Software tools that help marketers pop up every single year, and now at a far more rapid pace than ever before. Luckily more and more of these tools are taking on a freemium approach, meaning that marketers have access to better tools without spending much (or anything at all!).
Let’s take a look at some of the tools you can be using for free, right now, to boost your business.
Canva – an incredible free design software that purports to make anyone a designer. To be fair, it’s not far from the truth; Canva is a drag and drop editor filled with thousands of free images, backgrounds, and elements that you can piece together, resize, and recolor, along with text elements, in order to make some seriously snazzy logos, content images, and more.
You can use premium elements for $1 each in any design, but it’s fairly easy to create professional looking images without ever using a paid element. Plus, Canva allows you to upload your own photos and incorporate them into your designs, further eliminating the need to pony up any cash for your design needs.
Unsplash.com – In need of stock images? This site is one of the best royalty free, no BS sites you can find for stock images that are actually free to be used for any purpose – even commercial! Unsplash uploads a limited number of new images each week, but it’s been around for a while so there’s a healthy batch of material up there at this point.
Unsplash doesn’t have everything, however, and you might have trouble finding images of people in various scenarios (though there are many useable office/work environment type photos). Where Unsplash really shines is in environmental, landscape, and architectural images, so if those will work into your material, you’re definitely in luck!
Infogr.am – Inforgram allows you to quickly and easily create infographics for your business. You’ll be able to create a number of free infographics per account, and then you have to pay to create more. If you’re really strapped for cash, you could theoretically create more than one account to garner more free creations.
Infographics are a hugely popular information consumption format right now, and it’s no wonder why: Infographics are able to quickly and easily demonstrate complex concepts and figures visually. Because so much of the world learns well from visual input, and infographics keep people from having to skim through writing and research to pull out statistics and talking points, infographics can get shared like crazy.
Buffer – For many delving into social media for the first time for their brands, their barrier to entry is either not wanting to pay for software to manage many platforms, or for not having the time to even manage a couple on their own. Buffer is a platform that allows you to schedule social media posts across multiple channels at once, and you’ll be able to do it all for free if you’re only managing a few different platform. If you’re looking to manage a whole bunch of channels at once, however, you’ll need to pay a monthly subscription.