Does it feel like you’re working a 25 hour day yet you’re still drowning in the ocean that is online marketing?
As a Marketing Team of One you need to perform the same tasks that any ultimate inbound marketing team is capable of executing.
This can be rather daunting. You’re already super busy arranging trade shows, lunch & learns, preparing press releases and managing social media. Now, as your web presence quickly becomes the centre of your business universe, you need to become a content marketing superhero!
There’s no doubt, creating a powerful online presence is going to require time, energy, and resources.
So to create remarkable content, like any superhero, you’re going to need some superpowers. Okay, I can’t give you superpowers, however I can recommend some tools for your utility belt.
Here are 10 of my favourite content creation tools and apps for the marketing team of one.
1. Awesome Screenshot
This Chrome extension allows you to capture either the visible part of a page, a selected area, the entire page or import a local image. Once you’ve captured the image you can crop it, annotate it with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines and text. And when you’re done print or save it to your desktop or Google Drive. I use Awesome Screenshot daily for blogs, presentations and eBooks.
2. PicMonkey
Don’t have the budget for Photoshop? Feeling a bit limited by the editing capabilities of the tools you’re using? PicMonkey is a really cool tool for pimping your images. My little monsters (couldn’t find any Hobbits) had their picture enhanced to bring out their colour, a border added to frame them and a pin added to keep their picture on my page. With PicMonkey you don’t need to download anything and the whole photo editing process is easy and intuitive. Giving you more time to create remarkable content instead of spending it creating images for your post!
3. Compfight
Compfight is a search tool that uses the Flickr API to find images. If you spend a lot of time searching for Creative Commons images and aren’t getting the results you want, give Compfight a try. Firstly, it does an excellent job of getting some of the best images to the top of your search results and secondly it automatically generates HTML code for the correct content attribution that you can embed in your website. That way you don’t have to worry about making sure you give the original author proper credit.
4. Infogr.am
Want to create your own infographics? Infogr.am is easy to use and helps speed up the process of creating infographics. Build up your infographic by adding graphs, maps, pictures, text and even video. Double click on an element to edit text or add data using an excel like tool. Their infographics are responsive with mobile devices and they offer compatibility with Microsoft Excel through Infogram Charts.
5. Haiku Deck
Notice how presentations are finally becoming more exciting and beautiful? You actually look forward to seeing the next slide instead of being bored to death. Well Haiku Deck helps you create those exciting, beautiful and image rich slides. It’s a great tool for when you need simple layouts, big images, and access to font and typography help. There are limitations to what you can do with Haiku, so it may not be ideal for those executive presentations but if you’re creating SlideShares and exciting presentations this is a great tool.
6. Canva
Canva is awesome! Really, it is. They offer a library of pre-made templates that you can use to quickly create social media covers, banners, blog graphics, presentations and most recently real-estate flyers. Use one of their designs or manipulate it by adding your own imagery. Once you get the hang of it you’ll have no trouble pumping out imagery for FaceBook, Pinterest, Twitter and your other social media platforms. Need a unique image for a blog post, no problem, use Canva to create one in a matter of minutes.
7. Powtoon
This is a new one for me! I’ve been talking to the founder of Pace4Life about creating some animated explainer videos. Getting started has been really easy and we seem to be on the road to creating some professional looking animated videos explaining the process of donating and re-using pace makers.
8. PlaceIt.net
PlaceIt is a simple service that allows you to upload your screen shots and videos to be inserted into screens of various devices. If you have an application and want to put it on a device in a real-life looking environment, then PlaceIt is your tool. They provide pictures of the latest devices and backgrounds, you upload your screenshot, they process it and place it onto the device and presto, you have some excellent marketing collateral!
9. ColorZilla
This little tool is a Chrome extension that offers a Color Picker, Eye Dropper, Gradient Generator and some other additional colour tools. Use it to quickly get a colour reading from any point in your browser. If you like you can adjust the colour according to your needs and then, because it provides the RGB and HEX colours, use the colour in whatever application you’re working on. It also has a palette history so you can quickly refer back to the colours you’ve selected in the past.
10. Pictaculous
Do you ever find yourself getting frustrated with matching colours between images and text. You want to make sure your images, graphics, and font colours all come together properly and everything matches up. The thing is it’s often difficult using something like ColorZilla to find the exact shade you’re looking for in an image or picture. That’s where Pictaculous comes in. All you need to do is upload an image or photo to get instant recommendations for a colour palette, including each colours HEX code.
And these are only a few of the tools out there that can help you create remarkable content. What apps and tools are you using to make your keep you afloat in the content creation ocean?