11 Visual Storytelling Tools and How They’ll Help Your Content Marketing

Storytelling and visuals are two of the most powerful tools content marketers have. Both of these attributes can help get ideas across more effectively and increase engagement. Combining these two elements—well, that’s a recipe for success.

How can marketers go about creating a successful visual story? Luckily, there are plenty of tools available to help you take a marketing yarn and weave it into a beautiful visual. Here are 11 of the top software programs, websites, and more for creating your visual content marketing stories.

1. Ceros

Ceros is a design platform that makes it easy for marketers—or anyone, really—to create infographics, e-books, and websites without the need for coding knowledge. It enables you to create aesthetically pleasing designs easily, animate them, and input features like social media plug-ins and pop-ups. It also includes access to a catalog of fonts and icons.

Here’s an example of an animated infographic created by Fitbit using Ceros. Infographics are popular these days, and they’re very effective pieces of content. The animation in this one, though, helps it stand out from the crowd and makes it more engaging.

2. Infogr.am

Infographics are a fantastic way to organize information visually. They make text easy to digest and tend to get shared a lot on social media. Infogr.am is a tool that makes designing your own infographics a simple process. You can also make cool charts and maps by using one of Infogr.am’s themes.

National Geographic is great at creating interactive maps that make information easy and fun to look at. Here’s an example of a map of U.S. states and their ecological footprints. You could easily create something similar with Infogr.am.

3. Uberflip

Uberflip helps content marketers create engaging content and keep it all organized. It features tools for creating interactive flipbooks, as well as an attractive home for all your content. Uberflip also includes tools for adding in things like calls to action and social media buttons. There’s even a place where marketers can manage all their content and receive insights about it.

Dyn, a company that offers internet management services to businesses, has an example of a great content page on its website. It looks good visually and has content organized in an easy-to-use way.

4. Loupe

If you’ve got a bunch of photos from a company event or some other function and want to share them with your customers, try using Loupe to help you present them in an interesting way. Loupe lets you make a collage of your photos in a custom shape, send them in a card, or even look for photos in a Where’s Waldo-inspired game.

Here’s an example made with Loupe of the Apple logo made up of a collage of photos. Sharing your photos in a creative way like this can make your content more interesting and help develop a strong brand identity.

5. Aviary

If you really want to make your photos stand out, try using Aviary. This site or app features a bunch of different filters and other photo-editing options that’ll make your pictures stand out among all the photos that are using Instagram filters. It’s easy to edit your photos, save them to Adobe Creative Cloud, and post them to social media from the app.

Using high-quality photos on your website’s homepage can grab visitors’ attention, make your site look more professional, and encourage people to stay there longer. Large background photos, especially those featuring people’s faces, are known to pique people’s interest. That’s what Doc MJ did with its site, resulting in a clean, professional website that reflects the company’s legitimacy.

6. Canva

Canva is another one-stop shop that helps marketers easily create beautiful designs. The program allows you to drag and drop features and use templates to create posters, graphics for social media, and other content. It gives you access to images, fonts, icons, and photo filters, so you don’t have to go looking for stuff to add into your design.

Because visual content performs so well on social media, being able to create it is crucial for marketers. This is an example of the type of visual content you could create for social media with Canva.

Visuals and storytelling are two of a marketer's biggest assets.
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7. Prezi

If you’re looking for a simple way to create gorgeous presentations, you should check out Prezi. The company offers a number of sleek templates to which you can add text, images, audio and more. You can then easily share and present your creation. You could use Prezi for your next big meeting or try using it to create an interactive video for your website.

Here’s an exciting example of using Prezi to explain something exciting. This presentation by Red Bull explains why Felix Baumgartner was attempting the world’s biggest ever free fall.

8. WordArt

WordArt is more or less what it sounds like. It’s a website that lets you make art out of words. All you have to do is copy and paste words from, say, your latest blog posts and choose a shape, and you’ll get a cool-looking shape made up of the words you uploaded. You could use this to visually sum up a piece of text, but there’s another benefit: The words used most often appear largest, which can give you some helpful hints when optimizing for search engines.

Here’s an example of a visual made with WordArt that features the words “Michael Jordan,” “basket,” and “NBA.” You might have guessed this already, but it’s also shaped like a basketball.

9. Visage

If you want to easily design your own graphics and still have the possibility of working with a graphic designer, you might want to try out Visage. This company offers an easy-to-use tool that allows a team to collaboratively design and edit visual content. The company also has graphic designers on staff that you can work with on your projects.

Here’s a cool infographic like the ones Visage helps design. It looks at the Beatles and breaks down stats like their biggest hits, who wrote most of their songs, and what words they include most often in their lyrics.

10. Tiff

If you’re having trouble figuring out what font to use, Tiff may be able to help. This tool lets you overlay two fonts over each other, so you can easily spot the differences. You can choose which fonts and letters to compare, as well as whether or not the letters are capitalized. Typography is an important visual aspect of any website, so make sure you take the time to get it right.

Tomas Bata University in Zlín used fonts creatively on its website to create a certain aesthetic, as well as an interesting and interactive graphic experience for its site visitors.

11. Social Media Resizer

This tool provides a simple but very necessary service for marketers. It resizes your photos for you, so they’re optimized based on the requirements of different social media sites. If the images you use on social media don’t look good, they won’t be nearly as effective. Social Media Resizer takes care of any image size issues for you.

Twix, the famous candy bar brand, is a pro at using visuals on its social media channels. Here’s an example of an image the brand posted on Facebook that looks professional and visually striking.

Visuals and storytelling are two of the biggest assets marketers have. Taking advantage of the various tools that are available to help you create visual stories can make a huge difference for your marketing campaigns. Try out these 11 examples, and feel free to scour the internet for more helpful resources.

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