering” with ChatGPT:
Start every prompt with “I want you to act as …” which is when you tell ChatGPT the role you want it to play
Then for the next part of the prompt say “I will …” which defines your role
Then say “You will …” which outlines what you expect ChatGPT to perform for you
Then lay out the specific request
Hopefully this helps. Let me know if you have any good AI conversations this week!
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
23 martech tools to know in 2023
The landscape of marketing technology tools is vast — so vast that when all the tools get counted up for the 2023 version of the Martech Map, there will be more than 10,000 available for us marketers to consider.
Here’s a view of last year’s map, which had a modest 😅 9,932 tools.
The name of the game for marketing teams in 2023 seems to still be efficiency. How do you make your programs more efficient? Your channels more scalable? Your strategies more sustainable? Tools play a big part in this. It’s always easier to add a variable cost like a piece of software than it is a fixed cost like headcount. Or so finance always tells me. :)
With that in mind, I thought I would open up my bookmarks and share with you a list of tools that are on my radar for helping scale the impact of my marketing teams. You won’t find the common, ubiquitous tools in here like HubSpot or Webflow or Ahrefs. But there’s a chance these will be ubiquitous before too long.
for engaging with ambassadors & influencers
1 - Cabal - https://getcabal.com/
How they describe themselves: Get more out of your investors and advisors.
Cabal helps you organize your investor communications so that you’re making the most out of their networks and amplification channels. Great for company announcements, product launches, even recruiting and hiring.
2 - AudiencePlus - https://www.audienceplus.com/
How they describe themselves: We are building software, content, and community to help every company become a media company.
Tbh, I don’t really know what AudiencePlus is, but it’s founded by a team of really awesome marketers who know a thing or two about audience-building. For now, it is a repository of content resources. In the future … maybe it’ll be a software tool?
3 - Aspire - https://aspire.io/
How they describe themselves: Drive revenue with your influencer community
Aspire is doing some really forward-thinking stuff with influencers of all shapes and sizes and for all industries. Don’t let being a B2B business get in the way of you trying out some influencer strategies.
for Product-Led Growth
There’s a budding ecosystem around PLG software that exists somewhere between marketing, product, sales, and data. Here are two of the best:
4 - Endgame - https://www.endgame.io/
How they describe themselves: Welcome to Product-Led Sales. Endgame lets you connect the dots between product signals and sales opportunities without waiting on data teams so you can close bigger deals faster.
5 - Pocus - https://www.pocus.com
How they describe themselves: Turn product data into revenue. Pocus is a Product-Led Sales platform that gives go-to-market teams access to product usage data...without relying on engineers.
for interactive product demos
In the product marketing world, demos can be a rather touchy subject. Many tools are now solving the problem of on-demand demos, interactive demos, and more, which is great news for PMMs who need to manage a demo experience.
6 - Reprise - https://www.reprise.com/
How they describe themselves: Demos created by the storytellers in all of us. The only fully-integrated demo creation platform. Empower your enterprise sales and marketing teams to expertly build demos and seamlessly showcase products.
7 - Tiled - https://www.tiled.co/
How they describe themselves: If it’s not interactive, it’s not working. Make it interactive. Make it personal. Make it human. Content that actually converts—no code needed.
for email newsletters
8 - Beehiiv - https://www.beehiiv.com/
How they describe themselves: The newsletter platform built for growth
A bunch of folks from Morning Brew went off and built this newsletter tool, which has some big buzz and positive reviews. It may not be enough to get you to switch away from Mailchimp or ConvertKit or HubSpot, but for a small test or an early-stage team, it could be worthwhile.
9 - Substack - https://substsack.com
How they describe themselves: Do your best work, supported by your subscribers
You all probably know Substack by now, so I’m kind of cheating by including it here. But what I think is “up-and-coming” about Substack is the business use case. Few brands run their own substacks today — it’s very much a personal-brand playground. I could see this changing in the next 24 months to be something more akin to how brands used Medium as a content play.
for supercharging your BizOps, RevOps, MOPs teams
10 - Rattle - https://www.gorattle.com/
How they describe themselves: Get a pulse on your sales cycles. Unlock revenue insights that empower your team’s performance. Engage, update, and close business all from Slack or Teams with intelligent, bi-directional alerts.
