Discover several apps that will not only save you time, but will raise your productivity level(s). Establish a well-organized posting and website expansion plan through this list of tools.
~ SYNOPSIS ~
CONTENT CREATION
~ Canva ~
This is a graphic design platform that is astoundingly easy to use. Most of the features on this site are free, but there are subscription options for professional users/large organizations known as "Canva Pro'' and "Canva for Enterprise." There are a variety of templates for people to work with. Presentations, social media, video, gifts, marketing, and office are just a few of the categories they accommodate. So whether you are in the logo making business, print products, or take advantage of apps in any capacity, Canva is a great resource to have in your arsenal.
An example of this concept in action would be to imagine overviewing a chess board with the logo placed in one of the spaces to seem as if it is a piece of the game in play. To bring this to life, all you would have to do is download the free Unsplash image and your logo into Canva, choose the correct size template, upload both visuals, adjust the size of your logo to fit the space, and place it towards the middle of the board so it is the first thing your audience sees.
If you would like to focus on Instagram for the upcoming month, you can go into your Canva account, choose their Instagram post template, and create 30 blank canvases. My boyfriend and I enforced this tactic by coming up with a conception pattern to follow. For us that meant dividing the posts into three categories: educational/inspirational, entertaining, and promotional. So for ten of the posts we planned to teach our followers how to use the game for different purposes or possible gift combinations, the other ten would be there to show them how exciting it is to play with their friends/family members, and the last ten are to push sales.
Every element my boyfriend and I picked out for our website was to accentuate the unanimity of the brand kit that we had come up with beforehand. This is evident in our choice to keep the majority of the headings seen throughout our site as the same font we had used for our logo. Every page also mirrors the same shades that we had chosen for our color palette: purple, black, white, and green. For the icon, and similar element, aspect of our site we picked triangles. To keep the flow going we thought it would be a nice idea to make some of the frames outlining the pictures on our website into the shape of a triangle as well.
The second option would occur in that case that you are unable to find what you are searching for in Unsplash. Canva actually has its own gallery for you to browse through. Unsplash specializes in aesthetically pleasing images which a business owner may decide are best used for their social media platforms, whereas Canva supplies a gallery that may be deemed as the more suitable assortment to be utilized on a professional website. Plenty of these photos are for free, but there is a selection that demands premium access through "Canva Pro."
AESTHETICS
~ Unsplash ~
This website supplies over 3 million aesthetically pleasing photos. Photographers all over the world upload these images, free of charge, for users to download. The site offers categories to choose from for a quick find or you can type key words into the search bar if you are looking for something more specific. They offer a large array of pictures from food to gorgeous scenery shots. Unsplash also provides informative blogs that touch on topics about social media, photography equipment, and how their partnerships can benefit you.
At this point, we had the entire summer to figure out some way to let people know about the launch of our company without the use of a giant marketing budget nor the actual product itself. The apps we chose to begin with were Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest which all heavily focused on picture based content. The theme of our company revolved around family game nights and music, so I figured the best way to go about it would be to use attraction marketing through photos associated with those subjects.
My boyfriend and I are very creative people and I wanted our website to reflect that. Now that we had the social media aspect of our business covered, it was time to utilize Unsplash for the visual appeal of our website. My boyfriend and I are very creative people and I wanted our website to reflect that. Our aspiration was to make the website for our card games, and other merchandise, a fun space that captivated the interest of all ages ranging from adults to children.
Secondly, for the blog and product sections of our site I imagined coupling the words with photos that would serve as the visual representation of the subject matter. For example, we have developed a series of alternative rules to "You Better Sing It" for adults who enjoy playing drinking games. For this particular page, I went into Unsplash to find plenty of appropriate photos that most closely related to this topic without sacrificing the integrity and professionalism of our brand look.
ORGANIZATION
~ Planoly ~
This is a smart app for businesses to consider if they are having a difficult time coordinating multiple social media platforms. Planoly accommodates posts created for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Even though Canva offers a content calendar for their users, Planoly is the better choice in the sense that it can automatically upload pre-made content, with captions and hashtags included, for you.
When I searched for tools that could help people save time in the social media industry, Planoly was one of the first websites to pop up. I decided to participate in their seven day free trial, connected the Instagram and Pinterest accounts for my card game business, and started uploading some of my pending content for the following week. Each piece of content was published at exactly the time I had scheduled during peak business hours with all of the corresponding messaging properly attached.
For website designers, Planoly can be a game changer by way of regularly informing their audience of status updates. There are a couple different scenarios of why you would want to put this into practice. The first could be if you were planning to run a holiday sale strictly on your website. To let your followers know in advance when the sale will be, you can create festive content, upload it into Planoly, and then choose the dates you wish to publish the material on your platforms.
This goal could be attained by generating content that either advertises a free resource the entrepreneur has developed for their audience or by giving users a link that will connect them straight to the dropbox section of the website. Planoly can be an asset in this case by allowing you to see just how often, and during which time frame, you should be putting forth this kind of material. Each of these methods will allow you to successfully coincide everything you produce with your long-term marketing/advertising strategy.
I discovered Unsplash when I became a business owner. The reason why I actually started to incorporate Unsplash into my business plan was because I did not have the product that I was in the process of developing in my possession just yet, but I knew I had to establish my social media platforms with something. To explain, my boyfriend and I came with this card game called "You Better Sing It" in 2020 as we were quarantining together. When we decided to send off our designs to the manufacturing facility for the game to be produced, we were told that it would take up to two months before it would be completed.
