Improve your Brand Engagement with better Graphics

In today's online world, small businesses are constantly requiring custom graphics for product images, mocked images, website images as well as social media graphics.

Visual marketing is the most successful form of marketing. How you use graphics greatly affects how you and your business are perceived. It has the ability to invoke an immediate reaction and response from your potential clients. You can see this on your Facebook page posts as your visual posts or videos get a much higher reach than a text post. When people hear information, they're likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.

You always want your brand to come off looking polished and professional. Google is an easy place to find images but the majority of those images have been copyrighted. The last thing you want is to end up in trouble with the owner of that image. Please don't be under the impression that your business is small and they won't find out.

What do you do when you need professional images but can't afford a graphic designer?

I've compiled a list of ten sites that provide free images that you can use for personal and commercial use. With several of these sites, you can create an account and save the images you like for later use.

• Unsplash
• Pixels
• Pixabay
• BarnImages
• Burst
• Gratisography
• Freerange Stock
• Picjumbo
• Foodiesfeed
• ISO Republic

If for some reason I am unable to find a specific image I purchase image credits through BigStockphoto. With BigStockI typically purchase 25 credits at a time. Based on what my business requires for image quality the small image is large enough and only requires 1 credit. You can try BigStock Free for 14-days and download 70 images. Use my referral link to take advantage.

Create your own custom marketing material.

Use these sites below to create custom design images for social graphics, web stories & video.

• AdobeSpark
• Canva
• PicMonkey

These sites will allow you to create your own cover photos for your social media profiles, custom posts, quote graphics, marketing material, events, ads, videos and much more. The free option provides more than enough features to create some beautiful images. As your business grows you may want to invest in some of their paid options.