10 Visual Marketing Tools to Help Your Social Media Stand Out

As a marketer, I’m sure you are aware that we live in a visual age. If you’re not using visual content as part of your marketing strategy, you’re losing your audience.

Graphics make everything online better. And that’s a good thing, considering how social media has shifted to placing a bigger emphasis on images and graphics. Adding visuals to your content helps more than you might think.

Jeff Bullas, top marketing influencer, researched why images are so important. Here’s what he found:

  • Blog posts and articles containing relevant visuals receive 94% more total views
  • The more multimedia you include in your marketing materials, the more view you will receive
  • 60% of consumers are more likely to consider an organization when it shows up in a local search
  • 67% of consumers say the quality of the visual used is “very important” when selecting a product
  • Facebook posts with photos have the highest user engagement than any other type of post

The bottom line: if you’re going to stay ahead of the marketing game, you need to use visual content marketing.

Here are 10 visual content marketing tools to help make the creative process easier and save you money (most have free versions).

  1. Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark is one of my favorite visual marketing tools. You can use it to easily create high-quality social graphics and animated videos. There are three modules that allow you to easily create different types of content for social posts, web stories, and animated videos. It’s easy to use and comes with lots of different templates and backgrounds. And, best of all, the basic plan is FREE! The premium plan is only $9.99 per month and allows you to brand your graphics with your logo, colors, and fonts.

  1. Canva

I’ve sung the praises of Canva before, and honestly, it’s one visual marketing tool I can’t live without. The free version is impressive, offering unparalleled value that compares with other paid tools.

Canva lets you create social media posts for all the major platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and Snapchat filters.

Canva offers thousands of free images, backgrounds and fonts to choose from, so most of the time you can find whatever you need. And if you can’t, you can use any of their high-quality, paid images for only $1.

  1. Ripl

Ripl is a super-simple app that allows you to create custom post designs, animated collages, and slideshows using customizable templates. You can also share to your social accounts with one click form within the app. Incredibly, the basic plan is FREE!

  1. Word Swag

Word Swag is another easy-to-use app that you can find on Google Play or the App Store. It’s a great tool for quickly creating stunning text layouts. You can easily caption your photos, create stylish quotes or design graphics with text overlay. It comes with hundreds of captions you can use and hundreds of thousands of free background images. There is a one-time fee of $4.99 from Google and $6.99 from the App store.

  1. Snappa

If you’re more confident with graphic design, Snappa may be the right choice for you.

Snappa is a more robust web-based graphic design program than Canva. You can build designs from scratch with Snappa or use templates. However, you have more control over your designs with Snappa than you do with Canva.

Snappa offers a library of thousands of royalty-free photos, icons, and fonts to choose from. You can also easily upload your own images, resize your images and upload new fonts.

Snappa is a great tool to use with your team because it supports collaboration. You can easily share brand assets and designs. And it integrates directly with several social media platforms, allowing you to publish your creations directly from Snappa to your social networks.

The impressive Pro service starts at $10 per user/month, but you can test Snappa out with their free version.

Exclusive FREE Bonus: Download the pdf 10 Visual Marketing Tools to Help Your Social Media Stand Out to reference in the future and/or share with colleagues at your school.
  1. Piktochart

Infographics are always a big hit with most audiences. They allow you to display data in an eye-catching, easily sharable way. Piktochart is an easy-to-use web-based application that you can use to create infographics by simply plugging in your data, customizing your layout (social media dimensions are already set up) and sharing directly to social media.

Piktochart comes with over 600 templates, and you can easily customize them by simply dragging and dropping. There are also ready-to-use graphics, icons, images, and charts.

The free version lets you create unlimited graphics with over 4,000 icons and images. If you want access to their full selection of images and templates, a pro membership starts at only $15 per month.

  1. QuotesCover

QuotesCover is a simple quote-making tool. It’s so easy – just enter your quote and make some customized changes, and you’re done! There is also a “curated quotes” option that has hundreds of quotes to choose from that are listed by category. You can choose different fonts, images and color schemes.

Don’t have a quote in mind? QuotesCover can help with that too. Click on the “Find a quote” button, select a topic and then choose from a variety of popular quotes. QuotesCover has several video tutorials you can use, but my guess is that this app is so user-friendly you won’t need them. There is no cost to use this app.

Pinched for time? QuotesCover works on mobile devices too!

  1. Colorzilla

Colorzilla is a Chrome or Firefox extension that you can use to capture a color and determine the hex or RGB code for any color you see. It includes an advanced color picker and webpage color analyzer that will generate a color palette. It also stores the color history of your most recent picked colors.

  1. Paletton

Paletton is a color palette generator that helps you know what colors to use together. This can make your graphics look very professional.

Paletton takes all of the guesswork out of the color selection process. Start by uploading the hex code of the primary color you want to use in your color scheme. Paletton will automatically generate an adjacent (3-color) scheme, triad (3-color scheme) or a tetrad (4-color) scheme. You can also try using the free-style or randomize color scheme generators.

  1. Magisto

Magisto easily edits your videos or allows you to create videos using a template.

If you want Magisto to expertly edit a video, all you have to do is upload your video, and the tool will analyze, understand and edit your video and make it look professional. Magisto will also create a video “best of” collage that will look amazing! You can also use their templates and millions of high-quality video, image and background music options to create exciting, sharable videos that you can upload directly to social media.

Looking for more tips and tricks to help you create amazing social media visuals? These posts should help:

5 Best Types of Social Media Visuals for Schools

How to Optimize Images for Better Web Design, Social Media and SEO

How to Design an Attractive Instagram Ad for Your School

How to Make Good Marketing Videos Even If You’re Camera Shy

7 Best Tools for Designing Impressive Slide Deck Presentations

Top 8 Instagram Apps for Schools

How to Optimize YouTube for Search

40 Free Stunningly Beautiful Stock Image Sites

Exclusive FREE Bonus: Download the pdf 10 Visual Marketing Tools to Help Your Social Media Stand Out to reference in the future and/or share with colleagues at your school.

About the author 

Brendan Schneider

Hey, I’m Brendan, and this is my blog. After 28 years working in private, independent schools in mostly admissions, enrollment, marketing, communications, and fundraising roles, I decided to make SchneiderB Media my full-time job, where I help schools get more inquiries through my Fractional Digital Marketer program. I also started the MarCom Society, a membership created expressly to help, support, and train marketing and communications professionals at schools.