Putting Visual Marketing to Work for You

• Gliffy. This is easy to use and requires no complicated software manuals to create professional-quality flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings and more. Just drag-and-drop shapes from an extensive library and point-and-click to format. It works directly in your browser and is free.
• Hohli Online Charts Builder. You can create bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, Venn diagrams, scatter plots, and radar charts. First, you select the type and size of display that you want. Then you fill in the corresponding form with the information to display. Your chart is generated as you enter information so that you can see how each piece of information changes the visual. When you’re done, you save it to your computer or grab the embed code to use on your blog or website.

Slides

• Slide.ly. This free, web-based app lets you make slide shows and share them via popular social media sites by choosing pictures from Facebook, Instagram, Flickr or Google, setting them to music, adding some special effects and posting the slide shows to your company’s social media pages.
• Photosnack.com. Another free tool, this app makes it easy to add photos, create HTML5 slide shows with music and share them on Facebook, Twitter and blogs. There is full compatibility with mobile devices.
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Social Media

• Pinterest. Small businesses have started to see the value in Pinterest for visual marketing. Professionals such as graphic artists, photographers, interior designers and fashion designers can create storyboards to display their work. Affluent women are the largest segment of the audience and businesses that fall into these categories experience the most engagement: food, fashion, fitness, beauty, décor, crafts, babies, kids, pets and travel. Pinterest has a collection of pins to summarize research and tips under the heading of Visual Marketing Tips, Tools, Best Practices.
• Instagram. One of the biggest attractions of this site is the ability to add a variety of filters to images, thereby enhancing their appearance. You can feature pictures of your products and services being used by customers or invite them to post and do your marketing for you. There is a higher level of engagement among users with Instagram than other social media because of the specificity to pictures.

Mobile