Visual content can increase sales by 80%. This statistic indicates how critical visual content is for the success of any marketing campaign. Therefore, if you want your social media marketing campaign to be a hit, you must create visual content and include it in your social media content strategy.
Without any real graphic design skills or a budget to hire a professional designer, creating social media graphics may seem impossible.
Luckily, you exist in an era where social media tools have evolved to the point where anyone can create stunning posts for their marketing campaigns with virtually no graphic designing skills and on a shoestring budget.
The Importance of Graphical Content on Social Media
Around 65% of people are visual learners. Which means they process visual content better than textual content. That means, including visual content in your social media marketing strategy can help you get your message across, leave an impact, and effectively engage your audience.
Buffer reports that tweets containing visual content are 150% more likely to get retweeted than only text-based tweets. Moreover, Facebook posts that include visual content garner higher engagement than regular posts.
If all of this isn’t enough to convince you of the importance of visual content in your social media strategy, here is a case study from content marketing giant HubSpot discussing how visual content increased their social engagement.
HubSpot took a fun approach towards increasing audience engagement and decided to create memes for their social media handles. Before you come at us with pitchforks and knives, memes have now evolved from a time-wasting medium of jokes to an important marketing tool.
The HubSpot team made the infamous “what people think I do/what I really do” meme for their sales and marketing teams. 
Both the memes performed better than you would expect. They managed to engage HubSpot’s audience and collectively accumulated more than 900 likes, 100+ comments, and a whopping 593 shares.
The reason for such massive engagement metrics was visual content, combined with a bit of creativity and lots of fun.
Best Tools for Creating Stunning Social Media Graphics: Our Top Picks
At this point, we are sure you are ready to include stunning graphics in your social media campaign. And we don’t want to leave you wandering on the internet looking for the best tool to put your amateur graphic design skills to the test.
So, here is a list of the best tools you can use to create stellar social media posts, even if you cannot design visual content to save your life and have zero graphic design budget.
Canva
Canva is hands-down the best graphic designing tool for beginners.
It is a freemium tool. Yes, that’s a word. We didn’t just make it up.
Being a freemium tool, it offers some of its features for free, while the more advanced features become accessible when you upgrade to pro. But even the free version of Canva is good enough to set your visual content strategy in motion.
It allows for the creation of platform-appropriate posts. That means you can create graphics within elongated frames for platforms like Pinterest and Instagram stories, wider ones for Facebook and Twitter, and square frames for your Instagram feed posts.
Conversational, a virtual receptionist agency, used Canva to maximize its social engagement, and Canva proudly talks about it in this case study.
This virtual receptionist agency needed a tool to supplement its social media strategy.
Once they started using Canva to create original visual content, they experienced a whopping 1100% increase in engagement on their social posts. No kidding!
If you are looking for a graphic design tool that’s easy to use, has diverse features, and you don’t mind creating a free account, Canva is for you.
Pablo by Buffer
Buffer has a suite of social media tools, as discussed in one of our previous articles. With Pablo, Buffer extends it expertise and helps social media marketers to create and schedule visual social content.
Pablo goes beyond Canva in helping people generate highly engaging visual content for their social media. It has over 600,000 images, more than 25 fonts, and a no-login feature, enabling you to create unique, eye-catching, and lead-generating social posts instantly!
Besides the no-login feature, another aspect of this intuitive and user-friendly tool that compelled us to make it a part of our list is its dimension readjustment option. Using Pablo, you can create a generic post and then readjust it to fit the unique dimensions of each of your social handles. This eliminates the need to create different posts for different platforms
Pablo allows free downloads, but another feature that earns it some brownie points is that it lets you share your visual content directly on the social platform of your choice. That’s Pablo 1-0 Canva.
Easel.ly
Easelly lets you create infographics easily. (Of course we had to!)
Since most people are visual learners, infographics are a great way to visualize important information and data sets and present them in a format that makes them easy to read, understand, and retain.
65% of brands use infographics for marketing. That means your competitors are most likely planning to include or have already designed an infographic. And now, with tools like Easelly, you can too!
Easelly helps you create highly engaging, compelling, and truly selling infographics for free! There are no catches. No hidden charges, or sneaky watermarks, or branding. That’s right. You can start working on your new visual content just by registering for a free account. And once your infographic is done, you can download it for free in multiple formats.
