Visual Marketing - making the most of your free images

Partly through social media and partly through content marketing, we’ve all become image crazy. But whether you’re using your own or those sourced from royalty-free websites are you maximising the marketing impact of free images?

If you’re using images at all, you already have a head start in terms of grabbing attention. According to an article in social media examiner earlier in the year photos on Facebook accounted for a 87% interaction rate from fans (no other post received more than a 4% interaction rate) and adding a photo URL on Twitter can boost your re-tweets by 35%.

As it's definitely worth making the effort to include images in your marketing, I thought I'd share four methods of doing this:

Firstly let’s talk about sharing screenshots on Pinterest - What better way to get your website out there? (or the website of a client if you are a website designer)

All you have to do is pop onto the website Snapito.com Then enter the URL of the website you want to share; wait for the image to be created, click on the green Snap button, select Pinterest, choose a board and edit your description if preferred. Job done!

Want to get more creative?  Here are three easy solutions:

Make your photo more interesting cropping, re-sizing or splitting it into sections using a free website called PicSlice. Use the straightforward instructions to create the effect you want, hit “generate ” then download them all in a zip file. Sorted. 

It's a dead simple interface look:

Getstencil  (previously shareasimage.com) is another simple to use site. There are 640,000 images, 200,000 icons and more than 50 templates.  The free version allows you to

• Access limited backgrounds and icons and a cap of creating 10 images per month
• Change the colour, size and position of the text
• You can save in any format to suit e.g. post for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, You Tube or Blog
• Share directly to social media or save for marketing use
• Free or $9 per month for upgraded usability which allows you to create unlimited images and access the whole library of photos and watermarks

Here’s what I created on the original shareasimage using a photo from my website and a phrase I always share at presentations at workshops. Looks great doesn’t it?

I also love Picmonkey.com  Again there are free or paid versions, but for free you can - for example - create a collage of your chosen images, add text in any number of fonts or colours and then save it to your computer or share it via social media. 

Here’s mine, I’m dead chuffed with it - what do you think?

In practical terms you ought to think about protecting your own images by adding a watermark.  Don’t forget a text watermark can also be a marketing message!  There are several sites out there but I found www.watermark.ws simple to use.

The free version is limited to 5 photos with default font but for $3.99 per month you can save up unlimited photos and use saved templates, premium or custom fonts and export them to the cloud.  Here's what you do

• Upload your photos and choose either text or your own logo as a watermark. 
• If you are choosing text you can choose the font, size, colour and outline
• You can then decide whether to show the watermark once  and  any angle or as a tiled effect.
• You can even improve the brightness and contrast of your photo.
• Once you’re done simply download and save

Here I am protecting one of my quirky marketing postcards:

One good tip: You'd be horrified if you accidentally watermarked the one and only copy of your photos so for some watermark websites it's a good idea to make copies of your photos and watermark those.

I had great fun creating this blog post for you and got some super images for my own business at the same time. If you're interested in visual marketing you might also enjoy my post on looking for a infographic maker and some savvy advice  

Have you come across any other creative image tools that you’d like to share?