With social media being such an important element when it comes to marketing your business, the content, including the visual imagery needs to be right.
Many businesses, whether they are on the larger scale or down to the individual entrepreneur are getting on the bandwagon that images and strong visual content attract engagement. How many times have you been scrolling through your news feed or twitter home page, and your eyes have been frequently drawn to a photograph, well presented quotation or infographic?
Of course, visual content is not just applicable in social media. Your marketing material needs to be attractive to the eye. Your graphics need to be clear and concise and in line with your brand and you need to show consistency through your on-line presence. For example your website, social media profile or your newsletter, as well as your physical marketing materials such as flyers and business cards.
When you mention graphics to anyone in business who is not a graphic designer, you may get a few looks or comments that indicate the misconception of having quality graphics and imagery is expensive.
These days there are many resources on-line that you can turn to yourself, to assist you in creating beautiful images and graphics that resonate with your brand. Many of these tools are free to use and produce results of a great quality. Here are a few examples:-
PicMonkey – An extremely user friendly tool, enabling you to create not only graphics from scratch, but also develop existing designs and enable you to get creative. This tool already has templates that can help you with creating your Facebook header or a collage, or if you just want a simple custom shape to create some text graphics, PicMonkey is great! You can also import photographs, so that you can edit, add filters and text or simple touch ups. It really is worth taking a look.
Canva – As with PicMonkey, this is also another extremely user friendly tool. Not only can you do pretty much all the tasks I’ve mentioned above, you can also download free images to use in your creations. There are tutorials within the program, to help guide you and demonstrate just what Canva is capable of.
Gimp – Now this one is a little more complicated, and a piece of downloadable software. It is more of an image manipulation program, and possibly for those of us that are a little more advanced when it comes to graphics. It is basically the free lower spec version of professional software such as PhotoShop.
Those are just three of many options. With graphics being a hot topic and very much in demand, we will be keeping our eyes peeled for the new contenders.
What do you find draws you visually to a business? What elements of their marketing would you take on board and incorporate into your own strategy?
Of course, to be able to produce effective images, you also need to have the ‘eye’ to visualise what you want to achieve, and deliver that quality to represent your brand. If you find that this is something of difficulty you may want to consider outsourcing this important marketing element and Virtual Hand can help you with that. Please contact us with your enquiries and our team will see what they can do to assist you with your business graphics.
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