Visual content creation tools for stunning social media campaigns

Hubspot found that 80% of marketing professionals lean on visual content in their social media marketing.

It makes enormous good sense to assert that social media marketing is moving towards a direction where image and video content shall play pivotal roles.

Traditionally, content marketing has performed three roles:

1. Factually accurate content informs users
2. Stand-out content reminds them
3. Visual content convinces them

There are statistics that provide mounting evidence to the vitality of leveraging a visual content marketing strategy.

Key insights on the changing face of visual content marketing

1. With more than 2.5 billion camera phones in use, visual content creation is more accessible, affordable, and available to users than ever before.
2. Cisco found that by the year 2021, 82% of all IP traffic shall consist of video.
3. Image content enables brands to gain more traction in the market by increasing subscription users up to 329%.
4. Hootsuite found that a single piece of visual content has the same effect on the human mind as 60,000 words.
5. The Graduate School of Business, Stanford University that in fact offers a dedicated academic program called the Symbolic Systems Program, that reinforces the impact of visual content in the digital era of technology-driven marketing.

How do images and video content create value for brands on social media?

Prima facie, visual content augments value creation on social media in the following ways:

1. The human brain is designed to process a visual image in 1/10^th of a second. The obvious implication of this is that visuals enable brands to send across their brand philosophy to users in the smallest window of time and very often at a glance.
2. Visual content allows brands to showcase their key brand differentiators in the most seamless way possible. Take for example the short video that shows Coca Cola draping its bottles in beautiful red ribbons with the names of users written on the bodies of the bottles to personalize their selling. With this video, Coca Cola redefined personal selling on social media like never before.
3. Brands that leverage visual content for social media marketing reported a quantum leap in their traffic conversion rates and user engagements. In fact, as per Buzzsumo, images posted on Facebook get 2.3X more engagement than those without images. Dropbox had tried creating a face for its brand by investing an outlay of $50,000 in the creation of a video that saw its conversion rate jumping by 10%.

Challenge of leveraging visual content successfully for social media marketing

Accenture Interactive had conducted a survey on a sample of more than 1000 consumers that sought to objectively assess their tastes and preferences, habits, likes and dislikes of content consumption, and thus, identify patterns and insights on visual content marketing and consumption. The findings submitted as part of the Accenture Interactive research stated that visual content and especially video is still considered invasive by a large chunk of people.

The findings stated on page six of the report published clearly asserts that 35% of users find the use of video content for advertising inconvenient and invasive as opposed to 26% users that stated they prefer to see video advertisements.

Features of an awesome visual content design tool for social media marketing

Given the importance of visual content in the context of social media marketing and the abundance of design tools for creating visual content for the aforesaid purpose, it is worthwhile to explore the features, functionality, and performance parameters that make for a great design tool.

Other important aspects like ease of use, pricing, integration with other social media apps, and the spectrum of content prototypes that can be created using these design tools including but not limited to infographics, graphs, pie charts, bar charts, and scatter diagrams.

Some of the major parameters in assessing the merit of a great design tool for creating visual content are as follows:

• Ease of use
• Social media marketing integration
• User experience
• Choice of templates
• Custom design
• Pricing

The best visual content design tools for social media marketing

With the knowledge of the parameters that you got to be focusing on, from the perspective of visual content creation for social media marketing, it is easy to identify a list of the best such design tools that are available and in demand for the said job. Have a look.

1. Bannersnack

Making it to the list of the top design tools for image content creation is Bannersnack. Immensely popular with social media marketing professionals and graphic designers, the online banner maker offers the following features:

