DIY Design: How To Design Stunning Images Yourself

Images can make or break a landing page, promotion, or social media post. They are the many faces and personalities of your brand, which is why it's so important to get them right! But how, you ask, can you make them easily, quickly, all the while ensuring their effectiveness and quality? Learn some of my visual marketing powerhouse tips to design stunning images yourself.

Creating images doesn't have to be at the bottom of your to-do-list, and you don't have to be a pro to make them look impressive!

1. Why Visual Marketing?

93% of our communication is visual. It's very important that you get it right and share the proper message with your visuals. In the super crowded stream of social media and content marketing, each piece of content represents who you are and what you do.

The visual pieces of your content are the breadcrumbs that leave a trail back to you and your main hub.

2. Why do people share on social?

There is some psychology as to why people share on social media (based on a study done by The New York Times). Here is a little of what they found, people like to share:

1. To grow and nurture relationships
2. To be helpful
3. To define themselves to others

You can help people by making it easy to share. One of the biggest problems is that people don't set up their blog or website for good social sharing with images.

• share with beautiful graphics
• provide helpful info

3. Use visuals with your blog

From Rebekah Radice, “before you continue on, there is one important thing you must remember: Each social media platform is unique.

Do not underestimate how vital it is to allot time to writing a post or creating an image specifically designed for each particular community. It could make the difference between comments and crickets.”

Read more here in 25 ways to promote your latest blog post 

These tips will help:

• Add open graph images From Facebook, “When someone shares content from your site to Facebook, our crawler will scrape the HTML of the URL that is shared. On a regular HTML page this content is basic and may be incorrect, because the scraper has to guess which content is important, and which is not.Take control of what the Facebook crawler picks up from each page by using Open Graph meta tags. These tags provide structured info about the page such as the title, description, preview image, and more.”
• Write great titles “All of this hinges on understanding your core buyer persona. You need to find language that resonates with them, and know what they find valuable. Your titles might not resonate with some of your readers — but if they resonate with your core buyer persona, that's the most important thing.”
• Use your meta data– it counts! “Metadata is used to describe individual pages on a websites, allowing search engines to understand what each page portrays. This data helps search engines evaluate the relevance of a page content, thus determining whether a page will or will not be displayed within search results.”

Your homework: Go to your blog and check all the sharing buttons on the last post. How does it look when you go to pin a blog article with the Pinterest pin-it button? What happens if you post directly to Facebook? How does a tweet look? 

Find the areas that you need to fix with your social sharing and make it easy for people to share your content with one click.

4. Tools of the trade

• Canva
• Picmonkey
• Lynda.com- learning and tutorials
• Adobe creative suite
• You Tube tutorials

5. Get appy!

• Word Swag
• Over app
• Camera Awesome

I recently presented two packed sessions at INBOUND in Boston about DIY Design, here's my full presentation for you. Hope you like it!

What's your biggest challenge when creating images for social media? I'd love to hear them in the comments below.