20 Visual Content Marketing Tools To Engage Your Audience
A picture is worth a thousand words. And videos? They’re worth a million, says screenwriter and director Barry Levinson. Gone are the days of purely text-based content marketing. As more and more people gravitate toward videos and other visual media types for information and entertainment, more and more marketers are incorporating visual content into their marketing strategies to convey their message.
This article compiles 20 visual content marketing tools to help with your visual content marketing goals.
Video creation and editing tools
1 – PowToon
PowToon is a video marketing tool created for marketers, educators, and presenters. It lets users create do-it-yourself animated presentations and videos that explain, instruct, and engage an intended audience.
Regardless of your video editing experience, PowToon reviews found across the web indicate that the tool is easy to work with, especially with its drag-and-drop templates that allow you to complete professional-looking projects in mere minutes.
2 – WeVideo
A free online video maker and editor, WeVideo is used by businesses, nonprofits, and educational institutions. It’s intuitive, making it a perfect companion for both amateur and professional video editors. Because you can save your photos in the cloud, you can start a project on one computer and finish it on another.
Features included in the app are Ken Burns animation, clip transformation, voiceover, screencasting, and white labeling.
3 – Magisto
Perhaps one of the world’s smartest video apps, Magisto is an online video editor that can automatically transform your photos and videos into movies that tell your story. Just choose the photos and video clips you want included in the movie, select your music, effects, and themes, and voila, your movie is ready for viewing and sharing.
Magisto works with Windows computers and can also be downloaded to your mobile device via the App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore for Android.
4 – AVS Video Editor
AVS Video Editor is video editing software that allows you to splice, rotate, merge, and mix videos. Available editing features let you apply overlays and special effects to your video projects, and insert audio, menus, texts, and subtitles. 300+ video transitions and effects are offered to users.
Supported video formats include MP4, DVD, AVI, VOB, 3GP, MKV, MOV, and H.236/H.264 codes. Videos can be uploaded to sites such as Flickr, Facebook, and others.
Stock photo sites
By now, marketers should know that not every image available on the web via a Google search can be copied, downloaded, or used without the owner’s permission. There are copyright laws governing the use of such properties, after all.
But copyright laws can be confusing, to say the least. For marketers who’d rather not deal with the complexities involving image use, there are sites that share images free of copyrights.
5 – Pixabay
Pixabay is a website where image owners waive their rights to their work. As a result, site users get to download, alter, and distribute images even for commercial use. Images are categorized accordingly, and you only need to use Pixabay’s search engine to find the one that fits.
Sponsored images from Shutterstock are shown above image search results to help with the site’s upkeep. Donations can also be extended via PayPal.
6 – Unsplash
Just like Pixabay, all images on Unsplash are licensed under CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) and can therefore be used, modified, and freely distributed without providing attribution to Unsplash or the photographer.
Unsplash prides itself with sharing only high-resolution photos that cover a number of categories: fashion, outdoors, weddings, art, street photography, nature, people, patterns, and many more.
7 – Gratisography
Gratisography images are photographed and distributed by Ryan McGuire, owner and designer at Bell Designs. All images are free and can be used for both personal and commercial projects. Categories include animals, nature, objects, people, urban, and whimsical.
Donations via PayPal are also welcome.
8 – Jay Mantri
Designer and photographer Jay Mantri’s advice to marketers and other entities looking for high-resolution images is simple and straightforward: “Free pics. Do anything. Make magic.”
All images on the site are likewise CC0-licensed and can be modified and distributed even for commercial purposes.
Graphic design tools
9 – Canva
An online graphic design tool you can use for free provided you use either your own images or the images and elements they offer for free, Canva allows you to create various design projects with ease – whether or not you have previous graphic design experience.
Projects you craft with Canva can be used for a variety of purposes: social media, presentations, posters, blog graphics, magazines, resumes, letterheads, ebooks, Kindle covers, and many more.
10 – Piktochart
Piktochart is a DIY infographic maker that allows marketers to create visually appealing infographics, presentations, posters, and reports without employing the services of professional designers.
