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The sun’s rising and the birds are chirping. Your phone alarm rings and you swipe it away, entering your first bask into the blue screen glow of the day. Before getting ready, perhaps a quick scroll through social media. But now tell me, how many ads did you see? Two? Ten? None? If you can’t remember you may be suffering from banner blindness.
Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or subconsciously ignore banner-like information, which can also be called ad blindness or banner noise.
The average adult sees over 5000 ad messages a day (Media Dynamics, 2014). While we’re certainly not saying ads are useless, we’re saying that content marketing can be very useful. If you’re providing content that can bring your audience value, they’re far more likely to take note of it.
Implementing effecting pieces of content does however take time. To help your team’s efficiency, we’ve put together a list of our favourite tools to help you bring your content together – fast.
Adobe Spark
You don’t need an expensive Creative Cloud subscription or a design degree to create awesome graphics for social media. Adobe offers their Spark line of apps completely free for iPhone and Android, packed with ready-to-go templates and themes for any graphics, photos, or even videos you might need.
Unsplash
We know photos gain higher engagement than plain old text – but using stock photos on the daily can really bite into your budget. What’s a marketer to do? Unsplash, of course! If you’re unfamiliar with this website, it’s a real life saver. Unsplash is an incredible collection of high quality, hip photography that you can use completely free, on any commercial work, without attribution. Talk about generous!
TinyPNG
Pretty photos are nice and all, but they can sure slow a website down. A slow load speed isn’t just painful for your visitors however, it can even harm your SEO. As a safeguard, we run any and all visual content marketing we publish through this handy little site, ensuring fast-loading photos without hassling with Photoshop settings or losing that beauty we sought in the first place.
Hootsuite
Managing all your social media accounts can be a pain, but not with Hootsuite. This tool gives you a single platform to manage all your accounts. Switch between accounts, reply to comments, schedule posts, and track analytics all from a single dashboard. Hurrah!
Planoly
Hootsuite is great for most uses, but one thing they haven’t fully mastered is Instagram. For that, we’ll let Planoly take the spotlight. Planoly is a great option for designing, editing, and scheduling posts, hashtags, regrams and stories from Android, iOS, or right in the web browser.
Templates by 24Slides
Sometimes your content marketing might go a bit offline, be that an event presentation or a downloadable ebook, we’ve got you covered. 24Slides offers a great collection of pre-designed PowerPoint templates for just about any need – and with some really nice design work to boot.
Videvo
Yes, yes, photos get higher engagement than text, but video gains even more exposure than photos! Trouble is, videos take even more work to produce on your own, and the stock options are much more expensive. Videvo comes to the rescue with plenty of free assets useful for any industry. Be sure to check the licenses on each video however, they are all free but some assets do require attribution.
No Lick
A brand new resource just from this week, No Lick completes your trifecta for free stock. Sometimes that video just needs a little music, and No Lick has that taken care of with their growing collection of five new completely free tracks every week. Like Unsplash for music, no need to worry about licenses here.
And that’s a wrap!
Our tool belts over in the Greenhouse are always growing, and we hope that now yours are too. Do you already use some of these or have others to share? Give us a call or stop by our marketing agency in downtown Vancouver – we always have chocolate!