Visual marketing has become a vital part of social media and this can create a whole new load of stresses for small businesses and entrepreneurs. If you’re wondering how to create visual marketing on a budget, you’ve come to the right place! I’m going to share some tips and tools to create visual content that you can be proud of on a budget that you can live with.
Because you get what you pay for you will need to spend money on parts of your visual marketing. Never skimp on a logo since this is the calling card for your brand. If you’re a business, you’ll need a high-quality logo that communicates what your brand does and will help build the rest of your brand’s visual marketing. If you’re a blogger, you may have a logo but you may use your blog design and palette for your visual marketing.
Jeff Sieh of His Design recently created a logo for my company Lucky Clover Media. I had an idea what I wanted for the design and Jeff created it for me in PhotoShop. This way I can add the logo to business cards, designs, or invoices. Don’t get all excited I haven’t changed what I’m doing but having a company name and presence will add another layer of professionalism to everything that I do. When a professional creates your high resolution designs for you, you can use these elements on your website or blog and to create your own visual marketing content.
Places to spend your money:
- Logo design
- Web design and creation
- Video bumpers (the intro before a video)
- Great photos
Create a brand style guide
Your visual marketing creates an essential element in the communication for your brand so you need this to be clear. It may take some time to create exactly the perfect mix for your visual style but once you hit all the perfect notes, stick with it! Again, this could be an area where you can work with a designer to create your brand style guide but you can also create this yourself.
Your brand style guide should include:
- Your logo
- Three fonts: Header, subheader, and body text
- Brand color palette
- Filter for photos
Additional resource: Why Your Brand Needs a Visual Style Guide
If you’re doing this on your own, you can grab inspiration from many sources. I’ve found color inspiration from Design Seeds and Pinterest is loaded with font parings that can help you match things to the mood and style of your brand. A Design Seeds Pinterest pin was the color inspiration for my logo and design for My Book Club.
Creating the perfect social media post maximizes your great content by reaching more people. Using graphics to tell the your story is the current trend in social media. This is what I call “visual marketing” and it was spurred in part because of the success of Pinterest and Instagram. On these services a photo is often the first, and sometimes only, interaction with readers, and this changes everything.
Resource: How to Maximize Visual Content Marketing
Once you’ve created the visual essence of your brand, you’ll be ready to create content to share on your blog or social media. Here are a few fun and unique ways to add some low-budget visual appeal to your marketing:
Free Places to Create Graphics
Canva – My go-to tool for creating visuals. Easy to use and you could work with a designer to create custom templates for you. They’re launching a Canva for Work program in the next month, you can pre-register to be amongst the first to get the new features.. I can’t tell you what new features it will have yet BUT I can tell you that they are fantastic!
PicMonkey – caveats include being able to use all the fonts on your computer within the program and the ability to create transparent backgrounds. There is a pro version that you get extra benefits with and it’s very inexpensive.
Skitch “is an online application developed by Evernote, one of my favorite productivity apps. It’s also available for iPhone and Android making it a powerful multi-platform tool.” from Rebekah Radice.
Resource: 7 Apps to Create Great Social Media Graphics
Find Affordable Photos
Make sure that you have permission to use any images that you find for your blog or your social media posts. If you can’t afford images, you can’t afford the fines that you could incur for using photos illegally. Luckily, there are many sites that you can find free images to use. Here are a few of my favorites:
Resource: Oh Snap, Can I Legally Use That Photo
My splurge recommendation for photos is Stocksy.com. I absolutely love their creative, non-stock photos.
Present Professional Content
Using this fantastic free site that I found called PlaceIt, I created this video with a screencast from my desktop. I loaded it to YouTube, added music and embedded the video into this blog post. It took less than a half hour to complete. You could also add annotations, a YouTube bumper for your brand, or clickable links for your products or services.
Be Creative Like a Boss with GIFs
Adding motion to your content can grab the attention in a post or social media. Creating GIFS may seem complicated but there are easy ways to incorporate them into your content. The below GIF was grabbed from Giphy – there are thousands to choose from sorted by themes and hashtags. I used the embed code to add it to the text side of my WordPress site.
Want to learn more tips for DIY Design? My friends at Hubspot are hosting a free webinar on May 21st and I’ll be presenting on DIY Design Hacks. RSVP here. I’ll be sharing more ways to create your own winning visual marketing on a budget. I hope you’ll join me.
The post How to Create Visual Marketing on a Budget #DIYDesign appeared first on Peg Fitzpatrick.
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