The Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide for Content Marketers and Content Strategists

Nothing conveys appreciation for your favorite content enthusiast more than a bespoke holiday gift. Now that the season of festive holidays is underway, we’ve created a gift guide for marketers—specifically content marketers and content strategists.

We’re talking gifts for word nerds: People (like me) who read cereal boxes top to bottom as a kid; people who enjoy creating taxonomies that categorize seemingly random things; people who call out typos and grammatical errors with perhaps a little too much gusto. Let’s get started.

17 Gift Ideas for the Content Geek in Your Life

1. Bourbon or wine: Got it, you didn’t have time to read through the list, so we’ve put the easiest gift for you at the top. Whether it’s for weekend recovery, the late nights spent editing or updating a company’s messaging one more time, or the tricky web copy assignment that’s way over deadline, your recipient’s beverage of choice will never disappoint.

Too soon for the alcohol? Fair enough. Let’s continue:

2. AP stylebook: Chances are your content fan has an outdated print version of the infamous Associated Press Stylebook. Give them a current subscription so they can follow the latest guidance (and reference the best way to spell out numbers).
3. Warm beverages: We recommend gifting hot tea to your favorite content strategist for the next time they’re pondering naming conventions, social media strategy, or when futzing with a taxonomy. Herbal tea is an easy choice here.
4. Bookstore gift card: Powell’s Books, The Strand, Green Apple Books—pick the city or state, and no question the content person on your list has a favorite bricks-and-mortar bookstore. In their downtime, when not auditing content inventories or reimagining a product web page, they like to read.
5. Post-it Notes: These brightly colored sticky notes didn’t start out in 1977 as a content strategy must-have. Forty-four years later they have become an essential part of any brainstorming and categorizing toolkit.
6. Stress ball: Crafting content is hard, sometimes painstaking. While a stress ball might seem frivolous, it will likely be put to good use by a content creator (and potentially help with the carpal tunnel exercises they might find themselves needing one day).
7. Music: Your content nerd might need extreme quiet or white noise or background music to get inspired. Better than a generic gift card, Apple Music or Spotify might be the best gift they receive. If quiet is what they’d prefer, consider noise cancelling headphones.
8. Dartboard: When your favorite content person is in search of that elusive word, they can tack a few pages of a dictionary to a dartboard and throw darts in the hopes of striking word gold.

Gifting for Your In-House Content Team

We’d be remiss in not calling out extra special gifts for the content specialists on your team. If you’re in sales, customer success, product, or demand gen, here are some ideas that require some effort from you but go a long way toward your company’s content strategy and the happiness of your content folks.

9. Access to analytics: Whether your content pro is working in-house or at an agency, they’ll appreciate a log in to Google Analytics or a powerful platform like Tableau. Access to detailed metrics will help them create a more informed content strategy and superior customer experience.
10. Updated in-house style guide: No one likes seeing a company name rendered three different ways or confusion around whether or not to use periods at the end of bulleted lists. A content practitioner craves consistency, so grant them staff hours to update their internal style guide.
11. Healthy content budget: Content is not an afterthought, it’s central to the marketing success of any organization. We can’t tell you how much to spend for this gift, but this Forbes article might help.
12. Content audit: Maybe content governance isn’t currently on your holiday list, but we think it should be. A content audit of website pages, content assets, and blog posts can help your team prune underperforming or outdated content and identify content gaps along the customer journey.
13. Realistic content strategy goals: If you’re heading up a marketing team, they look to you for goals and a strategy to align their content projects. Forrester Research has a few thoughts on this part of your business strategy, as do we. Nothing says happy new year like a fresh direction that your team can get behind.
14. Legit backlinks: Backlinks are highly coveted and sometimes contentious. Helping your team members get a quality backlink or two—yes, PR teams, we’re looking at you—is worthy of many thank you’s.
15. Reasonable content operations deadlines: Any content marketer knows the value of deadlines. They give them, they follow them, and they cajole colleagues into sticking to them. Help your content person by providing a reasonable deadline or getting back to them on time.
16. Fully attributed case study: A case study that can be shared publicly is a rare gift. Do what you need to do to help your marketing team secure a client quote or a fully fleshed out problem/solution/results summary with a customer. It will truly be the gift that keeps on giving—your sales teams will appreciate it and prospects will rely on it when doing their competitive research.
17. Subject matter expert (SME) participation: Help a content creator out by agreeing to be interviewed for their blog post or ebook. Your time is precious, but if it helps, consider these requests flattering. You know something they don’t. You’re a subject matter expert.

And that’s a wrap: our gift guide for marketers who care about content. If you’ve read this far, you probably noticed that content practitioners try not to take themselves too seriously. Many of these “gifts” can’t actually be purchased, but at the end of the workday, isn’t it the thought that counts?