Amazing performance and intelligence platform for go-to-market teams, all built within Slack or Teams.
for Community-Led Growth
There are a handful of awesome tools in the budding CLG space, helping to stitch together community data with business data to help measure ROI and more. Here are three worth watching:
11 - Commsor - https://www.commsor.com/
How they describe themselves: Unlock the power of Community-Led. Discover the extraordinary impact of Community-Led Growth, with Commsor. Get the software, education, and community you need to transform your business.
12 - Common Room - https://www.commonroom.io/
How they describe themselves: Unlock community, the new growth engine. Gain complete visibility into engagement happening in digital channels. Take action to deliver personalized and authentic interactions across the entire customer journey.
13 - Orbit - https://orbit.love/
How they describe themselves: Start Your Community-led Growth Machine.
for out-of-the-box advertising
14 - Paved - https://www.paved.com/
How they describe themselves: Where brands connect with communities. Discover email newsletters that fit your customer profile and effortlessly launch newsletter sponsorships.
Paved is like a display network for newsletter sponsorships.
15 - Adgile - https://www.adgile.co/
How they describe themselves: Adgile is the leading tech-enabled truck-side media company. Use our Virtual Fleet™ to improve public perception, track attribution across the physical and digital space, and drive traffic to your brand.
Adgile is like a display network but for the side of trucks!
for team productivity and joy
16 - Fellow - https://fellow.app/
How they describe themselves: Fewer, better meetings are just the start. Fellow is where teams gather to have productive team meetings and meaningful 1:1s, build collaborative meeting agendas, record decisions, and keep each other accountable.
Fellow is revolutionizing the way that teams do meetings, helping you have fewer meetings, yes, but also making the meetings that you do have waaaay more effective.
17 - Vowel - https://www.vowel.com/
How they describe themselves: AI-powered meetings for fast-moving teams Vowel is the tool for remote teams to host, summarize, search, and share video meetings — no add-ons required.
Maybe Vowel is to Zoom what TikTok was to Facebook?
18 - Matter - https://matterapp.com/
How they describe themselves: Recognition and Rewards all inside Slack or Teams
for hiring great people
19 - Cauldron - https://cauldron.app/
How they describe themselves: Power your ATS with Cauldron. Hire 3x Faster. Cauldron overlays your ATS and allows you to pre-screen candidates with quick tasks as they apply.
With Cauldron, you can qualify candidates throughout the process with tasks and questions relevant to each role. It cuts down on the time to hire and gets you a more qualified applicant pool from the start.
for customer research
20 - Dovetail - https://dovetailapp.com/
How they describe themselves: Bring your customer into every decision. The flexible customer insights platform for teams that gets you from data to insights fast, no matter the method.
A complete home for customer insights
for multimedia awesomeness
21 - Descript - https://www.descript.com/
How they describe themselves: There’s a new way to make video and podcasts. A good way. Descript is the simple, powerful, and fun way to edit.
Descript is a video- and audio-editing platform that works like a text editor. It’s quite remarkable how easy it is to edit video in Descript and take something like a podcast recording and simply export script, timestamp, and more.
for new-school software & services
22 - Superside - https://www.superside.com/
How they describe themselves: Standout design and video that performs. Get everything you need to unbottleneck design, reduce costs and move quickly with infinite scale
Superside is a creative agency with a super powerful software tool that helps manage work-in-progress, briefs, communication, and more. They’re used and loved by a ton of cool brands (including Oyster).
23 - Breef - https://www.breef.com/
How they describe themselves: THE EASIEST WAY TO FIND AN AGENCY. Find vetted agencies. Get pitches in < 7 days. Manage contracts + payments (in one place).
Breef is a directory of fantastic agencies at your service, and its software solution makes it incredibly easy to find and manage vendors in hours, not days.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster. I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.
