Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...Pinterest and Instagram set the standard for content marketers and social media managers to create good -- if not awesome -- visual content that tells a story. The problem is that people need good, fast, and cheap, but mostly what’s available is mediocre, slow, and expensive.

At Canva, we’re trying to change this by making a fast, free, and easy tool service accessible to everyone. Here are ten steps you can take to improve your visual marketing with Canva....

Jessica Gioglio, Social Media Strategist for Dunkin Donuts, and Ekaterina Walter, Co-founder and CMO of Branderati, join the Social Pros Podcast this week to discuss their new book The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand.

The skill set is shifting, says Jessica. A writing background is key to thinking about the whole lifecycle of the content. It’s not just about creating; today’s social pros need to think about how content travels across platform and how it gets consumed.

They see companies hiring more visual artists to create content but also people with publishing backgrounds. “It’s not just about which content you create and which context you put it in,” Jessica says. “It’s about speed too.” What is the right time to produce the right content for the right audience in the right format? Those are a lot of cross-disciplinary skills...

There’s significant momentum for publishers toward increasing the production of video content, on account of both the strength of video as a medium for storytelling and high video CPMs as advertisers begin to move their TV spends online (see the Chicago Tribune’s coverage for one example). An increase in video content across the board, of course, means that it’s all the more important that we have a sense of which parts of our audience we can hope to reach with video. To that end, below is a brief survey of the state of online audiences and their consumption of video.

...But there is one problem. Just like any marketing channel, as more and more marketers starts using it, content marketing will become even more challenging to gain desired results. For example digital banner ads, which made an appearance in 1994, enjoyed 78% CTR(click-through-rate) and the industry average today hovers around 0.05%. Andrew Chen calls it the ‘Law of Shitty Clickthroughs’

As a marketer, this creates a challenging opportunity to create content that is engaging and innovative. A picture speaks thousand words. That explains why visual content like infographics, gifs and memes are the buzzwords in today’s world of content marketing.

In this article, we have put together a selection of the best tools that can help you create amazing visual content. These time saving apps save you many hours as you create stunning stories that are unique and arresting....