Because no good story ever started with someone using a Spreadsheet. This one does.
The Candy App is a bookmarking tool that allows you to save all kinds of website content. The app lets you arrange information into customized Storylines, which are your personalized resources built from selected data in your desired order and context.
My story with Candy started about 6 months ago. Working as a freelance marketer for tech startups, I was all of a sudden baffled to realize I still relied on multiple browser tabs and, wait for it… Spreadsheets (!) to arrange and store all the links and important information I needed for various clients and projects. I was working in one of the most innovative industries out there, and managing information as if it was 1999. This had to change. That’s when I stumbled upon Candy and never looked back.
Marketing activities depend largely on data, and your success as a marketer is influences by your ability to collect and use information. But when information is not structured, prioritized or even useful, you might as well not possess this information at all.
Marketers face different information-related challenges every single day. Here are a few universal issues we as marketers often confront, and how Candy can help us stay on top of things.
1. You’re new at your job
Marketers’ skills are extremely transferable. It is not uncommon for marketing professionals to change jobs between very different industries. Broadly speaking, it doesn’t matter much if you’re marketing a hot new app or a line of running shoes. What is important is how quickly you adapt to new concepts and situations. When marketers change jobs between different industries, the biggest issue they face is not the fact that they have to learn from scratch how to market something but rather learn about what it is they are marketing. This includes a ton of research — what does the new company do, what have they done so far, what is the product, who are the competitors? That’s a massive amount of information you not only have to collect, but organize, process and memorize. How about creating a personalized Storyline in Candy that includes all you need to know about your new job and which you can customize and go back to whenever you want? Constantly having dozens of browser tabs open is now an annoying thing of the past.
2. You’re writing copy
Copywriting, let’s be honest, you either love it or you hate it. But when you work in marketing, chances are you have to do it at some point in your career. Whether you are good at it nor not, you’re never really alone with it. There are so many tools out there that can check your grammar, keywords, structure, and readability or even help you change business jargon into clever phrases to spice up your copy. But writing content is only half of the job. You can’t write good copy without prior research and organizing your thoughts as well as your resources. Candy was developed so you could store all the important information you go through, save the sources of everything you read, organize the data in a visually appealing way and allow you to share, send and embed what you’ve compiled. Creating Candy Storylines to boost your research effectiveness is surprisingly entertaining and slightly addictive. You might even start enjoying copywriting if you didn’t before.
3. You’re creating marketing plans, strategies, and content calendars
After my first entry level job in government communication, I started working as a content manager at an up and coming tech startup. During my first week, I was told to create a content calendar for the next 6 months. Having never been a content manager, or barely having any idea of content marketing, the first thing I did after returning to my seat was Google “how to create a content calendar”. Admit it, you’ve all done something similar at some point in your career. And boy was I glad I did. There is an incredible amount of useful tutorials, templates, articles and examples online that will help you excel in whatever you need to create. Don’t plagiarize, but don’t also try to reinvent the wheel. Everything you’re about to create has already been created thousands of times before and there are hundreds of resources out there that can help you transfer your specific marketing objectives into the best plan, strategy or calendar your company has ever seen.
Make Candy a must in your research process — store only the most important content while leaving aside the unimportant. Focus only on what will help you get the job done to an excellent standard. Imagine creating your own resources for whatever task you need to take upon, having fun while doing it and successfully processing more useful information than you could ever imagine. Who said you can’t have it all?
Share your thoughts! The Candy team is always on the lookout for stories and experiences similar to mine. What are you struggling most with as a marketer that has to do with information management and research? Give Candy a try and let the team know on candy@candybank.com how the app is making you more productive. Have a good idea on new Candy features after trying it out? Give a shout-out!