• AI-driven online banner generator: Bannersnack offers an artificial intelligence-driven online banner generator that allows users to edit multiple advertisement banners thereby reducing the turnaround time greatly and also augmenting the ease of creating banners with just a few clicks.
• Diverse banner sizes: The online banner design tool allows the user the option to choose from a wide array of banner templates of diverse sizes including miniature versions as well as scalable ones.
• Design from scratch with templates: Users get to choose from a wide diversity of animated and static banner themes and build their online banner the way they want to. Bannersnack allows for the use of built-in standardized themes as well as complete customization of designs.
• Export or embed your banners to any display advertising platform: Bannersnack allows users to create online advertisement banners of dimensions that are accepted by major digital advertisement publishing platforms like Google Ads, Display Network, AdRoll, and ReTargeter.
• Thirty-two, 32 ready-made animation presets for a fast result: Bannersnack offers users 32 built-in animation themes that can be used to create and customize animations in HTML5 through an intuitive virtual interface.
• Create more banners of more than 20 different sizes: With Bannersnack, users get to create online banners of more than 20 different sizes at the same time, thus augmenting productivity and speed and reducing the turnaround time.
• Allows multiple users to collaborate on any design project: Bannersnack offers some handy features for collaboration and co-creation of online ad banner copies. It allows multiple users to collaborate on the creative process of designing the banner copy.
• Pricing: Bannersnack offers the following pricing plans for individual users and teams. Individual users can fall back on a starter trial offer of seven days for free. A monthly subscription for individual users is available for $7. A quarterly subscription of three months’ duration is available for $18 a month, and a yearly subscription for 12 months is available for $36 a month.

2. Venngage

Second on our list of online banner makers is Venngage. Offering hundreds of charts, maps, and icons to create infographics for perfect data visualization, this online banner maker is highly used for making infographics. Venngage offers the following features listed below:

• Choose the perfect data visualization: The online banner maker offers a wide variety of options to create infographics. The list of statistical representations that can be created using Venngage includes but is not limited to the line chart, smooth line charts, area line charts, pie charts, bar charts, multi-column bar charts, stacked bar charts, scatter plot charts, bubble charts, stacked bubble charts, multi-series charts, and summary stats.
• Customizable infographic templates and themes: Venngage offers powerful features for creation of customized infographics. The online banner maker platform provides hundreds of templates and art themes to choose from with new templates being added to their portfolio every week.
• Easy drag and drop interface: Venggage has an easy drag and drop user interface that allows users to pull widgets directly into their canvas, lock and group widgets together into places and customize the widget size, color coding, and orientation.
• Free-form design canvas: Yet another feature of Venngage that makes it very convenient to use and operate for non-technical people is its supremely easy navigation that allows users to maneuver across diverse art themes, icons, pictures, fonts, and objects. The design tool offers a free-form design canvas that can be used to move objects around without any area restriction, snap to grid for automatic alignment, and thus delivers a seamless user experience.
• Share seamlessly on social media: Given that digital marketers, graphic designers and content creators usually do have the need to share their creative banners on social media platforms, blogs, and other digital publishing platforms, Venngage makes it easy for users to do so. The online banner maker tool allows users to share seamlessly on diverse social media platforms.
• Pricing: Venngage is affordable. For business enterprises, Venngage offers subscription plans priced at $49 a month. On the other hand, premium individual subscriptions are priced at $19 per month.

3. Visme

Third on the list of the best visual content creation tools is the online banner maker from Visme. The online banner maker is highly popular among graphic designers and marketing professionals. It offers a host of features, functionalities, and end user benefits as listed below:

• Easy to use banner maker: With a supremely easy to navigate user interface, Visme rates high among visual content creation tools for social media marketing among marketing professionals and graphic designers.
• Hundreds of templates to choose from: The design tool also offers features of built-in images and icons to select from millions of free and high-quality photos that can be searched from the image bank along with custom graphics and fonts for the text content.
• Create unified banners with simple resizing options: Yet another feature that makes Visme highly popular among communities of professional and novice designers is the rich customization that it offers. Users can create unified banners with diverse resizing options for their web arts and digital creatives without having to bother about the pixel clarity being affected.
• Easily create web graphics of all sizes: Visme allows users to create graphic arts of different sizes. Right from small scale banners to the large scale ones that brands need for their social media assets in the background or cover sections, users get to create web graphics of all sizes. Thus, it ranks high on the rich diversity of scale that it offers.
• Customize the banner template with your own graphics and fonts: Visme is one of the most popular image creation tools equipped with features like hundreds of templates for all the main social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. It provides custom features to choose from all types of banners, from advertisements and blogs to social media graphics of all sizes.
• Pricing: Visme offers a three-tiered subscription plan. There is a no-frills plan with basic features for users that is free of cost. Second, there is a standard subscription plan that costs $14 per month, and a complete subscription plan that costs $25 per month that allows users to access the whole suite of features and functionalities.

