If you’re like many longtime bloggers, community managers and content marketers, you’re probably a rockstar at creating impactful content, probably pushing out 12 or more blog posts per week. But, coming up with new and, um, not boring, ways to communicate with your audience can be difficult.

DESIGN to the Rescue!

We’ve compiled some of our favorite design tools in a neat little list to help you spice up your content marketing efforts. We encourage you to bookmark the list if you don’t have time to check them all out now. These are marketing tools we use on a daily basis, so we do hope they are useful to you as well.

Images are probably your current go to for spicing up your blog posts. We know just having images increases the time a user will stay on the page, but did you know it also ups your total pageviews. Articles with images get 94% more pageviews overall, and that’s a stat you can’t ignore.

1. The Noun Project

Icons are awesome, and they help users navigate through a site so much easier. Just on a simple blog post, having icons interspersed can move the eye right through the blog post, to get the user all the way through to the call to action.

The Noun Project is a community of designers who are working together to create a visual language that anyone can understand. You can find icons for most any noun there, and you can choose to support the site for a very small monthly fee, and use the icons with no attribution.

The free version requires attribution, but that’s a small price to pay for free icons…

2. ShowHows

If you create alot of How To’s or complicated user guides, ShowHows will revolutionize your efforts.

Upload a few images, drop in some text that explains each step, and in minutes you’ll have a polished step-by-step guide that looks great on any platform – desktop web, small phone screens and tablets.

Our local seo ShowHow is here if you want to see an example: Local SEO

ShowHows are free to any user. Brands may be interested in whitelabeling, but that’s not an option yet.

3. Canva

Canva is an image creation tool that is specifically designed for bloggers and writers, and you are going to love it!

It’s simple-stupid, and makes strong visuals that you are absolutely going to love. I created the lead image for this post in 3 minutes.

Canva is a free service, with premium features if you need them.

4. SlideShare

I know everyone is already using SlideShare, but I think it’s important enough to include in any list that talks about adding graphical info to a blog post.

SlideShare has free and premium plans.

5. PostWire

PostWire makes it easy to create an easily shareable collection of documents. Say I want to share a powerpoint, a video, a proposal, a contract and explain them all in one place. PostWire makes sharing these types of collections easily.

PostWire has free and premium plans.

GET TO IT:

Don’t spend all that time writing something awesome, and not put the time into adding visuals that rock. Marketing tools are everywhere, so there’s no excuse to not go the extra mile here. At the very least, make sure to check out each of these services (in your abundant spare time), and add some pizazz to your blog posts.

FREE MARKETING TOOL:

Need to get your content marketing under control? Check out the Content Mapping template to streamline your efforts.