If “content is king” then the crown jewels are visual content.
The last time you were scrolling through your favorite social media channel, what made you stop in your tracks? Odds are it was a stunning visual that made you pause, think and react. In the social media world, good visual content is marketing gold.
Those stunning visuals began with a good story to tell and good visual content tools to tell that story.
Like a good first impression, an image that is on-point and attractive makes us want to know more. It draws us in and can be the key to starting a relationship with our target customer. It can illustrate how we are alike and how we have the same pains, questions, and needs. It will help you shine the best light on your product or service while engaging your clients. It humanizes your brand, turning prospects into friends.
You see, we are imaginative beings. Good visual content is emotional and compelling. It tells a story, sometimes without saying a word. It draws the reader in and, when done well, encourages the reader to share the message. Images that are “share-worthy” will help spread your marketing message to the masses in a viral way.
Consider the impact of visual content on social media and website conversions:
- Between Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr, consumers share nearly 5,000 images every second of every day on these social media platforms. (Forbes)
- 40% of marketers surveyed reported that original graphics helped them meet their marketing goals. (Venngage)
- On Pinterest, a visual search engine, 2 million people post pins every day. (Hootsuite)
- HubSpot reported that “When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.” (HubSpot)
- 1 Billion GIFs are sent each day. (Forbes)
- In 2019, video ads were the #1 way consumers were introduced to brands they later purchased from. (Animoto)
- Videos on landing pages increase conversions by 86%. (HubSpot)
- 96% of people say they’ve watched an explainer video to learn about a product or service. (Wyzowl)
- Consumers are 30 times more likely to read an infographic than text-based content. (HubSpot)
Visual content can earn big returns for relatively little effort. An image that takes mere minutes to create that is shared on social media, can gain exposure for your brand’s message like nothing else can. Incorporate strong visual content into your marketing assets, and you’ll not only reach new customers but learn about what appeals to them as well.
Table of Contents
35 Visual Content Tools to Increase Engagement
Ready to up your visual content marketing game? Try using these visual content creation tools to create content that will connect with your customers. We’ve broken the list into five categories: image design resources, infographic tools, video creation tools, screen capture tools, GIF creation tools, and meme generators.
Image Design Resources
Content creators can become graphic designers with the tools available today, so there is no excuse to not include visual content in your digital marketing. Give these free tools a try.
Canva
This site is quickly becoming the go-to resource for non-designers to create images that stand out. There are templates for all social media platforms, as well as free designs and backgrounds. Use it to create a quick image or go further by creating an eBook. You can also use Canva to create videos and GIFs. https://www.canva.com/
Canva ~ Font Combinations
Looking for the perfect font pairing? Canva’s tool will help you choose fonts that look good together. https://www.canva.com/font-combinations/
Crepatory
Creatopy’s visual production platform enables your design team to create visual images at scale. You can create and edit sets of different-sized images at one time. The Feed Ad Builder lets you upload data and auto-generate multiple versions of ads. Very cool! https://www.creatopy.com/features/create-at-scale/
Design Wizard
Design Wizard is an excellent graphic design tool that allows you to personalize an image or video in seconds. It holds over 1 million high-quality images in its library and tens of thousands of image and video templates. One standout feature is the magic resize button, which allows you to change the size of an image while you are creating a design! Don’t forget the integrations with Hubspot, Marketo, Buffer, and Intercom. https://www.designwizard.com/
Fotor
With Fotor, you can edit images, create collages and create designs from scratch easily. It includes a library of stickers and templates to add pizazz to your images. https://www.fotor.com/
Photoscape
Photoscape is a free software download that includes photo editing tools as well as advanced options and a GIF animation tool. Unique features include a photo splitter, a tool to merge several photos into one, and a color picker. http://www.photoscape.org
RGB to HEX Color Converter
This converter takes input in the form of values for Red, Green and Blue ranging from 0 to 255 and then converts those values to a hexadecimal string that can be used to specify color in html/css code. https://www.rgbtohex.net/
Pixabay
Pixabay is our go-to site for royalty-free images. From stock photos to illustrations to vector images, you’ll find almost any image you could need here. https://pixabay.com/
Pixlr
Looking for an alternative to Photoshop? Try Pixlr. It offers many of the same features, without the price tag, to help you make awesome social media graphics. https://pixlr.com/
Place It
With Place It, you can choose from a vast selection of templates to create social media images. The mock-up templates allow you to place a screen capture, for example, an image of your website home page, on a stock image of a smartphone, laptop screen, or mobile tablet screen. https://placeit.net
Ripl
Ripl makes it super easy to add animated text to images for attention-grabbing social media posts. https://www.ripl.com
Snappa
Looking for an image design tool that is intuitive to use? Check out Snappa. Similar to Canva, it offers an image library, templates, and pre-set image sizes to make blog graphics creation easy. https://snappa.com/
Unsplash
A free subscription gets you no-copyright, high-resolution photos you can use as backgrounds for your visual content and blog headings. Your images will look professional without the price of stock photo subscriptions. https://unsplash.com/
Wordswag
This app for the iPhone is a dream to use if you want to pair an eye-catching image with an inspiring or humorous quote. You’ll get more likes, shares, and comments when you create images that connect with your users. http://wordswag.co/
Infographic Tools
Infographics allow data to tell a story. They are one of the most-shared types of images on social media and are especially helpful for businesses that want to present complex ideas in a visually compelling way. Add infographics into your visual content strategy to build brand awareness.
