If you’re a long-time merchant, you probably never considered that you’d have to become a content creator. Here are several tools that make creating content easier than ever; not only do they help produce posts, in many cases they even supply the creative ideas.
Of all the available tools, Canva is the beast of content creation. I wrote about it in this column several years ago and still use it to create awesome social media posts for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. With the premium account, you have automatic resize capabilities. Here’s how it works: if you create a post in Facebook, Canva can automatically resize it to a specified Pinterest post. Canva is not only for social either. I’ve used it for business cards, a flyer, and recently created a multi-page PowerPoint-like presentation. The beauty of Canva is the breath of templates that make executing a post a customizable predesigned, experience. You don’t have to be a designer to look like one. It’s loaded with free and paid (as low as one dollar) graphic elements and stock photos. There’s a free plan, but the paid version at $12.95 a month is well worth the extra bells and whistles that make producing content much easier. Canva does have limitations, especially when creating GIFs. And GIFs are super effective for communicating your story quickly and succinctly.
Unlike Canva’s GIFs where you can only really animate text or elements in a few set ways, you can get creative with Easil, using photos, text, icons, and text effects. When designing regular posts using some of these DIY tools, posts can have a familiar look. I recently saw a Facebook ad where I could identify the template and source of the stock photo. This is where Easil excels. Their templates for social media posts include high qual-ity, professional, editable templates designed by professional designers that break away from other template-based tools. Easil has no particular style so the templates are always edgy. And they have a huge selection of Instagram Story templates. There are free and paid plans, starting at $7.50 a month, which is all you will need.
Wave.Video is like Canva, but for videos. I’ve been writing about the benefits of video engagement over post engagement. Wave has hundreds of easily editable templates which allow you to create video easily and quickly without any design skills. Choose from categories like holidays, trending hashtags, black Friday and retail (of course!). Wave has hundreds of thousands of awesome video stock footage, photo stock images, and audio clips, including free content, paid content, and premium content. Or shoot your own videos on your phone, upload them, and use it in one of the templates. Wave has an intuitive editor that pops up with what you need depending on whether you’re editing text or video. There’s a huge selection of text editing tools like color, brand colors, fonts, transitions, and animations. It has the ability to resize to more than 30 video formats so you can easily change from a Facebook video to a Twitter-sized video. Another thing to love about Wave is its awesome content calendar that allows you to find ideas for videos for each day of the year. In addition to video ideas, it suggests ways to utilize them in specific marketing executions. For example, National Sponge Cake Day is August 22. Wave suggests you show your audience how you eat or serve a sponge cake. Another idea is what to pair the sponge cake with. A video with a tea service or coffee mugs will showcase your inventory and honor the holiday. Wave even suggests another idea. How do you make a sponge cake? Shoot a short video using bakeware tools and include a recipe.
Wave also suggests that you turn Wednesday into #Winesday. Anyone here selling wine glasses? You may know that inspirational quotes are the most shared type of online post. This brings me to Stencil and its ridiculously simple image creation. One of the features I like about Stencil is its huge library of quotes that you can use to quickly import into your image and create fresh content. The quote section has a great search function so you can search by the person who said the quote or quote keyword or phrase. I did a quick search of Picasso and found several. Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. I could plug this into a pre-designed template and in five minutes go from search to designed post and share it on my Instagram page.
The entire point of social media is to drive traffic to your store and website. With so many tools to facilitate your efforts, maybe it’s time to take off one of the many hats you wear.