Visual Content Tools That Can Skyrocket Your Blog Performance
When it comes to creativity in design with your social media marketing, I’ve found that there are many areas for improving your designs with these visual content tools. These include automation, communicating, engaging, and more.
When I look for helpful design tools, I often grab ones that make a difference in one or more of these areas.
Each of these social media visual content tools I’ve highlighted below fit into one of these categories. Here’s hoping that a bit of help in each area can unlock some creativity for you.
This author regularly discusses marketing tools, John Jantsch.
The design isn’t something that every marketer feels comfortable doing, but the reality is every one of us will need to design something at some point in our careers. Whether it’s a website, some sales collateral, or an ebook, there will be some design expertise required to finish the project.
The reason why we often get bogged down in it all is that often, we don’t know how to use the tools at our disposal to get high-quality designs. But here’s a little secret, marketers: You don’t need Photoshop to create great designs. Below are design tools even the most design-phobic marketers can use to create gorgeous visual content.
InstaQuote
When I’m on the go or especially at conferences, I use InstaQuote to easily create quotes to share with my Instagram and Twitter followers.
Instead of buying tons of image packs, I use Sunsplash’s free subscription service. It sends you ten new images every day.
All are high quality, and they’re released under CC0 meaning you can use them however you want, no copyrights. (editor’s note: currently it’s ten images every ten days).
PhotoGrid is an app that is used to share to Instagram, but you can use to create graphics to share anywhere. This app allows you to import non-square shaped photos onto a square background, edit backgrounds, add borders, and add text overlays to images to create compelling calls-to-action and motivational quotes to your images for unique and fresh visual content. Available on iPhone and Android.
PowerPoint
This usually gets a laugh or an aha moment. I love this simple software that most of us are comfortable with to create all my own personalized and branded content. It’s easy to use, manipulate, and create your designs without needing fancy software experience or training.
This is a fantastic free plug-in for Google Chrome that allows you to get the HEX color code for any color from a webpage. Very handy when you see a color you like and want to use it in your designs.
Canva
Who doesn’t love a tool that completely simplifies the graphic design process? I have been a fan of Canva since it’s inception and next to Photoshop, this is my daily go-to tool. Now that they’ve taken it from online to the app, it’s the perfect all-around tool.
It is a great a la carte platform – you have free options for templates, icons, and backgrounds; you can pay $1 for some images and backgrounds, or you can upload your own.
They also make the design process a little easier with templates already sized for each of the social networks, as well as suggested layouts that you can purchase or use for inspiration.
Canva is your one-stop-shop for easily creating customizable designs. You can search for a library of images, layouts, backgrounds, or upload your photos to include in your designs.
Then all you have to do is drag and drop your images into place, resize them, and voilà! Your images come to life.
Over
Over is an app available for Android and iPhone and one of my original go-to apps. While I love Wordswag as well, Over keeps me coming back with features that give me far more flexibility over the design.
QuotesCover is a busy marketers dream! This online tools take the ease of Canva and marry it with the built-in templates and fonts of Over and Wordswag.
There are no design skills needed with QuotesCover. Simply add your text, choose your background and font and voila, you’re done!
The NounProject is your best source to find all the icons you could ever dream of needing for your next design. All you have to do is search for the icon, and a few suggestions will come up with icons that you may be interested in.
The majority of these icons are free, but there are some you need to attribute if you use it (don’t worry, they provide clear instructions for each icon).
Selfie Stick
Part of the power of digital photography is that it allows us to experiment and have fun with our surroundings. It’s not just about selfies either. You can completely change the perspective of your images with this simple, quirky accessory.
Quick
When I want to add text to an image (again on mobile) the fastest and easiest way to do that for me is Quick. It’s from the same people who created Over (formerly Overgram) and for iOS users integrates into the native editing function so you can access it right from the edit screen in your photos app. Available on iOS and Android.
This is where I keep my digital ideas. I use it on my smartphone, tablet, and laptop as well as with the Chrome Extension. No matter what device I’m on, I can easily locate what I need.
I like to create notes that have images, links, and sometimes just the title to build on while I’m thinking of my content.
Pictaculous
Pictaculous is a color palette generator and allows you to upload any image and get a matching color palette within seconds. If you have ever wondered what colors to use with a specific image, this will solve that problem.
I love Wordswag because I can create amazing graphics on the fly, from my phone! Recently, Wordswag updated their app to include a transparent background option. I love this upgrade because now I can use that transparent “text” on any photo.
ColorPicker
ColorPicker is a great tool to explore different colors that you may want to use in your design. Simply slide the arrows on the right bar up and down, and move the circle within the square from side to side to find the perfect color that you want to use. You can also save multiple colors at the bottom if you want to access them later.
ColorPicker provides the RGB and HEX colors so you can use the exact color while designing on other programs. It is a great tool to explore new colors and figure out exactly what you want to use in your designs.
It’s awesome because it’s easy to take a screenshot. You can take a screenshot of some parts of your screen or the whole screen.
I love the built-in editor! You can add arrows, add text, draw on your image, pixelate, and add a marker or highlight some parts of your screenshot without noob-looking output. It’s like a premium ”˜paint’ tool.
Skitch might be one of my favorite design tools ever. Using Skitch, you can easily take screenshots and then annotate them. In the example below,
took a screenshot of the Skitch website (meta, I know), added an arrow to CTA to download Skitch for Mac, added some text on top of the image, and added a box around the sign-up CTA.
This program is great for any marketer who may be providing feedback on someone’s work or taking screenshots of content that need annotations.
This is a favorite iPhone photo collage editor app! It’s awesome because…
It’s slick. I love the design, and they don’t put too many ads, unlike other apps.
Lots of awesome features are available. You can adjust the frame, the background, add text and inject some cute stamps (really cute ones!) on your photo.
Super easy to use! You can save it to your camera roll, other apps and you can easily share it via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Flickr.
At some point in every marketer’s life, there comes a time when they need to take a screenshot to be used in a real-life scenario.
That’s where PlaceIt comes in. PlaceIt allows you to upload your screenshots and videos to be automatically inserted into various screens. This program makes it infinitely easier to provide professional-looking screenshots in real situations.
HubSpot Image Editor
Now live today for all HubSpot customers is an image editor right within your HubSpot account. Crop your images to dimensions for Twitter, Facebook, or any size you want. Add text, stickers, or frames, and draw anything you want right over the picture.
Adjust the brightness, take out red-eye, or add filters. The image can then be inserted right into your blog, web page, email, or social posts. If you want to make other changes to the original file, it will still be available right within HubSpot.
We all need to mix it up with what fonts we use every once in a while. Well, did you know that Google offers hundreds of fonts that you can download for free?
You can even preview how the different fonts will look with whatever text you want. If you are putting a new headline on your website but want to see how it looks with your slogan, you can do that.
Or if you want to start experimenting with different fonts in your next design, you can download the font and immediately start using it.
GIFBrewery
You may have noticed that a cool thing you can do in your email marketing is to use animated GIFs to explain something or delight your subscribers. But many marketers don’t have the necessary software to create animated GIFs.
That’s where GIFBrewery comes in. It allows you to create GIFs from your screen recordings easily — and you can even crop the images, add commentary, or apply filters.
The bottom line
These are interesting tools, many of which we already know, of course. They are not rocket science and shouldn’t be. This list of little things simply reminds us of what we have forgotten.
Then it is up to us to put these lessons (or reminders) into daily use through persistence and practice. Remember … Your learning trumps all!
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