Easelly
Easelly provides a wide variety of templates and icons to turn boring data into captivating infographics. Their free option allows downloads without Easelly branding which makes this a great choice for marketers on a budget. https://www.easel.ly/
Infogram
Create interactive and engaging charts and infographics. You can even connect live data sources to Infogram’s infographics, charts, and visualizations. Embed them into your content for real-time, engaging data displays. https://infogr.am/
Piktochart
Infographics are especially useful for sharing business information, statistics and data in an intriguing format. Create content, such as pie charts and infographics, quickly and easily, and watch it go viral! http://piktochart.com/
Visme
Visme includes a wide variety of templates and graphics to help even novice infographic creators design compelling images and presentations. https://www.visme.co/
Venngage
Looking for some design inspiration? Check out Venngage for tips, image backgrounds, and infographic templates. https://venngage.com/features/infographic-maker/
Video Creation Tools
Raise your hand if you made a purchase recently after seeing a video ad on Instagram or Facebook. You don’t need a video production team to create engaging explainer videos or product demo videos for your brand. Videos are highly effective at increasing brand visibility and attracting customers so they should be incorporated into your content marketing strategy. Brands can get a lot of mileage out of a single video. Videos can be embedded in blog posts, shared on social media, uploaded to Pinterest, and added to your YouTube account.
The following tools allow companies to create engaging videos with little or no experience, using templates, stock footage, and music. Customize them with your brand style, fonts and colors to create a unique brand message.
Animoto
Animoto is a favorite of the SMA Marketing team. It’s easy to use and includes several templates to get you started so even rookie video creators can feel confident creating their first video. Import your own images, video snippets, or GIFs to customize and brand your videos. https://animoto.com/
Biteable
Create fun, animated videos using Biteable’s colorful templates and huge library of Shutterstock images and stock video footage. You can also mix in your own photos or videos to create one-of-a-kind videos. https://biteable.com/
Lumen5
The unique feature of Lumen5 is its ability to repurpose blog articles, or any text content, into videos. Using AI, it will add images and video to the frames based on the text. Or create videos from scratch. The drag and drop video builder allows you to highlight text and drag it into video frames, then add images and video from their extensive library. https://lumen5.com/
Magisto
With Magisto, take ordinary videos and make them extraordinary with captivating text elements and animated effects. Videos become stories with this easy-to-use app or online video editor. https://www.magisto.com/video-maker
Doodly
Doodly is a software program that creates professional doodle, whiteboard, and chalkboard animation videos. There is a bit of a learning curve in creating doodle videos, but they are fun to watch and captivate an audience. https://www.doodly.com/
Powtoon
Animated videos are a great way to explain technical concepts in an engaging and understandable way to audiences of all knowledge levels. Powtoon’s drag and drop functionality and use of templates and predesigned characters and props make it easy to create fun videos that are highly engaging. https://www.powtoon.com/
Learn more about creating engaging marketing videos in our article Creating Awesome Marketing Videos – It’s Easier Than You Think.
Screen Capture Tools
Sometimes, creating a video or GIF is as easy as capturing what’s on your screen. If you want to create visual content quickly to explain a concept or demonstrate a product’s abilities, try a screen recording. These screen capture tools make it simple.
Loom
Download the Loom Chrome extension, click the record button, and you’ll be creating screen capture videos quicker than you can say “I’m a marketing pro!” Use it for product marketing, sales demos, and more. Your viewers can react and comment on your videos and you’ll get engagement insights to see if your videos are being watched. https://www.loom.com/
Screencast-O-Matic
Use Screencast-o-Matic to take screenshots or create screen recorder videos. You can add audio, overlays, and stock images to your video to make highly engaging visual content to share or embed on your website. https://screencast-o-matic.com/screen-recorder
Gyazo
Gyazo is a no-frills, easy-to-use, screen recording tool that allows you to capture what’s on your screen and turn it into shareable videos, GIFs, or images. https://gyazo.com/
GIF Creation Tools
Think GIFs are only for sharing pop culture trends? Think again. Businesses are using GIFs to engage with their customer base because they are easier to create than video and get a message across quickly. Adding in a bit of humor helps engage your audience, positioning your business as having a pulse on today’s consumers. Use these tools to make a quick GIF for your next social media post.
CloudApp
CloudApp offers a number of tools including a screen capture tool, screen recorder, and animated GIF maker. https://www.getcloudapp.com/
EZGIF
Upload your images, and EZGIF creates a GIF for you. Editing tools allow you to change the order of images, resize them and apply effects. https://ezgif.com/
Giphy
Giphy, the most popular GIF tool, offers several features that make GIF creation easy, including backgrounds, stickers, and captions. If you aren’t feeling creative, choose from one of their ready-made GIFs and share directly to your social channels. https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker
Meme Generation Tools
Memes – those images with funny, relatable captions – are excellent visual content for your social media posts because of their viral nature. If you hit the jackpot with a meme that people love, they will spread it around the interwebs like wildfire.
Imgflip Meme Generator
Imgflip meme generator is a free online image maker that allows you to add custom resizable text to images. You can upload your own images or choose from their image library to create humorous memes to add to blogs or social media posts. https://imgflip.com/memegenerator
Imgur
Use Imgur to create your own meme or browse their selection of memes. https://imgur.com/memegen
I Love Img
I Love Img’s meme generator tool allows you to upload your own background or use one of their templates to create a meme. https://meme-generator.com/
Promo Meme maker
Promo offers a few different tools to create visual content, including tools to create videos and memes. To make memes, simply choose your video or image, trim the part you want to convert to a meme, and add your text. https://promo.com/tools/meme-maker
So, content marketers, there you have it – a list of easy-to-use visual content creation tools to add to your arsenal. Now, go inspire your social media niche with your message and create connections that convert!
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on December 7, 2018, and has been updated with fresh content.
