Everyone is a designer now-days thanks to tools like Photoshop and Illustrator that have made it super simple for just about anyone to create designs. However, that doesn’t mean that you can create a great design. In this article, I’m going to highlight the web design software you need to create stunning digital marketing designs as well as include links so you can try them out for free.
Canva
“Canva is the WYSIWYG for design tools,” says Carly Farlow of Builder Funnel. “What WYSIWYG did for marketers with developing websites, Canva has done for marketers with designing beautiful images and CTAs.”
Zachary Darsch of Knovio agrees: “As a marketer with limited resources, Canva is the design tool that I can’t live without. It allows us to easily create beautiful designs for social media, emails, blogs… the list goes on. Their simple user interface and endless library of photos and icons make designing easy for anyone.”
“Canva is such a great tool for building stellar graphics for social media campaigns and posts,” says Tyler Pigott of Lone Fir Creative. “They have all the dimensions pre-configured for each platform, and edits/layout is a breeze.”
“Canva gives us the flexibility to create ad graphics fast so that we can quickly respond to changes occurring on ad platforms like Facebook,” says Stewart Anderson of MuteSix. “While we make most ad creative using pro tools like Photoshop, a more agile option is essential for iterating as fast as possible.”
Fotor
“I have so many reports and business banners to create, so a free online photo editor is very useful,” says Pinterest’s Marvin Kim. “I used to use Canva, but I discovered that Fotor is much cheaper and has more easy-to-use features like HDR and go art.”
Vennage
Vennage is a free infographic maker that offers more than 100 templates to help you tell your marketing story in an attractive and visual way. You can enhance your infographic by adding icons and images from Vennage’s library, and customise it by changing the fonts and colours. It’s a paid service, but there is a free plan for students.
“Our go-to design tool is Venngage,” says Sujan Patel of Mailshake. “Their automated Brand kit and team collaboration features make it really easy for us to streamline our branding across a range of visual assets for lead generation, like ebooks, white papers, infographics, and reports. The real-time collaboration feature makes project prioritization and roadmapping efficient and effective for our team so that everyone can stay aligned on important company goals and milestones.”
Matrix Mortgage Global’s Laura Martin shares similar praise for Venngage.
“The infographic templates that Venngage offers are so relevant and professional, it makes communicating relatively complex and, for lack of a better term, ‘boring’ information, so straightforward. The designs really elevate our brand and get our message across in an engaging way.”
Pablo
Another free, browser-based editor, Pablo helps you create engaging images for your social media postings. The key to getting attention on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is to combine the right text with the right images, and Pablo makes this quick and easy. For instance, it enables you to make your text larger or smaller, change the font type or colour, switch your photo to blurred or black-and-white, add icons, and more.
Piktochart
Piktochart is a subscription service offering an easy to use infographic maker. You don’t have to be a designer to use it, because Piktochart’s own designers have created more than 600 professional templates for you to use. You just have to find a style that fits your message, then make it unique by editing the text, fonts and colours.
Adobe Illustrator
“Adobe Illustrator is the most helpful design tool we use, and we use it frequently for a variety of projects,” says Sam Zises of [L]earned Media. “The vector-based program is our go-to when creating a logo or any other branding elements/graphics that can easily be scaled to any size.”
“Artwork designed in Illustrator can also be simultaneously used with other programs like Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, XD, and Keynote without losing quality,” Zises says.
“It is the base of almost every layout we do as an agency,” says Tiago Dias of Aparticula.
“Illustrator provides layout efficiency, rapid and precise duplication, lockdown, grouping, transparency, and single and multiple selection,” says Nandor Rakosi of Polymorph Studios.
“These seem like pedestrian items to mention, but we use these functions hundreds of times an hour, and the time-savings on projects both small and large is substantial. Almost all design work—from layout and presentations to UX and digital—gets developed through Illustrator before it goes anywhere else,” Rakosi says.
Beacon
When it comes to designing ebooks and lead magnets, Andrew Brockenbush of Beefy Marketing recommends Beacon:
“We used to have a long process of content research, creation, design, revisions, etc. Using Beacon, that has now been streamlined to allow anyone on our team to design a lead magnet for our clients.”
“Beacon has well-designed templates to choose from, you can customize colors, layout, etc., and it makes it way easier for our copywriters to put together the entire lead magnet. This speeds up the launch process and saves us money,” Brockenbush says.
Rocketium
Another option for designing and creating videos quickly and easily is Rocketium, recommended by Jorge Sheffy of Loclweb.
“I can take a blog post I wrote and turn it into a nice video that looks good and doesn’t take a lot of time to create. It has been a great tool to easily create quick videos cheaply,” Sheffy says.
Design Pickle
If you don’t have the resources to hire a full-time designer but need some help with design work, Megan Mosley of Referral Rock recommends Design Pickle.
“Before Design Pickle, we relied on a few people (including me) to handle all the images, infographics, and design elements. As you can assume, that took a ton of time, and we lacked consistency with our content as a whole.”
“By using Design Pickle, we have gained consistency and our time back because we now have a personal designer to help us achieve our vision. We are able to focus on our bigger tasks and hone in on the things we’re actually good at,” Mosley says.
