Visual marketing has been growing steadily throughout the years now. These days readers expect to see Visual content when they land on a blog post. Few people enjoy reading a wall of text. Content marketing will not work unless you engage in Visual Marketing.

Here are a few tools to help you!

Create Images

Canva

Visuals are a very important part of any content. But it goes beyond stock images, no matter how good they might be. Canva is the perfect tool if you want to create professional level graphics of any kind, but don’t want to hire a designer to do it. Or if you happen to be a graphic designer yourself, but just don’t have the time to spend.

Canva is easy to use, intuitive, affordable, and full of features, vectors, themes, and pre-mades for you to choose from.

Piktochart

If you are in the market for infographics, Piktochart may be more up your alley. Start with a premade theme, and then customize it. Drop in vectors and graphics, add in your own images, like a logo or watermark, fill in the text, move grids around… anything you need to make it your own.

This is among one of the easiest ways possible to create a high quality infographic or chart. I have used it myself for official meetings, and they have been a hit.

Over

Text over images are always popular. You don’t need to go through a quote generator, or use a visual editing tool to do it. Just use Over. It allows you to select images from your phone gallery, add and edit text in different fonts, apply filters, then publish on your Instagram account.

This is definitely one of the simpler ways to engage, as users seem very likely to save images cross platform when they have text across it. For example, you will find many inspirational images on Pinterest originating from IG accounts.

Layout (iOS, Android)

The most popular Instagram image I ever created with a four part collage set in a two up, two down grid. It showed how to make a super simple craft, and it was still receiving favorites and comments more than a year later.

I made it with Layout, the official Instagram collage maker that lets you combine and shared multiple images in one post. It is easy to use, and a must if you want to increase the value of your content on that particular network.

PicStitch

PicStitch is another collage app similar to Layout. I would say it is a little harder to use, but it compensates for that by being a lot more thorough in their customizations. You can create pretty much any combination you want, either using one of their templates, or making your own.

There are up to 245 different layout combinations, which is really cool. Plus you can edit in the app with flip, rotate, filters, FX, and more. It is compatible with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Path, and you can send via email.

Display Images

SnapWidget

Where is the best place to advertise your visual content? Your website! If you have a WordPress site (and who doesn’t, these days?), you can use this extension to create a widget on your site that displays both photos and videos from Instagram, Facebook and more.

It is easy to use, looks good, and is perfect for connecting your social account with your ecommerce site. Or with a blog.

Make sure to select a responsive WordPress theme that optimizes images for different screen sizes. Here are a few good themes to select from. Here’s also a great guide on optimizing your blog images for search.

Promote Your Images

Olapic

Formerly Piquora, this is a precision tool for better visual content curation. It enables users to combine algorithms to make smarter content choices. It also automates activation, so you don’t have to manually make requests.

This is a great time saver, and a more advanced tool than many for Instagram.

Olapic has a powerful analytics feature that allows you to discover content that triggers higher engagement. You can also use the tool to find influencers to connect to.

Cyfe

Cyfe is great for monitoring your visual marketing statistics. I use it to monitor social media statistics tracking growth of my Pinterest, Instagram., Flickr, and Youtube.

Viral Content Bee

More on Pinterest promotion here

Viral Content Bee connects you to Pinterest users who are willing to share your images on Pinterest. Simply share your direct image URL, select relevant categories and VCB users will find your image and pin it to their boards. Pinned images link to your web page where that image is hosted driving more clicks and exposure to your site.

Use “Interactions” tab to track who is pinning your images. Connect to your promoters by liking those pins and following those pinners. This way you’ll grow your Pinterest following too!

What other visual marketing tools you are using?

(photo credit)