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Visuals play an important role in content marketing. These outstanding content marketing tools help you create the visuals your content needs.

To get the most out of your great content you need pictures, graphics, and videos to get more shares, more engagement, and more subscribers. Images help you structure longer texts and add value.

Since most bloggers and content marketers are not born designers, most of us need the aid of tools. Here is a list of useful tools to help you pimp up your content and make it more shareable. Without visually appealing images your content is doomed to fail or at least bring your far less impact as you intended.

Make your content count by adding images for social media and for making your content easier to read and understand with these easy to use content marketing tools – most of them are free or at least come with a very usable free version.

1. Canva

Canva is by far my favorite tool for creating social media images and I use it almost every day. I create the images for our blog posts with Canva and some quote images I use on our Facebook and Pinterest accounts. I am no designer and while today I feel comfortable enough to create some not too ugly images, when I started creating images for the blog I was more than happy to use one of the templates Canva provides to help me get started.

Canva is an online tool that provides the right tools to easily create images in the right format for almost any purpose. Canva comes with templates in custom dimensions, icons and design elements. You can put all these together to create your own personal images for your blog. Most of the items you can use for your image come for free – in addition you can choose a variety of templates, icons and images which start at 1$.

Canva also offers a paid account “Canva for work” which is especially useful in teams when you need to share image templates or want to define a corporate design.

2. Pablo by Buffer

Pablo is even simpler than Canva. It is the tool to create images within minutes – or even seconds. And it comes from Buffer – most of you probably know Buffer and use it daily. Pablo is just as intuitive to use and easy as scheduling tweets with Buffer.

Pablo provides all the basic but necessary tools to create social media images withing seconds. You can use one of the preloaded images and easily add text as you like.

3. PicMonkey

PicMonkey is a tool to help you edit any pictures you may have – or use some of the ones from their database. You can upload any photo, change it and make it look better for your blog by using one of the following options:

• Add text or overlays
• Add a frame or cutout
• Add effects, filters and change sharpness, lights and colors
• Crop

4. Meme Generator

Sometimes to make your readers smile is just what you need to make them read on and stick to your story. Meme Generator can help you with that. Add a little meme to your text and make it shareable in social media. It has the power to boost social shares and engagement.

MemeGenerator lets you choose from various famous templates, you can add your own text. You may have seen the one I made multiple times with various messages. Head on over to Meme Generator and make your own.

Learn to drive traffic, leads and customers from social media. Optimize your results with visuals. All that and more in the ebook “The Social Traffic Code!”

5. Snappa

Snappa is another very easy image design tool. It comes with tons of templates and is extremely easy to use. The free version allows you to create 5 downloads per month – which for us is not enough with the amount of blog posts we have and images we need. That is probably the main reason why we stick to Canva for our images.

If you just need a handful of images per month, then you should take a look at Snappa. It provides the right image sizes for blogs and social media, provides templates, patterns, vectors and shapes and coms with a ton of Fonts and typefaces.

It is all there you just need to get started.

6. PowToon

If you want to create your own little explanation videos PowToon may be the tool of your choice. It is really a three-step process:

1. Write a story you want to tell with your video. You will need a written script which you will use

2. Record your voice over – oh, I hate that part, my voice never sounds like my own when I listen to it

3. Add visuals. PowToon provides you with a ton of templates.

Since the free account does not come with download options and commercial rights it seems to be more for testing and playing around. If you actually want to “use” the created videos you will probably have to decide for a paid plan.

If you like your video you can go for a simple one time download. I like the option of creating a small video first and then decide if I want to keep it. However, it is a very simple and easy to do process and now you know how all these cartoony videos are made 😉

7. Easel.ly

If you ever tried to create your own infographic and if you are like me, you probably gave up, because creating them eats up a ton of time and in the end it still looks crap. But with templates and the right icons you can easily fill in your own data and adjust the everything that it fits your needs.

Easel.ly does exactly that: It provides you with thousands of templates for your infographics and you can easily adjust and add to them as you need.

The pro account comes with even more templates – but to get you started the free account should be enough for some time.

8. Skitch

This tool comes handy when you have a screenshot or another image where you want to mark areas or add some explanatory text. I used it to add some additional information to the screenshot of the second tool in this list Pablo.

You need to download the tool and install it on your computer. The basic version is for free and already lets you use a lot of the functionality.

Even though we are writers, we should invest more time to make our posts more valuable by including graphics, images, memes or videos. It is worth the time and effort you invest as it is a fact that content with images gets more shares and responses.

Take a look at the above tools. Some of them may just be what you have been looking for.

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