It’s a situation most business owners are all too familiar with.
You’re suddenly challenged to make use of marketing materials or get down and dirty by creating your own custom copy. Without the proper training or background, lacking the know how to produce effective, eye-catching content often creates a sense of feeling flustered and frustrated while leading to way too many hours spent combing YouTube for the right creative tutorials.
It’s a humbling experience that when combined with the busy day-to-day duties of running a place of business, can simply become an overwhelming experience. But there’s help. While the in-house creative team at FetchRev is always on-hand to lend their muscle and create a top-flight results-driven campaign, there are plenty of affordable user-friendly creative resources to be found that produce professional and timely results.
Here’s a few of our favorites carefully curated just for you:
1. Envato Elements:
$29 per month or $198 per year
A one stop shop for everything under the creative sun, Envato Elements offers it all. From easily editable templates for social media graphics to professionally licensed stock photos, fonts, and music for podcasts, the platform makes it simple to download what you want—when you want it—for whatever you want. As a bonus, they also offer community sourced tutorials for a variety of creative software programs for beginners.
2. Grammarly:
Free extension for Google Chrome or $15 per month for the business version
There’s nothing worse than a typo or grammatical mistake. Twisting the tide of the message and nearly automatically devaluing what you’re trying to get across, making an honest mistake on something meant to be seen by the masses never ceases to be a cringe-worthy moment. That’s where Grammarly comes in. When installed as a Google Chrome extension, this plugin provides invaluable assistance by catching your errors in real-time and allowing you to self-edit in the process. Most impressively, Grammarly actually seeks to make you a better writer by analyzing your readability score, sentence-length, and word choice on a weekly basis. Think of it as your own personal proofreader.
3. Canva:
Free or $12.95 per month for the Canva for Work version
Similar to Elements Envato, Canva offers its users a simple graphic design tool featuring a vast surplus of images, graphics, and fonts. Boasting a simple drag-and-drop format, Canva sets itself apart from the competition by marketing to the creatively-challenged with a simple platform geared toward saving you time and effort.
4. Stencil:
Free or $12 a month for the Pro Package
Need to build up a bigger buzz for your social media efforts? Stencil is a site designed to expedite the process of creating and scheduling posts that are optimized for channels including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Designed for those that don’t have experience behind the hood of a user editing program, Stencil requires absolutely no learning curve to master.
5. Ripl:
Free or $14.99 a month for Ripl Pro
Even with a mini production studio in your back pocket, successfully filming and editing a professional video on your phone can call for a whole bunch of movie magic. Whether you take your inspiration from Michael Moore or Alfonso Cuarón, Ripl makes it much easier to create a customized video for your business that makes waves on social media. Featuring 100s of designs, the app allows the user to add fonts, music, and photos to match your brand without requiring any design skills. Additionally, your videos can be scheduled to blast immediately to your social channels in just one click—or scheduled for a later time and date.
