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There are a number of blogging platforms and tools that you can utilize for your business, including:
Some of these have paid premium subscription features and some of them are free to use. Examine the background of each of these individual platforms and assess if they’re geared toward a business-to-consumer or a business-to-business audience. For example, Medium is a great format for connecting business to business in terms of the creative industry, whereas Tumblr is a great tool for reaching millennial audiences with a business-to-consumer message. Make sure to do the research and find out which blogging platform is right for you.
WordPress is a very popular blogging platform, content management system, or CMS. The platform allows for great freedom in terms of post creation, gives great insights into backend analytics and traffic sources, and allows for really creative plugins that can help innovate and energize your individual platform. It also provides a great feature by which you can police and administrate your individual page to prevent any spam or any trolls from getting involved or creating any crisis moments for your brand’s blog.
With video content, there are a number of free and paid-for video editing platforms. Some of these are native apps that have video editing built in, and some of them are third party apps. Some great longform video editing tools include Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Final Cut. Shortform video tools include Photoshop. Native video editing tools include YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, who all have various video editing elements built into them.
The YouTube native video editor offers a number of handy options, including the ability to add music and sound effects, add scene transitions and subtitles, make basic edits in terms of chopping and changing the length, and add additional scenes. YouTube also has a very handy library of royalty-free music for any video projects that you are working on.
When it comes to creating eBooks and whitepapers, there are a number of free and paid-for tools that you can utilize. Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign are two paid-for platforms that you can use. Other free platforms that you can use are Atavist and HubSpot, who offer a great selection of entertaining eBook formats for free.
For creating infographics, there are a number of free and paid-for tools available. Some of these are native applications and others are cloud-based web applications. Free tools include Infogram and Piktochart; and paid-for tools include Visually and Adobe Illustrator. Some of these platforms have great templates you can use to design your infographics quickly and easily.
For image creation, there is a vast number of both paid-for and free tools. For SMEs, Canva is brilliant for creating beautiful presentations. Tools like GIMP and PicMonkey allow advanced image editing without having to pay high fees. Photoshop by Adobe would be the industry standard in terms of image editing. This is used by a lot of image professionals, but is a paid-for product.
Here’s a screenshot of online image editing platform, Canva (see slide ‘Images’). As you can see, you can use a collection of high-quality formats and design assets from templates and the stock library provided. You can then customize and personalize these into exactly what it is that you need to design. It’s a very simple interface and works great for creating not just social media content, but also presentation decks and even infographics.
Podcast creation and seeding platforms come in a variety of formats; iTunes would probably be the largest in terms of seeding across the web. Other platforms like PodOmatic and Podbean can help you create great podcast content that travels well online. Probably the best integrated with social sharing would be SoundCloud. SoundCloud have worked with social media platforms to build specific formats that aid the sharing of their content in native newsfeed streams.
Other tools to consider as part of your content creation arsenal are social advertising mock-up generators. Essentially, what these tools allow you to do is create a number examples of social media posts. You can draft up content and use templates to visualize exactly what it is that you’re hoping to achieve.
AdParlor and lemmetweetthatforyou.com both offer very dynamic platforms, where users can fill in pre-populated templates to get their data analyzed and visualized exactly as they need it to be.
Here’s a screenshot from AdParlor (see slide ‘Social content mockup’); in this particular example, you can see that they are demoing a Facebook advertisement. This tool is great for mocking up social media posts, social media advertising formats, and even social media channel design; for example, you can use it to map out what a new cover photo on your Facebook page or your Twitter account might look like if you change the font or change the color position.
Back to TopCreative Director at Teneo PSG Digital
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DMI Short Course: Content Marketing
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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE
This module introduces the concept of engaging with and acquiring customers using the creation and sharing of content. It explains how to choose the right content for your customers – and how to ensure it gets seen by them. It outlines the different content formats available on social media channels and helps you identify which platform best suits your content. It also identifies best practices for scheduling your content, and equips you with the knowledge to devise and execute your own content creation strategy.