UXPin
“Our agency is entirely remote, so UXPin being cloud-based is extremely important for our team to collaborate,” says Dustin Drees of Market 8. “We’re able to coordinate between strategy, design, and development—along with our client—in one tool.”
“Where we really love and make great use out of UXPin is with the Design System Libraries.”
“We have created many library elements of layouts that are typically used on our client’s websites so that we can quickly wireframe and design and stay consistent with the HubSpot modules our development team has created for our clients,” Drees says.
Databox
Using the tools above, you can create beautiful blog graphics, lead magnets, websites, videos, and more, and then you can measure and share the performance of those assets in beautiful reports using Databox.
Databox is a data-visualization tool that lets you build reports—like the HubSpot CRM dashboard above—with data from 70+ tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, MailChimp, and Facebook. Build your own custom reports, or take advantage of our Template Directory of more than 200+ pre-built dashboards.
You don’t need to spend hours or days every month building reports for your boss or clients. Instead, just set up your automated dashboard once to access and share real-time reports anytime.
Want to see how easy it is for yourself? Take a test drive by signing up for our free-forever plan.
Adobe Creative Cloud
“Our favorite design tool is the whole Adobe package,” says Judit Font Artigas of QU24. “Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop are essential, and we use After Effects to make motion graphics and Premiere Pro for video editing. Without these tools, it would be very difficult to perform our work effectively and with agility.”
LyntonWeb’s Rob Walz agrees: “Adobe’s apps are vital to our design process and used daily. Whether it’s Photoshop and Illustrator for designing mockups, InDesign for ebooks, or Premier Pro for editing a video, we are constantly using the Creative Cloud apps.”
“Without Creative Cloud, we’d be stuck with a quill and ink,” says Ian Blake of Squaredot. “It is the key tool we use in all of our designs.”
Wideo
Another option for designing and creating videos quickly and easily is Wideo, recommended by Best Company’s McCall Robison:
“Wideo helps businesses create animated videos—rather than live-action—videos. It can be a great way to create lower-budget videos that are just as effective—if not more—for certain topics.”
Sketch
“Sketch makes designing websites faster than any other tool I’ve used,” says Dave Meier of Hidden Depth. “It also allows me to export files in multiple formats, which makes building retina-friendly websites easier.”
Jon Eichler of Adhere Creative also recommends Sketch: “It lets me keep all of my page designs for one site in one file so I can always tell if I am keeping my designs consistent. It also allows for reusing different elements within a design using a function called ‘Symbols,’ which really speeds up my design process.”
And Andrew Vinas of T3 recommends Sketch because it lets him “create mockups fast.”
InVision
“InVision would rank as a critically important design tool for us because it allows us to demonstrate our design work with interactivity,” says Tim Hamilton of Praxent.
“Without interactivity, clients have to rely on their imaginations, which reduces the quality and comprehensiveness of their feedback and can lead a to costly misunderstanding of scope,” Hamilton says.
Trevor Hatfield of Inturact also recommends InVision: “It helps us map out user flows, onboarding processes, design changes, and conversion optimization adjustments, as well as create complete product mockups before ever touching the code.”
Pixlr
Need to quickly crop an image, or apply a filter? With simple image editing tasks, you don’t need to waste time and money with Photoshop. There are plenty of free, browser-based tools that will get the job done just as well, and our favourite is Pixlr. You can create a new image, upload one from your desktop, or grab one directly from a URL. And the tool even includes some mid-level features you’d expect from paid software, such as fill, crop, blur and smudge.
Movavi Business Suite
Movavi Business Suite is a great video editing software for beginners and professionals. It takes just a few minutes to record and edit with this video ad maker. Movavi Business Suite lets you add audio and commentary, include screen recordings, and choose from more than 200 effects and editing tools. It’s a comprehensive media editing platform that lets you create and convert videos, record your screen, and a whole lot more.
Key Features:
- Built-in image, video, and music libraries
- Free and paid courses to learn the software
- No subscription fees; just pay for the lifetime license
Make Web Video
Don’t let the website fool you; Make Web Video is on our list of the top video ad makers for a reason. For starters, creating video ads on the platform is easy. Make Web Video includes Adobe After Effects templates so you don’t need any video production knowledge to create a great video ad. It also offers promo video templates!
Key Features:
- User-friendly video editor
- Choose from several video templates
- Workflow is completely cloud-based
Magisto
Magisto is an online video ad maker that offers ready-to-use video templates to help you turn your photos and video clips into a gorgeous video ad in just a few clicks. Magisto doesn’t offer a free plan and charges for many of its functions like adding elements from the media library to choosing a video style.
Key Features:
- Easy to use smart video editor
- Tons of video ad templates
- Share to YouTube or Instagram with a single click
- Custom branding, graphics, effects, and captions
Conclusion
So, there you have it. These design tools have been handpicked from the best source which can e suited to any kind of niche. Get started with these best design tools for advertising your products and services.
Both paid and free video ad makers offer the features and tools you need to create brilliant video ads that will motivate your target audience to convert. No matter the type of video you want to create, it’s important to put your brand, products, and services in the best light. Any of our picks for the top video ad makers can help you do that. Get started with one of these video ad makers today to increase the time your audience spends on your page, build trust, increase conversions and sales, and more.