Storytelling and visuals are two of the most powerful tools content marketers have. Both 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 eight visual storytelling tools we love for weaving visual content into the content marketing mix.
1. Canva
Canva is the visual content and storytelling tool we use most often at Convince & Convert. It empowers marketers to easily create beautiful designs and animations without any technical or design expertise. We use it for creating blog graphics (like the one above), infographics, social media graphics and more.
For important templates, I like to work with a graphic designer or team (we use Lightboard.io, big fans! hi Devin & Heather 
) to come up with beautiful, functional templates in Canva that we can use over and over again.
Here’s a peek into our Canva account at Convince & Convert. We use Canva to create blog graphics, social media graphics, infographics and more.
Canva even 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, although I use iStock to access a wider selection of photos and illustrations.
Because visual content performs so well on social media, being able to create it is crucial for marketers. Here’s are a few examples of the type of visual content you can create for social media with Canva.
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2. Ceros
Ceros is an interactive content 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 interactive content created in Ceros: The State of Hiring in the COVID Economy.
With Ceros, the team at 24 Seven was able to take research on hiring and turn it into an interactive report. Study after study shows that interactive content engages users more than static content, and with a solution like Ceros, you can take your static research or copy-based content and insert it into one of their templates for a more engaging user experience.
3. Prezi
If you’re looking for an amazing way to create gorgeous, engaging presentations for webinars, meetings, and other events 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.
We’re big fans of Prezi here at Convince & Convert, and last year, Jay Baer presented a webinar (created in Prezi) on “How to Unsuck Your B2B Webinars” with Brian Fanzo and our friends at Prezi. If you’re creating webinars, you need to check it out.
Watch “How to Unsuck Your B2B Webinars” and see Prezi in action now.
4. Infogram
Infographics are a fantastic way to organize information visually. Users love them. They make text easy to digest and tend to get shared a lot on social media.
Infogram is a tool that makes designing your own interactive infographics a simple process. You can also make cool charts and maps by using one of Infogram’s themes.
Here’s an example of an interactive infographic about the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill — it takes a look at what has happened in the ten years since the spill.
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5. Uberflip
Uberflip helps content marketers create engaging content and keep it all organized. It features tools for creating interactive flipbooks, infographics, white papers and more, 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
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 8 examples, and feel free to scour the internet for more helpful resources.
This post was originally written by Kayla Matthews in 2017 and updated by Megan Leap in 2021.
The post 8 Visual Storytelling Tools and How They’ll Help Your Content Marketing appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.
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