This blog shows you the inexpensive ways (and even free tools) to boost your marketing.
by Merle van Wieringen on 12-Apr-2021
5 mins read
You might not expect it, but it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to sell your merchandise to your fans. There are, however, enough inexpensive ways (and even free tools) to boost your marketing.
It would be a shame if you used paid tools for your marketing and you later discover that you could easily have done it yourself. To prevent this, we have prepared this handy list for you. This list is not only provided with free tools but also includes a few ideas for paid marketing.
Canva
Canva is a great platform on which templates can be created for free. The platform makes it very easy for you to make beautiful designs and professional graphics. You can choose from hundreds of professionally designed layouts, but you can also create your own design from scratch.
Examples of templates are resumes, calendars, flyers, brochures, newsletters, invitations, menus, proposals, and many, many more. The many examples shown on the website will ensure that you get inspired!
Real life images for your campaign
Taking photos of your merchandise is a very obvious way to promote your campaign, but certainly also a very important one. Although the cameras on mobile phones are constantly improving these days and you sometimes hardly need a professional camera to take a proper photoshoot, we understand very well that sometimes there is not even time or money for that. However, to still promote your campaign through photos, you can use free lifestyle images that can be found on the following websites:
Unsplash– beautiful, free images and photos that you can download and use
iStock– A royalty free, international micro stock photography provider based in Canada
Pexels– free stock photos which can be used everywhere. They are free for commercial use and there is no attribution required
Burst– browse thousands of beautiful copyright-free images
There are many more websites that offer high quality lifestyle photos that you can use free or to make your campaign more appealing. If you are wondering why using lifestyle pictures are more effective? It is because us humans are more likely to feel emotions when we see a picture instead of only reading a written text. You want people to feel attracted to your campaign and you can do this by attaching beautiful photos. This way you have no extra costs of hiring models, a professional DSLR camera, the shooting location and you would save time.
Showing your products in use
If you don’t have money to shoot a photo shoot for your campaign, it might be useful to show your products in use in a different way. However, you do not necessarily need photos for that, but you can also use mockups. A mockup is a model or replica of a design, used for demonstration, design evaluation, promotion and other purposes. We have put together a few handy websites where you can make free mockups for your products:
Mockup World– providing tons of free and legal, fully layered, easily customisable photo realistic mockups
Unblast - offering an unbelievable collection of free PSD mockups such as phone muckups, packages, apparel, flyers, posters, etc.
Graphic Burger- presenting tasty design resources made with care for each pixel, it’s free for both personal and commercial use
Pixeden- Psd mockup templates to showcase your design directly on the appropriate medium. Each psd mockup is fully layered with smart object to make the creation of your mockup template just a quick drag and drop affair.
Create videos and GIF’s
Let’s just forget about the photos and move on to what may be more perceived as more important these days: videos. The time of videos and YouTube is here and to use this as much as possible to your advantage, you can also create videos that are related to your campaign.
This is also possible with making small GIFs. We have put together a few tools for you that can help you design good GIFs.
- Giphy.com – not only can you create gifs out of existing videos, but it also offers you making a Giphy slideshow to create your own gif.
- Tenor – an online GIF search engine and database
- Gifmaker.me– useful for high quality animated gifs and videos
Video tools that are free to use:
- iMovie – this is only available for iOS
- InShot – this is a mobile app that gives you the opportunity to edit videos and add all kinds of effects to it. You can delete the watermark for free once, after that you have to pay to delete it.