I quickly came up with a list of key words to type into Unsplash that would generate the kind of visuals I was searching for and I was not disappointed. What I found were beautiful images of kids playing together, an assortment of board game pieces, musical instruments, and of people singing. I curated captions and hashtags for each of these pictures to serve as content fillers for all of our platforms which began to attract niche users directly to our company website. Now that we had the social media aspect of our business covered, it was time to utilize Unsplash for the visual appeal of our website.
First, I decided to tackle the backdrop. I knew I wanted to stay far away from plain, solid-colored, backgrounds simply because they felt incredibly boring to me. The great thing about Unsplash is that you can type into the search bar any color name that you wish to find and a seemingly endless gallery of backgrounds/ wallpapers will pop up. Texturized, blurred, and patterned graphics are available to set your website backdrop apart from the millions of others that are currently accessible within the online marketplace.
Finally, once you have all of the necessary information and photography inserted into your website, you may find that there are a ton of empty spaces that could be filled in. This is where the aesthetic collections on Unsplash are really beneficial. A few of the ways I exploited this side of the app was by making the photos into stickers, having them be the heading for a couple of our landing pages, and allowing them to serve as inspiration for us to recreate.
I came across Canva when I was trying to find a substitute for Adobe Illustrator. Now that I had found content fillers for my social media platforms on Unsplash, I needed to think about how to produce material that would educate our audience and associate these random images with our brand. At this point in our business we had already come up with a logo that we felt fit the essence of our company. I decided that it would be a good idea to put our logo on each of the photos in unique positions.
To manage your business effectively, you also need to be able to "batch," or create a bunch, of content in one sitting. This is notably important for your media platforms if you have a small team of associates or employees who are trying to coordinate multiple platforms at the same time. Canva makes this overwhelming task an effortless one. The list of templates Canva offers specifically for social media include: Instagram posts (for stories, ads, and animated posts), Facebook posts (for covers, ads, events, videos, stories, shops logos), WhatsApp profile status, TikTok videos, YouTube (thumbnails, channel art, and intros), Twitter posts, Pinterest pins, and LinkedIn banners.
None of this is worth the effort if you do not direct your viewers eyes to your website. Anything you put out into the world that is supposed to represent your business should have the same “look.” This allows your audience to quickly identify and determine that what they are viewing is a part of your distinct organization. For those reasons, it is imperative that you keep your brand design consistent. Canva reinforces this crucial point by offering a brand kit and mood board templates. This brand kit is a place where you can go to create, or insert, your color scheme, logo design, designated font list, and icons/stickers.
Another tool Canva grants users is to help them find specific color codes. There are two ways you could go about this notion. Let’s say you found a picture in Unsplash that could potentially fit within your website somewhere, but you want to be sure it is as close to your color scheme as possible. First, upload the photo onto the Canva template you wish to work on, then click on the color wheel button towards the upper left corner of the site. Once that menu pops up, scroll down to the bottom and you will see a broken down list notating the "name/code" of every shade of color present within that particular photograph.
Planoly is a site that allows users to plan and develop a publishing schedule for their content. Utilizing this site supports a content creator’s effort in maintaining their social media and overall marketing strategy. This tool administers profile analytics to subscribers that they can later study and incorporate into their business model. The site has contributed some great marketing tips within their blogs/articles. Planoly has also sponsored media case studies that are worth a read.
I came into contact with Planoly when I became the head social media manager for an entertainment company. Due to the fact that it was a brand new organization, they were expecting me to publish content quite often. I had to set time aside every single day out of my week to create a post for each of their business platforms, along with the material I was producing for my own company, which very quickly became an overwhelming job for me to successfully accomplish.
The app proved to be a credible resource, so I invested in the cheapest package that would allow me to automatically upload 30 posts a month for the entertainment company and an unlimited amount for my card game business. The process became an even smoother transition when I implemented the idea of batching three months worth of content in Canva. Not only did I have filler images from Unsplash and custom material that I had previously made in Canva, but now I had a way of posting it all hands free.
Another circumstance may involve a blogger wanting to promote their latest article. Based on their profile analytics and research they would choose the social media platform(s) which hold the followers who could relate to, or appreciate, this specific article the most. Once that has been established, they can determine the times in which their potential readers would be logged onto his or her account and assign that hour in Planoly. A business owner may also want to focus on raising the number of emails they capture.
"When my GIRL puts her mind to something, trust me she gets it done. Our website would be in shambles if it wasn't for her."
G. BIGGS | STUDIO 135
"Not only did Victoria help me create my company's main social media platform, but she assisted in developing & sustaining an aesthetically pleasing overall look."
K. Pinson | hair goddess
"I had no clue how to even set up an Instagram account let alone a website, Victoria's creativity blew me away."
T. | music photography
"My girl, ~vicqwah,~ is unbelievable, she Took my business ideas & made them look dope in a professional way."
E. Pinson | North Oconee Animal Dr.
"Victoria's thoughtfulness did not go unnoticed. The site she made for my animal hospital blew me away."
Sweet Compliments From Kind People
Tips & Tricks
FAQS
Unsure where to start, don't know how to use my templates, etc. ?
Sharpen your pencils, there are notes to be written !
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