The most important part of marketing is arguably content creation. Creative assets should be focused on drawing new customers in and building your brand.
Here is the complete stack that we currently use for creating the content we use for marketing.
Graphic Design
Sketch – $99
Sketch is powerful design toolkit that makes it easy to work with vector images. It’s great for both designing mockups and advertising graphics.
What we love about it:
Free trial. One time fee. Easy to use. Non-destructive editing for easy reverts and adjustments. We use it for all over our blog covers, logo design, and more.
Vectr – Free
Vectr is a free web and desktop vector editing software.
What we love about it:
It’s free, easy to use, doesn’t require a download, and supports collaboration. We use it for quick edits on images used in tutorials.
Mockups
AppLaunchpad – Free
AppLaunchpad has a mockup generator that allows you to take any screenshot and turn it into a mockup displayed on a phone, tablet, computer, or monitor.
What we love about it:
The images are extremely high resolution and have an authentic feel to them. We often use these mockups in Facebook ads that we run.
Graphic Discovery
FreePik – Freemium
FreePik has an extensive collection of vector graphics that are free for commercial use. They have everything from backgrounds, to icons, to infographics.
What we love about it:
Artists have profiles so if there is a particular style you like, you can easily find more graphics that are similar. Most graphics are vector images so you can easily edit them in Sketch or Vectr.
Iconfinder – Freemium
Iconfinder is our go-to source for all of your standard icons and logos.
What we love about it:
All icons can be downloaded in various sizes. Many artists upload “icon sets” containing many icons with the same look and feel. It contains many brand’s logos.
Stock Image Discovery
Cloud Campaign – $40/mo
Cloud Campaign is a social media marketing platform that has image recommendations built in.
What we love about it:
If we’re sharing the images on social media it’s extremely convenient to discover and publish from the same platform.
Pexels – Free
Pexels is a website offering a large collection of free stock photos.
What we love about it:
High-quality stock images that don’t require attribution. We use Pexels for images used in our Medium blog posts.
Video Creation
iMovie – Free (with OSx)
iMovie is the default video editing software that comes installed on Apple products. It supports editing videos and easily combining videos, images, and audio.
What we love about it:
It’s intuitive to use and comes free with OSx. It’s not extremely powerful, but works well for the simple advertising videos that we produce.
QuickTime – Free
Quicktime is video playback software, but it can also be used for screen and audio recordings.
What we love about it:
It’s a super easy way to film screen recordings. We use it for tutorials and demos.
Lumen5 – Freemium
Lumen5 turns articles into informative videos combining key quotes from the article and stock video clips.
What we love about it:
Video is becoming a more critical part of social media marketing, so the ability to easily translate one of our blog posts to a video is huge. The software is easy to use and they even have an auto-generate feature that builds a new video anytime you write a new blog post. It still has some kinks, but we love the potential.
RawShorts – Freemium
RawShorts is an online animated video creator.
What we love about it:
It’s simple to use and there are pre-defined templates that you can easily adjust to fit your needs. We’ve used RawShorts in the past for creating explainer videos.
Blogging
Medium – Freemium
Medium is a platform for bloggers that has a great uniform look and feel.
What we love about it:
Medium is a great platform for discoverability and it makes it easy to contribute to large publications to get increased exposure for blog posts. We use Medium for personal and behind-the-scenes blogging.
WordPress – Freemium
WordPress is a web hosting platform that hosts many of the world’s sites ranging from blogs to full-blown websites.
What we love about it:
There are many themes to get a design-friendly blog up quickly. The ability to customize the headers and footers were a huge appeal to us as we can extend the look and feel of our website to our blog. We use WordPress for our company blog.
Zendesk – Freemium
Zendesk builds software focused around customer relationships.
What we love about it:
We use Zendesk for our FAQs so having announcements and FAQs in the same domain was appealing. We post product updates to our Zendesk FAQ.
Content Discovery
Cloud Campaign – $40/mo
Cloud Campaign is a powerful social media marketing platform that has content discovery built-in to help with finding trending articles related to your business.
What we love about it:
Being able to schedule or broadcast articles on social media with a single click has a huge appeal. Cloud Campaign also uses AI to automatically write captions for articles found in the content recommendations, which save us a ton of time each week since we share other people’s articles every weekday at noon.
