14 Online Tools for Visual Content Creation

A picture is worth a thousand words – and creating eye-catching and engaging content for digital marketing channels is easy.

Stunning videos, pretty pictures, data-driven infographics – all these are loved by marketers, even more so perhaps than by the readers, customers, or leads.

The reason being – embracing visual content gets better results in terms of customers, leads, visitors, and of course, revenue.

A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. But, when we talk about getting the attention of your audience, do not leave to chance the way you communicate your message.

Types of Visual Content

Visual content is great because it powers up your communication and receives great attention from the target audience.

Infographics: Businesses using infographics as a marketing tool receive 12 percent more traffic than those who don’t.

Videos: Sharing videos on landing pages can increase the average page conversion rate by 86 percent, according to EyeView.

Presentations: 90 percent of information is transferred to the brain visually. Use catchy images, videos, and graphics in your presentation to get into the minds of your target audience.

Memes: The Internet is full of colorful images and videos because audiences love them and sharing them. Memes get copied and spread rapidly.

Whether you are a champion of visual content or have recently become more inclined toward leveraging its power, here is a list of tools for enhancing the graphics of a marketing campaign.

For Infographics

1. Creately

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Creately is a brainstorming, diagramming, and charting tool that acts as a visual communications platform. Use it to create flowcharts, infographics, or even organization charts. Users can download their work as a .pdf or .png and can even upload images. It’s pretty intuitive to use, with most of the work being done with mere drag and drop. One of the negatives of the tool is that all the files created with be public, unless you pay for them.

2. Infogr.am

a-infogrAnother free infographic generator is Infogr.am, with six basic templates, each varying in terms of font styles and color schemes. The template can be customized in several ways, and creators can also upload images or videos into the infographic to make it look more appealing. The chart feature gives the flexibility to add or change the data easily.

3. Piktochart

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Piktochart is an infographic creation tool that lets you design stunning pieces worth sharing in minutes. For a layman with no idea of graphic designing, Piktochart offers more than 100 categorized themes to bring data to life. The free version, however, has a limited number of templates and features. The Pro Plan is worth paying for.

4. Visual.ly

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Use Visual.ly to create compelling visuals. To get an infographic created, fill out a creative brief in the cloud based Project Center and the creative team will connect with you. The process is fast, simple, and worth the money.

For Videos

5. PowToon

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The online animation software of PowToon is perfect for storytelling and creating Flash-style movies. You don’t have to go through hundreds of tutorials to learn motion creation as PowToon will do it for you. Great for small business owners and marketers.

6. WeVideo

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A browser-based video editor, WeVideo is great for creating digital stories out of audio recordings and still photos. It has an easy to use interface and several tools to create an interesting story. All the media editing including photo cropping, audio editing, and text slides creation can be done in one software interface.

7. YouTube Video Editor

YouTube video editor is simple and with a single track timeline, you get all the basic transitions and effects and a soundtrack feature. It is easy to learn and quick to use. Users can edit and remix the YouTube videos that are uploaded in their YouTube accounts. Black and white, image stabilization, contrast, and brightness are the effects you can include in the video. If we talk about the cons, YouTube video editor has only the most basic features.

For Presentations

8. Emaze

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If you are looking for an alternative to PowerPoint, Emaze is here. It lets you create visual presentations, fast. Choose from a variety of templates with built-in HTML5 technology, 3-dimensional patterns, and PowerPoint style presentations. After you have saved the presentation in the cloud, you can view it online or download the HTML file.

9. Haiku Deck

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A simple way to make better presentations, Haiku Deck is a tool with a few features but creating presentations is incredibly fast and hassle-free. All you have to do is pick background images and write a sentence or two over them. Haiku automatically queries rights free image databases, thus saving your time in finding images. However, if your presentation must have flowcharts, graphs, and bullets, Haiku Deck is not the right tool for you.

10. Prezi

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Prezi is cloud-based presentation software that is simple to use as compared to the traditional slideshow makers. It displays information not as series of slides but as a large board that zooms in on specific information, text, or an image, giving presentations a fresh and non-traditional feel.

11. SlideRocket

a-sliderocket-2A fast and feature-packed cloud-based presentation software, SlideRocket lets you add dynamic and media-rich content. You can have animations, live feeds, audio, and high resolution videos – all added in the tool to make an impact. If you want to share presentations on HTML 5 compatible devices, live embed data in the slides, and protect your presentation online, use SlideRocket. A major drawback is that advanced features such as offline mode require a pricey subscription. SlideRocket is now integrated with ClearSlide.

For Memes

12. Imgur

Create your own memes using the Imgur Meme generator. The tool is simple to use and the meme can be titled as well as shared in the public Meme galleries. There are more than 135,00 templates to choose from and you can also upload a template of your own.

13. Rage Comic Generator

With Rage Comic Generator it gets easy to create some fun cartoons. A huge number of meme images are already included in the tool and you can enlarge images or even flip/rotate them. The tool also has social sharing feature.

14. QuickMeme

As the name implies, QuickMeme is extremely fast and lets you create and share memes super fast. Adding text is simple and users can also adjust the font size or positioning. Another helpful feature is the list of featured, popular, favorited, and random memes from everywhere within the website. A slightly disorganized categorization is however a problem with QuickMeme. If you are looking for a particular template or meme type, you will have to do a manual search within the website as there’s no list of the most popular images.

Most of these tools offer lots of features for free. However, if you aim at coming up with some extraordinary videos, infographics, presentations, or memes, the paid versions are worth trying.

Which of these tools have you used so far? Share your views in the comments section below.

*Homepage image courtesy Sliderocket.

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