The creation of visual elements is a huge part of a successful online marketing strategy.
Whether you need a blog article’s header, a social media post, an entire ebook, infographic or a slide deck, there are tools out there that can help make your life easier. These tools save us time, energy, and can turn an amateur’s creativity into something that looks straight out of a design school.
Here are 111 visual marketing tools you might want to take a look at…
Editing and Visual Creation
Visual marketers need tools that make the creation of something beautiful easy. Now, we could tweak and edit and import and fuss with an image and quote overlay for six hours and get it looking perfect, but where’s the ROI in that? If we’re creating a social media post with an inspirational quote, turning data into brand message or creating an entire infographic, we need to do it before lunch.
The tools in this section are awesome shortcuts – software that takes our creativity and turns it into something we can be proud to call our own, and does it intuitively, simply, and beautifully.
Here are 12 editing and visual creation tools:
1. Canva
2. Picmonkey
3. CloudConvert
4. RenderForest
5. Pinstamatic
6. PowToon
7. Skitch
8. Subtle Patterns
9. Pixlr
10. Thinglink
11. Easelly
12. Visme
Image Resources
Trying to find appealing images for blog articles, social media posts or header images can be frustrating. Everything seems to cost an arm and a leg, and nothing looks like what you want (and some of those free stock images are guaranteed to plummet engagement and conversions on your content).
But the internet’s a big place. You know the right image is out there; it’s just a matter of finding it.
Having been in your shoes way too often ourselves, here’s a comprehensive list of 54 (count ‘em!) free image resources:
14. Pixabay
15. Death to Stock Photo
16. Foter
17. Gratisography
18. Unsplash
18. Visme
19. Flickr Creative Commons
20. The Pattern Library
21. Shutterstock
22. SkitterPhoto
23. PicJumbo
24. Hubspot Icons
25. Stockvault
26. StockSnap.io
27. Splitshire
28. Pexels
29. RgbStock
30. Wylio
31. New Old Stock
32. Albumarium
33. Stokpic
34. Camarama.de
35. ISO Republic
36. Crow the Stone
37. Magdeleine
38. DesignersPics
39. Smithsonian on Flickr
40. Moveast
41. FindA.Photo
42. Snapographic
43. Foter
44. Free Nature Stock
45. Pickupimage
46. Free Stock Image Point
51. FreeDigitalPhotos.net
52. Compfight
53. Jay Mantri
54. Foodies Feed
55. Kaboompics.com
56. Splashbase
57. Little Visuals
58. Cupcake
59. MMT.li
60. MorgueFile
61. Every Stock Photo
62. New Old Stock
63. Photo Everywhere
64. Free Range Stock
65. 500px
66. Picography
67. Life of Pix
Updated May, 2017: Burst (from Shopify) is a new, awesome resource we use
Color
Finding and matching the right color scheme can mean the difference between a slide deck that gets shared (or even a landing page that generates conversions for your business) and one that doesn’t.
Use these five color tools to find or generate the colors that will go best within your next piece of visual marketing content:
68. Adobe Color CC
69. Design Seeds
70. Paletton
71. Color Lovers
72. Oto255
Fonts and Icons:
If you’ve ever worked closely with a graphic designer you know they’re sticklers for font, and you can see why. Get the body font wrong when next to a certain header font and the result can be jarring to say the least.
Here are 16 font tools (with some free icon sources thrown in) to get your copy looking clean, professional, and visually appealing:
73. Google Fonts
74. 1001 Fonts
75. Font Space
76. Font Squirrel
77. IcoMoon
78. IconFinder
79. Vecteezy
80. DaFont
81. Flaticon
82. Type Genius
83. Fontface Ninja
84. Beautiful Web Type
85. Font Park
86. Lost Type
87. The League of Moveable Type
88. Type Wolf
Image/Screenshot Capture
I have to continually clean my desktop because of the sheer number of screenshots I take in my role as a content creator, and having the right screenshot tool is important. I need something that takes clean shots, is quick to access and gives me a bit of versatility.
Here are 6 likely image capture candidates:
89. Awesome Screenshot
90. Nimbus Screenshot
91. Lightshot
92. Jing
93. Skitch
94. Snipping Tool
Video Marketing
Video marketing is evolving, and the next stop (for almost every business) is professional-looking videos. This is something that our business is experimenting with pretty heavily, and here are the six most promising video creation and publishing tools we’ve encountered so far:
95. Camtasia
96. Knowledge Vision
97. Rawshorts
98. Wistia
99. Waywire
100. Animoto
Ebook Creation
Ebooks are one of the most powerful indicators of brand authority and are hugely influential for lead generation strategy (alongside an optimized, email-gating landing page. Here are four tools which make ebook creation a cinch:
101. Zmags
102. Uberflip
103. LookbookHQ
104. Google Slides
Note: Canva is also one of the leading ebook-creation tools, but as we’ve already mentioned it in the visual creation section we decided against repeating it, but check it out as well!
Apps
Sometimes you just gotta design on the fly. Luckily our mobile phones are mini-computers, and the visual marketing capabilities of apps (offered both with Google Play and the Apple Store) are just getting better.
Here are 7 of the top visual marketing apps for mobile:
105. Instaquote
106. Photogrid
107. Pixlr
108. Adobe Photoshop Express
109. Over
110. Piktochart
111. VSCO Cam
Thanks for reading, and if you have any visual marketing tools and apps that you love, feel free to let us know in the comment section. If we dig them we’ll be sure to add them to the list!
james-scherer-2