The DIY scene has blown up as businesses seek ways to keep costs low and their production high. DIY graphic design tools, in particular, have been a great resource as marketing teams churn out creatives for their Facebook Ad campaigns.
I scoured the web to find free apps with the most user-friendly interfaces, resources and had the most cost-effective upgrade packages.
These 7 free tools made the cut:
Better Video Ads
Better video ads is a forever-free tool that allows you to turn your Shopify existing products into stunning video ads for free. You can explore pre-made templates and customize your product video ads easily. Better Video Ads has a dozen of templates, all of them are customizable with no need for design skills.
You don’t have to worry about the costs because it’s totally FREE!
Crello
Crello offers free templates made by professionals.
Crello offers numerous templates to get those creative juices flowing. A great feature that puts Crello ahead of Canva is the ability to create animated visuals with the Animation Maker tool that isn’t limited to text and elements. You can make videos as well!
A wide selection of illustration-style graphic elements are available on Crello. These are likely to perform better than photo-based elements when advertising on social media. You can use a background remover to style pictures and create this combination of elements effectively.
Highlights:
- Animation maker and animated templates
- Various design size and format including Facebook Cover Video.
- More than 12,000 templates and 240 fonts to choose from
- Photo editor
Stencil
Stencil shares images to social platforms directly.
Stencil is quick and easy for making social media images, ad images, marketing images and creative postcards. Stencil doesn’t have as wide a selection of templates as Crello but it does have a large library of quotes that you can import into your image.
This unique feature is a winner for creating fresh content or getting inspired by something you’ve seen.
Highlights:
- Over 1 million stock photos
- Share images to social platforms directly
- Over 1 million icons and graphics to choose from
- Over 100,000 quotes you can use to instantly create quote images. You can add quotes straight from the web, into a Stencil canvas to create images.
- Custom social media sizes
- Over 2,300 Google Web Fonts
Easil
Easil offers advanced Design Tools.
Great for designers and non-designers alike with a smooth interface. With features like layers, text effects and merging designs you really have the option to go as in-depth with the creative process as you like.
Easil regularly adds new templates to keep up with social media trends and caters a lot towards Instagram Story templates where other similar tools may not.
Highlights:
- Templates are designed by professional designers with no particular style so each is unique.
- Unique editing tools like text effects, designs with transparent backgrounds, color generator and tables.
- Advanced Design Tools
- GIF Maker to animate images, text, icons and photos.
- Stock Images
Marketers who incorporate video into their strategy increase revenue 49% faster than non-video users.
Additionally, social videos are shared 1,200% more than text and image posts combined.
Wait, before you go off to start making plans to implement video into your marketing strategy, check out which video tools made the cut:
Zyro
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Zyro has a free online upscaler tool that uses deep convolutional neural networks. It can accurately analyze and process all kinds of images. As an example, it will automatically fill in the details of the object while enlarging your images. It will eventually look more realistic as you get a larger image. Zyro's AI image upscaling software is performing reasonably well in comparison with other websites.
Animaker
Animaker provides you with all the necessary tools to create great videos.
Animaker is home to the world’s largest collection of animated properties, icons, characters, charts and maps in the world.
Pretty powerful right? It’s easy to use too.
With a simple userface and variety of learning materials, the team at Animaker provides you with all the necessary tools to create great videos for your marketing strategy on your own.
Animaker is particularly great for visual aids like graphs and charts. You can even use it to create engaging Instagram stories!
Offeo
Offeo offers a ‘live’ preview feature that cuts out the long rendering time.
Offeo, my personal favorite, is equipped with over 1000 templates and graphic elements.
These templates can be used to include product catalog, sales, promotions, social video, new launches, logo animation, festive greetings, announcements and more.
Offeo also has a ‘live’ preview feature that cuts out the long rendering time when you redesign or change your video effects.
Bonus Tool - PhotoADKing
PhotoADKing is a great tool to design anything from social media posts including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter & Tumblr to printing materials in just a few clicks. It offers thousands of templates to choose from, even a non-designer can make anything without being an expert.
Besides offering social media templates, it has posters, brochures, and flyer templates for small businesses to make promotional materials in minutes.
Highlights:
- 10000+ premade templates for users to design anything in minutes.
- Thousands of fonts, icons, stickers & stock images to use in design
- Basic image editing
- 10 free templates to new users upon signup
- Easy download and sharing options
Creative automation
Each of these 5 tools can produce great creatives for your ad campaigns. Hunch can do that too. In fact, you can upload any of your own images and use layers and any of our icons or predefined designs to complete your creatives.
The one thing these five tools are missing is the creative automation element.
Creative automation is generating many creatives using your catalog so that Facebook can then serve them to the audience most likely to engage. In our earlier article, we talk about how you can use creative automation with Hunch to maximize the effectiveness and reach of your creatives.
Take Home Message:
DIY graphic design tools can minimize your marketing team and maximize your creative output.
I listed five tools that I think can help you produce your next top-performing ad.
Together with some creative automation, you’ve got a force that can drive campaign success.
If you would like to find out more about how Hunch can help your team produce attention-grabbing creatives at scale, then get in touch for a FREE strategy call.