Let's face it... creating appealing content isn't always easy. It's possibly one of the most difficult aspects of marketing, encompassing the most time and effort in day-to-day marketing tasks. While many business processes are becoming automated, content creation is still a very manual procedure. It's the number one pain point that most marketers have.
For instance, HubSpot stated generating traffic and leads is the top marketing challenge in their 2017 State of Inbound report. What's the key driver of healthy traffic and quality leads? High-quality content. But constantly creating high-quality content is tough. It's why, at times, we engage third-party agencies to help alleviate the workload.
However, what do you do when budgets are tight and hiring an ad or creative agency isn't an option?
Below, I've compiled a list of 6 awesome tools and resources to help you create, edit, write, inspire and design high-quality content. (Many of the tools offer free options or minimal pricing compared to an outside agency.)
6 Free (or Inexpensive) Tools and Resources for Visual Content Creation
Canva
I love Canva! I can't say it enough. When I need an infographic or card on the fly and don't want to tackle Illustrator or InDesign. Canva is my go-to resource.
Canva is a web design tool that's easy-to-use, affordable and has a large library of images, layouts, and templates for creating a variety of engaging content. Whether you want to create an ebook, infographic, social media post or even an advertisement, Canva has a template to fit your need and simplify your process. In fact, it offers templates for just about any design requirement.
What is my favorite part about Canva? The tool allows users to create spectacular, customized content but built with the non-designer in mind. It makes it easy to drag-and-drop objects and images for a look that's yours. Canva makes it easy to choose from preset dimensions or enter custom dimensions. You can upload custom photos or select from a large library of free or paid photos. The tool truly offers a wide variety of customization features like fonts, icons, banners and many more styling options to make your content truly yours.
Canva also offers a "for Work" option for corporate teams giving you and your team the ability to create amazing on-brand marketing materials. You can create presentations, social media posts and many other corporate style materials with the drag-and-drop editor using the same templates available in basic Canva, but with the Work option, you can share with your colleagues for additional edits or final reviews.
Keeping on-brand is easy because Canva for Work allows you to save your brand's colors, logos, and fonts making it easy to maintain consistency across all of your marketing materials.
Finally, Canva and Canva for Work provides flexibility by allowing your creation to be downloaded in JPG, PNG or PDF formats whichever fits where and how you want to share your design.
Here's an example of a custom creation made in Canva:
Google Fonts
If your next design requires a unique typography, try using Google Fonts. As marketers, we know typography is one of the best ways to bring a voice and personality to content. Like their slogan says, Google Fonts is "making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography".
The interactive directory of web fonts makes it easy to search for high-quality typography in more than 135 languages (a.k.a. endless options). Google Fonts makes adding a font to a website or downloading for later easy as one, two, three. The interface allows you to see fonts in-use and offers font pairing and appearance tools to aid in design and layout. Google Fonts also provides analytics showing the most popular fonts by usage across the web. All of the available fonts are open source, so you customize, improve and share them as you see fit.
And since I didn't mention it already... all of the fonts available are FREE!
Coolors
Need some color in your life?
Color plays an important role in the marketing world. Colors used for a product, website, business card or logo can evoke powerful reactions. They can soothe, empower, suggest or even cause a buying action.
Understanding the "psychology of color" is a hot topic of debate among marketers. Which colors convert the best, which colors convert higher quality leads, which colors persuade a stronger buying response...
In one study, researchers at the University of British Columbia found that blue was shown to boost creativity and red was shown to increase memory and attention to details. Needless to say, color is an important aspect to consider during any content creation process.
Coolors (no.. that's not a typo) makes it ridiculously easy to find the perfect color scheme.
The color generator allows you to create, mix-and-match, share and save color schemes in an easy-to-use interface. You can grab colors from an inspirational image, refine the hues to be just right, and save all your schemes in an organized manner with names and tags.
Collaboration is made easy by exporting in several handy formats like PNG, PDS, SCSS, SVG or copy via the permanent URL.
If you need some color inspiration, Coolors lets you explore other user's schemes and tweak them until they are just right for you. They even offer an app and Chrome extension for quick color research. Your color options are endless with Coolors.
Skitch (for Mac)
Skitch is a great screen capture tool from Evernote. It's a functional tool to help marketer's, as they say, "get your point across with fewer words". You can annotate, create shapes and even add sketches to existing or newly captured images. You can then file them using your Evernote account.
If you don't have an Evernote account don't worry. Skitch lets you capture, markup and save without needing one.
Source: Skitch
Awesome Screenshot
Since Skitch only works for Mac users, here's another great option for communicating with images.
Awesome Screenshot offers many of the same functionalities as Skitch but works with Windows based computers. It is a browser extension available for Firefox or Chrome. You can store and organize your images by the project. It also allows you to share your project to get quick feedback on your screenshots and designs.
PowToon
Videos are king and in a big way! They are no longer considered a nice-to-have, but are a necessity as part of your marketing content arsenal. Based on Hubspot's findings, 43% of people want to see more video content from marketers and 51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as they type of content with the best ROI.
As videos have become mainstream, marketers are searching to produce more innovative and eye-catching visuals. Animated videos are one method used to add some spice to a normal product or brand video. But what if you don't have the budget to create a custom, hand-sketched animation? Enter PowerToon.
PowToon is an online animated video creation tool that gives you the power to create amazing videos and presentations. Best of all, it offers a free option along with multiple other payment types to meet your budgetary requirements.
PowToon enables you to make short, targeted animations offering more impact than longer videos or text communications. It provides high-quality pre-made templates or the ability to customize your own with a premium plan. Drag-and-drop capability, voiceover recording, an intuitive interface and at-your-service-support are features that set this animated video creation tool above others.
Source: PowToon
These are some of my favorite tools and resources. What other options do you use to create content? Leave your ideas and feedback in the comment section below.