There are many apps at your disposal to create the best advertisement of your company. These apps are designed for the beginner to advance in their manipulation of so many new programs, allowing easy access to advanced amateurs.
There are all sorts of apps on the market to make creating advertising easier. These apps allow for new users and professionals alike to get access to the most advanced design and editing techniques and options available.
Canva
Canva has emerged as one of the most impressive tools for small business owners and entrepreneurs. If you’ve never fancied yourself a designer and don’t have Photoshop skills, this is the tool for you!
Need to create an image for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or Google+? Canva has pre-designed graphics that allow for complete customization in a clean, drag and drop environment.
From the design-selector menu, you can choose your layout, search for images, purchase stock photos, add effects to your image, and customize the look and feel to match your brand color palette and fonts.
A great example of matching every aspect of your brand look and feel is Peg Fitzpatrick. Peg uses her color palette in every one of her designs, creating a consistent experience for her fans and followers.
PiktoChart
With PiktoChart, making your own Infographics has never been easier. But they don’t just stop there. This free web app has over 100 customizable themes for Infographics, reports, banners and presentations.
Simply pick your template and within minutes you’re editing and publishing your design.
PiktoChart’s intuitive editing tools give you flexibility and control over every aspect of your project.
From text to color scheme, you can match your branding to a pre-designed template.
QuotesCover
Want a quick and easy way to create beautiful quote graphics? QuotesCover is your tool!
With QuotesCover, you can design a visual representation of personal or famous quotes in a snap.
Here’s how it works – add your quote, choose your layout, add a photo or choose a plain background , choose the color and font and you’re voila – you’re done!
Whether you need an image for Facebook or want to design a new Google+ cover, it can all be done as easy as 1,2, 3.
Pixlr
If you’re looking for a robust desktop design tool, then Pixlr is the one for you.
The interface, very similar to Photoshop, allows you to choose your image, add effects, overlays, filters, text and borders to convert a photo from boring to beautiful.
Whether you want to create an image from scratch or build off a stock or pre-designed template, Pixlr gives you the flexibility to capture your visual style.
Pixlr can also work as a Chrome extension within your browser, giving you the freedom to move back and forth from online to offline.
Adobe Spark (Web, iOS, Android)
Adobe is the biggest name in graphic design, so it’s no surprise they have an app designed for making social media and web graphics. Adobe Spark (or Adobe Spark Post on mobile for the tools you want) isn’t as well known as Photoshop or Illustrator, but it’s better for most people. And it’s free to get started.
As I write this, Spark claims to have more than 34,000 templates for you to work from. A good chunk of them are Premium templates, only available to subscribers, but there are still thousands available for free. (To me, it looks like it’s a roughly 50/50 split between free and Premium).
Search isn’t as good with Spark as it is with Canva. The simplest way to get started is to select the kind of post you want to make from the home screen, then use the Templates search in the left sidebar to find the one you want, rather than to just search everything from the home screen. You can also create your own design using the Icons, Design Assets, and Backgrounds tabs in the sidebar, and, of course, adding your own photos (or pulling them from Pixabay) and text with the appropriate tools.
One great feature of Spark is how easy it is to resize and reformat your posts for different social media platforms. In the right sidebar, click Resize, and then select the different post style or design. Spark will then make a best guess at reformatting everything to fit. It normally does a pretty good job, and it should only take you a few seconds with the admittedly lovely-to-work-with editor to fix any quirks.
Spark is an excellent standalone editor, but it’s hard to overlook its integration with the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite. If you plan to scale your business to the point where you need to use (and pay for) Adobe’s more powerful tools, Spark is the way to go. You can create libraries (in the Libraries tab of the sidebar) that are available across all your Adobe apps, pull in photos from Lightroom, and use Adobe Stock images.
Beyond the Post (graphic) design type, Spark also provides two other project types: Pages and Videos (available as separate apps on iOS). With Pages, you can build a simple, sleek web page that you can then share via a direct link. Videos is just what it sounds like: a basic video editing app that works as smoothly as Spark’s graphic design tool. You can even start with a template that will help guide you through ideal video structures for presentations, ads, and more.
The main downside of Spark’s free plan is that Adobe adds a logo to the bottom corner of your design. If you click on this logo, it will say Remove Once, but, after lots of testing, the logo appears to be removable in all designs—you’ll just have to deal with that upgrade pop-up each time.
Adobe Spark Price: Free for basic features; from $9.99/mo for premium features, such as logo upload and placement, branded templates and tools. (These premium features also come with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, starting with the $19.99/mo plan.)
Desygner (Web, iOS, Android)
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Desygner has some of the most advanced features of any of the apps we tested—while still being simple to use. If you don’t want to go the template route (although it does have thousands of great templates to work from), additional features like a free-drawing pen tool and the ability to import from PDF, PSD, and SVG files give you a lot more creative freedom.
Take that pen tool: with a project open, click Drawing and then Pen. Now, click and drag to draw a free-form line into any shape you want. Handy, right? Well, click on the shape you just drew, and you get some additional, super-powerful options in the top menu bar. You can click Convert to Image Box to create a frame that you can add an image to, or Opacity, Fill Color, Stroke Color, or Stroke to control how it looks. And you have all the same options with the other, shaped drawing tools and the Path tool, which is basically just the pen tool but you click to draw straight lines.
If you go to a lot of effort to make an Instagram post, you want to be able to use the same elements on Facebook. Click the resize button at the bottom of the screen, and select a new size. Desygner will convert your canvas to the new size—but as a new Page in the same document. This means you can work on one design and quickly replicate it for other platforms.
While working on your own designs like this is absolutely more time-consuming than working from templates (which, again, Desygner has thousands of), it does mean your social media graphics are going to be unique. There’s a certain sameness to a lot of the default templates in every app, and you’ll begin to spot them in your social media feeds. Desygner helps you stand out.
Desygner Price: Free; from $9.95 for more templates and assets, as well as features like saving your own designs as templates.
Take advantage of social media
Create a Facebook page for your business
Make sure to include your phone number, address, email address, opening times – essential contact info as well as a company overview. If you’re working on your website, your Facebook page makes a good interim option. You can also use your Facebook page to drive direct sales to your website.
Set up a Twitter profile
Use your Twitter profile to tweet about business news, products, events and anything relevant to your industry that your customers would find interesting.
Connect with other businesses and local networking groups via LinkedIn
If you are B2B – LinkedIn is the best place to approach employees who have a say in key business decisions.
Set up an Instagram page
Instagram is an effective channel if you’re in an industry that can produce visually appealing images and/or videos.
Conclusion
There are tons of free business apps to help you do all kinds of things, but it can be hard to manage them all. Apps are designed for the beginner to the expert user, so you have access to everything.