It comes with 500+ prebuilt design templates to choose from and is packed with tools that lets you personalize and instantly share your creations with colleagues, partners, and clients.
11 – Snappa
Snappa is a graphic design tool for marketers who create online graphics for social media, content marketing, ad campaigns, and email newsletters. Its design library carries hundreds of ready-made templates to help you get started on a project in no time.
It also has thousands of patterns and photos, vectors and shapes, fonts and typefaces, image effects, as well as social integrations for easy sharing and distribution.
12 – Prezi
Trusted by approximately 60 million users worldwide, Prezi is presentation software that allows marketing teams to creatively and effectively present their company’s story.
To create visual, conversational presentations that captivate, inform, and engage, Prezi comes with premade presentation templates that you can customize to suit your needs. You can also build presentations from scratch.
Inspiration sites
13 – Pinterest
Whoever you are, whatever you do for fun or for a living, Pinterest is a treasure trove of design inspirations. For marketers suffering from a sudden bout of the “block,” like when writers suffer from the dreaded writer’s block, Pinterest might be what you need to get those juices flowing.
Pinterest entries are divided into several categories – from architecture to education, from crafts to gardening, from sports to fashion, and everything in between. Sort entries according to your preferences, or find out which pins are the most popular so you get a feel for the “pulse of the masses.”
14 – Behance
Behance is an online portfolio repository for creative professionals. According to the site, it’s a “platform to remove the barriers between talent and opportunity.” As such, it’s where creatives showcase their work, at the same time a place where marketing teams can find inspiration for their creative campaigns.
It only takes a spark to light a fire, after all.
15 – Flickr
Even before Pinterest invaded our collective consciousness, there already was Flickr, a photo-sharing site that allows people from all walks of life to organize their photos and videos and make them available to the people they care about.
If you’re on Flickr for creative inspiration and don’t know where to start, considering the number of photos and compilations the site has accumulated through the years (the site was launched in 2004), this list of Flickr groups can point you in the right direction.
16 – Visually
Visually is a content creation service that provides a range of solutions for content marketers: videos, infographics, ebooks, reports and presentations, social media content, interactive microsites, and many more. It’s a content marketing agency, collaboration platform, and marketplace for creatives in one.
For design and creative inspiration, the Visually community has a content gallery teeming with infographics and other visuals from the site’s freelancer pool.
Photo editing apps
17 – VSCO Cam
VSCO Cam is a photo editing app popular among mobile users. Dubbed by some as the best mobile photography app there is, VSCO Cam lets you capture awesome photos, as well as edit them using its built-in one-tap filters and advanced toolkit to manipulate your photos’ exposure, cropping, white balance, and straightening, among others.
VSCO Cam is available for download via the App Store and Google Play.
18 – PicMonkey
A totally free online photo editor that also offers premium features, PicMonkey lets you edit your photos for effects, touch them up to your heart’s content, and stitch them together to create amazing photo collages – all without downloading or installing any software.
To launch the app in just a click, install the PicMonkey Chrome extension on your browser.
19 – PhotoScape
PhotoScape is a free image editor that allows you to enhance the photos you capture. It’s equipped with basic editing features to resize, adjust, and even batch edit your photos. It lets you merge several photos in a single frame, splice photos into separate pieces, and create animated GIFs using multiple photos.
Download the app on your computer to start using it. It works with Windows and Mac computers.
20 – Adobe Lightroom
Favored by professional digital photographers worldwide, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a photo-enhancing tool that can be used anywhere – using a web browser, on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device.
With Adobe Lightroom, say goodbye to dull-looking photos, skewed shots, distracting objects within images, and excess haze, among others.
Final word
As color and visuals emerge as the prime movers in getting people to consume content in a digital world overflowing with free information, content marketers would do well to inject visual content into their campaigns.
As Content Marketing Institute points out, “Words aren’t enough to keep customers and prospects engaged these days.” Instead, lavish them with photos, videos, and other visuals to captivate their attention, and you might just see a bump in your conversions.
Original Article