When designing your infographic using Easelly, you can choose from hundreds of professionally designed and customizable infographics templates
But wait. That’s just the cake. The icing on the cake is Easelly’s graphic support team.
Easelly gives you your own design team to reach out to and consult, discuss ideas, accept feedback, and get suggestions.
For example, you are designing an infographic on Skincare through Easelly. But you are stuck choosing a color palate. You can reach out to Easelly’s support team through email or live chat, get suggestions from professional designers on what colors to use and how, and proceed with confidence
Infogram
Since we are discussing tools that create infographics, let’s talk about Infogram, which tackles infographic designing and enables you to create maps and charts.
Truly a data visualization tool, Infogram has over 35 charts and several infographic templates to choose from. These charts and templates are fully customizable and create responsive graphics that help convert boring data into fun and engaging visual content that can generate leads and drive sales.
What makes Infogram better than its peers is its performance analysis feature. It tracks the performance of each content piece that you create using its resources. In this way, it helps you shape your visual content strategy with data-driven insights.
Giphy
Believe it or not, GIF marketing is a thing. It is still relatively new, so if you start capitalizing on it now, you can enjoy its benefits before everybody and their grandma starts using GIFs for marketing. And it becomes overused.
Breathing life into boring textual content and setting still visual content into motion, GIFs burst with the potential of enhancing your social engagement. When used smartly, they can take your social media campaign to newer heights.
Let’s explain the functionality of GIF for a marketing campaign with an example.
Say you are about to launch a new product for your fun and quirky skincare brand. You can generate prelaunch hype with a series of GIFs to intrigue your audience and set the stage for your new product.
Here’s how a series of GIFs can bring you closer to achieving your social objectives:
You can kick-off your campaign with “Are you tired of fighting your acne and seeing every product fail?” along with this GIF
This caption, along with the GIF, will engage people and make them want to know more.
Next, you post this GIF with the caption, “Do you want to get rid of your acne, for good?”:
At this point, your target audience, i.e., people struggling with acne, will be hooked to your social handle.
You can continue with yet another post, the final post before the official product reveal, and say:
“We have something you’ll love!”
By now, your engagement metrics will be shooting through the roof, and you will have the attention you need to trigger sales of the new product.
Giphy is the tool you can use to supplement your visual content plan with highly engaging and promising content pieces. It has a website that you can access right now and download from thousands of GIFs present in its content library.
Using GIPHY, you can create a content plan for an engaging and successful marketing campaign in a few minutes. Like we did for our example above.
BeFunky
BeFunky is yet another graphic designing tool that lets you edit your images, create collages, and develop engaging graphics, all through a single platform.
Built with your lack of graphic designing expertise in mind, BeFunky is easy to use and bursts with all the tools and resources you need to create stunning graphics for your social media. It has hundreds of fully customizable templates for your next social post.
With a stock image repository having more than a million images, you can enhance your social posts and generate content ideas through royalty-free images. Additionally, it has hundreds of elements you can choose to embellish your visual content and make it more eye-catching and impactful.
Stencil
The last but not in any way the least graphic designing tool in our list is Stencil.
Much like its peers, Stencil is a graphic designing tool for graphic designing dummies, and you can literally create an engaging piece of content in less than five minutes.
We created this post in less than five minutes using Stencil. Yes, we were running short on creative quotes ideas.
It has three versions, the hobbyist version, which is free and lets you download ten images. The pro version is paid and allows you to download 50 images, and the unlimited version, which, as the name suggests, lets you download unlimited visual content at a fixed price.
It has more than 5000,000 royalty-free images that you can use to create visual content for your social media. Combined with more than 1300 customizable templates and around 3,100,000 icons, Stencil, quite literally, bursts with everything you need to create fun, engaging, and meaningful visual content.
Conclusion
Bill Gates said content is king. We will go a step ahead and modify Mr. Gates’ statement and say visual content is king. Visual content is engaging, intriguing, and easier to understand. Therefore, including it in your social media content strategy can help skyrocket its results.
With the evolution of social media graphic designing tools, creating visual content has become easier than ever. Now you can generate fun and engaging visual content within minutes, that too without any design expertise or a massive budget.
However, it is important to understand that success with visual content relies on your own creativity, imagination, understanding of your audience, and insights. All the tools we have discussed here only supplement your creativity with their features and make it easier for you to generate ideas and manifest them graphically.