4. Fotor

Fourth on our list of the top visual content creation tools for use in social media campaigns is Fotor. With probably one of the most diverse and widest arrays of templates for creating image content, Fotor offers great multi-purpose functionality that embraces both the online and onsite business ecosystems. Fotor offers the following features to users:

• Templates: Fotor is an online image creation tool that offers a wide portfolio of templates that can be used to design web graphics and digital banners for social media platforms, emails, banners, flyers, invitation cards, business cards, thumbnails, tickets, mobile wallpapers, postcards, letterheads, and certificates.
• Design: On the front of the design, Fotor offers a multitude of features for graphic design, photomontage, and background. The online banner maker allows users to save their work in progress on the cloud and retrieve their last work at ease to take it forward later. The design features also include support for a large number of formats including JPG, PNG, and PDF.
• Basic edits: Fotor offers extensive features to users for executing basic edits to their copies of advertisement banners. Users can crop, resize, and straighten their web graphics with ease. Yet another feature that adds to the list of end-user benefits offered by this online banner maker is the supremely easy user interface that allows for seamless navigation.
• AI-driven visual effects: The online banner maker also offers an option to upgrade to a paid subscription that offers additional benefits of premium content with no watermark that is free of restrictions, advanced features for ease of use, advertisement-free editing, bigger sizes of canvas, and massive cloud-installed memory to archive your finished graphics and work in progress that can be downloaded in different image and PDF file formats. AI photo effects, stickers, collage, text, HDR photography are all part of the console.
• Multi-lingual collaboration: Further the online banner maker also offers a multi-lingual front end for graphic designers covering major international languages like Portuguese, German, Russian, French, Traditional, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese making it easy for multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan teams of designers to collaborate and co-create graphics for brands.
• Pricing: Fotor offers two subscription plans. Users can opt for a monthly subscription plan at $8.99 per month. On the other hand, Fotor also offers an annual subscription plan at $39.99 per annum, which essentially comes down to $3.33 per month, which by all accounts is certainly affordable.

5. My Banner Maker

Fifth in our list of the best visual content creation tools is My Banner Maker. An easy to use online banner maker, My Banner Maker stands out in the list for its professional turnkey assistance and professional collaboration in addition to the technology suite that it offers. Some of the major features that My Banner Maker offers are as follows:

• Social media banners for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube: The specialty of My Banner Maker lies in the features and functionalities that it offers for visual content to be deployed in games, that is in addition to that for social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
• Banner advertisements of diverse sizes: My Banner Maker is one of those free visual content creation tools with simply awesome templates for feature-rich designs, custom color codes, customizable font sizes for content to go along with, and seamless user experience for designers. Further, the platform offers great scalability to users with options to access graphic content and images of different sizes.
• Professional collaboration with the vendor: With a paid subscription plan, brands can also collaborate with the design team at My Banner Maker to co-create their custom graphics assets and visual content pieces by sharing their brand logos, brand copyrighted images, and mascots.
• Pricing: Priced at $4. 95 per month, My Banner Maker allows users to make pixel perfect banners of different sizes, use the express banner editor and online design studio along with unlimited access to full photoshop library, and priority support.

In the final diagnosis, it is only humble to take cognizance of the ever-increasing influence of visual content in the context of social media campaigns and the opportunities that brands can look forward to leveraging. While this list is by no means exhaustive and exclusive, the above mentioned visual content creation tools make it to our list on parameters of user experience, custom design abilities, and pluralism of deployment across digital platforms. Here is wishing your brand all the luck to reinvent the future of social media marketing by creating some stunning visuals this year.

Birbahadur Singh Kathayat is an Entrepreneur, internet marketer and Co-founder of Lbswebsoft. He can be found on Twitter @bskathayat.

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