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One of the most challenging marketing tasks for many small business owners is creating attractive graphics to promote their businesses.
A fresh, clean look can help you develop a unique brand, and will give your business a competitive advantage.
Unfortunately, most people aren’t graphic designers, and high-end graphics tools are often difficult to learn and use effectively. But fear not, fellow marketers! Below are three online tools that can help you create stunning marketing visuals.
Find Professional Photos With stock.xchng
A picture is worth a thousand words, and a great marketing photo can cost you hundreds of dollars.
There are many stock image websites across the web that give you access to millions of professional photos for a fee. One of these websites is stock.xchng, and it’s willing to give you access to its huge library of images for free.
You heard that right, for free. Stock.xchng (http://www.sxc.hu/) is one of my favorite places to get the creative juices flowing when designing ads, fliers, and other marketing collateral. With nearly 400,000 unique images, they have plenty of pictures to get you started in the design process. Get creative with your image selection, and try to find pictures that reflect the colors, mood, and attitude of your brand.
Edit Pictures With Picnik
Now that you’ve selected some all-star pictures, it’s time to add text and effects to really make them pop. Many advanced graphic artists may tell you to get Photoshop or GIMP, but these programs can be expensive (though GIMP is free), difficult to learn, and require some serious computing power.
Picnik is a free, lightweight alternative to help you perform basic edits to any of your images. The program lets you adjust colors, crop images, add text and create some other neat effects. Picnik is completely web-based, so you can edit your images virtually anywhere.
If you need some more functionality, Photoshop Express Editor has some more robust tools, and it’s another freebie.
Create Great Marketing Pieces With HP
If you’ve ever tried creating a marketing flyer or brochure from scratch, you probably know how utterly frustrating this can be.
To add insult to injury, many of the free templates that come standard with Microsoft Office look like they were designed by colorblind time travelers from the 1980s.
Fortunately, Hewlett-Packard (HP) has recognized this issue and created the Creative Studio for small business owners. This flashy site is loaded with free marketing templates in Microsoft Word format, including business cards, fliers, calendars, and more.
They cover some popular niches including real estate and restaurants, but also include some generic templates for more diverse businesses.
Having the right design tools at your disposal is only half the battle. You’ll still need to muster up some creativity to craft a solid advertising message, and spend some time tweaking each item you create.
For incredible creative inspiration, check out the new book “Visual Marketing” by legendary small business expert Anita Campbell. It offers 99 creative marketing examples from real small businesses across the country.
Get Busy Media is a blog and resource center that helps small businesses and entrepreneurs build smarter companies. For more information on how to jump-start your small business marketing, please visit www.getbusymedia.com or connect with us on Twitter, @GetBusyMedia.
