Want to learn more about digital content creation tools? Or about digital content creation process? Digital content for marketing is a major determining factor for the success of your marketing strategy. The Internet provides access to any information, which is why the content you create and post online needs to be relevant, thought-provoking, and informative. To help you with that, we have put together a list of content creation tools that should aid you in your efforts.
Content creation tools are software that make it easy to create content, like infographics and blog posts. There’s a lot more to content creation than just knowing how to take good photos and write in-depth articles. Modern marketers create content using many resources, including their own founded assets such as social media accounts, and assets provided by businesses they work with, such as product images. As the number of people performing marketing tasks continues to grow, so will the demand for these tools. This article offers an overview of digital content creation tools.
A digital content creation process is a series of steps necessary to develop, deliver and manage digital content in order to achieve marketing goals. While the process varies depending on the size, target audience, and budget of the organization, there are five core steps that all digital processes should follow: understanding customer needs, creating a strategy, developing the concept and design, creating content and launching implementation.
What is a content creation tool? It’s a software that is used to build websites. There are many open source and paid content creation tools on the market. These are of the best. The list of free and open source content creation tools has expanded considerably over the years. Here are some of the most popular content creation tools in today’s market.
What is content creation?
First, let’s check out the basics. By definition, content creation involves developing topic ideas that appeal to your target audience by considering their personas. This way, you can internalize what ideal customer you have in mind.
Then, the topic ideas will depend on your content creation tools. Now that you have a grasp of the persona of customers you are targeting, it’s time to make your brand accessible through written output, videos, posters, and other formats you have in mind.
Canva
A social media tools list wouldn’t be complete without Canva. One of the most popular tools for creating social media graphics, Canva allows users to create high-quality images quickly using layouts, templates and design elements.
The free version of the tool is extremely comprehensive, but those who want more can invest €11.99 per month (up to 5 people) or go with pro or enterprise pricing if it’s the best fit for the business. It is free for education and non-profits.
How to Create Beautiful Graphics with Canva:
- Search Canva’s amazing library of templates and choose to use them as-is or to customize for your needs. There is a section dedicated to social media graphics for an array of content formats across platforms.
- Choose your unique elements to make the graphic your own.
- Share your new visual on any social media platform!
Crello
Similar to Canva, Crello is a graphic design tool that makes it easy for certified social media marketers to create stunning graphics without a lot of design knowledge.
Crello’s advantage over Canva is that it offers more than 30,000 free design templates, 180 million photos, 32,000 videos and 15,000 illustrations. You can also design as a team by inviting members (up to 10), animate your designs and choose from a music library. Like Canva, a variety of different image types are offered, including templates specifically for social media. Crello is free for users, with limited usage, and pro plan starts at $9.99 a month.
How to Build Graphics Quickly with Crello:
- Use Crello’s ‘Create’ tab to find a free design template or templates that work for your brand.
- Simply click on a design template you love, and customize it using the Crello editor.
- Save your finished product, and/or share it across your social media sites.
Hashtagify.me
Hashtagify.me is a free tool (with paid add-on features) that allows you to search for hashtags. Once you’ve searched for a hashtag, you can determine its popularity and how it’s used. The tool is simple to use: in the search box, type in a hashtag you are curious about, and search to find out its performance and related hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. You’ll also see the top influencers for that hashtag, as well as recent tweets using that hashtag and other demographics. Paid users can sign up for alerts on particular hashtags, track influencers and usage patterns, and more.
Prezi and Flipsnack
Prezi allows you to create stand-alone presentations, appear alongside a presentation, and design awesome interactive graphics and charts. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, presenting and collaborating from home has become hugely important and the platform has capitalized on its technology to make it seamless while looking good!
Check out this Coronavirus handbook for social media managers to get more insight.
Prezi can be integrated with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webdex and has an ‘Inspiration’ section where you can see what other brands have done to engage their audiences. You can also get reusable designs and templates so you don’t need to start from scratch. An individual subscription starts at $3 a month.
If you’re looking to take your PDFs or ebooks to the next level, look no further than Flipsnack (previously known as SlideSnack. This tool has a flip book maker that allows you to create, share and embed online flip page formats.
For your mobile visitors, you can convert PDFs to HTML5 to make a book that’s fully mobile responsive and create mobile friendly content that engages.
Google Trends
Google Trends helps to keep you in the loop. Google Trends reveals insight into today’s relevant content. Not yesterday’s. Google Trends is ideal for those who frequently create content. This includes those who blog, have a heavy social presence, develop content for specific groups of people, or work in marketing.
The Content Marketing Institute recommends using Google Trends to research keywords, discover content ideas, and monitor your brand.
Simply enter in a topic or explore trending stories and featured insights. Google Trends displays the frequency of search terms in consideration of its total volume across geographic regions. Additionally, Google Trends shows search interest over time. Depending on the flux of query volumes, you may choose one topic over another to discuss in whatever content you create.
Moz Keyword Explorer
You wouldn’t want to create awesome content and not get noticed. Easily check what keyword to use for blog posts and site pages with Moz’s Keyword Explorer. You can enter terms or phrases into Moz Keyword Explorer. Moz will provide you with keyword suggestions and a SERP analysis reflective of the keyword’s search volume, difficulty, opportunity, and potential.
Once you start exploring, you can export CSV files and save them for later. This includes the top ranking sites containing your keyword or phrase. Moz Keyword Explorer allows for two free searches a day. If you require more searching, you can upgrade to a paid subscription starting at $50 a month.
Sigstr
Sigstr is an email signature banner. Email banners are added and changed from one admin console with changes immediately reflected in employees’ email signatures. Sigstr banners are a great way to intertwine visual content and compelling copy.
You can create unique signatures for departments, teams, executives, and customer service. Swap out Sigstr signatures to engage email recipients with company news, upcoming events, and relevant content.
Giphy
If you blog or even just read a lot of blogs, you know how easy it is to get lost in a sea of words. GIFs are a really easy way to grab the audience’s attention. Sometimes animation shows more than just still images. But where is everyone finding GIFs? Giphy is a free visual content creation tool. You can contextually search for GIFs, or you can create your own.
Have one team member who can answer your chats and emails at lightning speed with an animated GIF suited for the context? In addition to sparring in chat messages, use Giphy in blog posts.
SurveyMonkey
Quizzes are still hot., But it is important to also include an added layer of purpose so they drive conversions.
This is where players like BuzzFeed and Refinery29 shine, and for those interested in making their content a little more engaging, it can easily be done with tools like SurveyMonkey.
Yes, most commonly associated with its survey services, SurveyMonkey has branched out to include a variety of new content types, including quizzes.
Customizable to include your logo, theme, and whatever variation of questions formats you’d like to combine, drafting a simple or robust quiz has never been easier. They even include a bank of popularly used questions to help spark inspiration.
Access stats on scores, rankings, percentiles, and completion rates to ensure ROI on this content creation tool.
Snappa
Not everyone has the luxury of hiring a graphic designer. And often, even if they do have one or two dedicated staff members, the constant necessity for fresh content as an inbound tactic day in and day out can still create barriers to production.
Thankfully, tools like Snappa.io allow regular old marketers like you and me to create high-quality visual content without having to rely on design.
With a bevy of pre-designed templates in a variety of formats, start cranking out fresh content for your blog, social media, newsletter, paid media initiatives, and more. All your in-house design team has to do is make sure that everything matches brand guidelines.
Wideo
Not a spelling error, Wideo has been simplifying video animation since 2013. As an incredibly effective marketing tactic, many businesses have pined over having the ability to produce video content on a regular basis.
With ready made templates and its easy drag and drop interface, upload images and original creative to turn weeks or months of dedicated resources into a wheelhouse of daily marketing, promo, and explainer videos.
Venngage
Far from dead, the almighty infographic lives on to help content marketers — new and old — turn complex stories into aesthetically beautiful and comprehensible experiences.
With a sea of templates based on a variety of different layouts and constantly updated categories to suit your specific needs (think statistical, geographic, timeline, and charts), Venngage takes the cake in this department, leaving your graphic designer with more time free of grey hair.
What are some examples of content creation?
Right now, you are already consuming an example of a product of content creation. Through written output, commonly known as ‘blog posts,’ we reinforce our brand by producing content related to technology since our target audience is tech enthusiasts.
Another example is graphic design. Professionals use this type of content to project their branding onto visual posts. Take Coca-Cola’s graphic design, for instance. Even without names, you immediately know their products when you see their posters. Talk about effective content marketing, right?
Conclusion
Content creation is a vital process in online marketing. But often, it’s time-consuming, repetitive and seemingly endless. Marketers have to juggle content creation with other important tasks – drafting social media posts, creating social media advertisements and planning new strategies. In essence, they’re working within a system that isn’t ideal for the job: it’s time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Every year we host a Digital Content Creation Tools webinar during the first quarter. The webinar is designed to give our partners insights into how to spot the right tools – and what’s missing – for their creative teams. To date, this has been the most popular session in our two-year content marketing series with just under 600 registrants.