Design is tough… especially for healthcare marketers. We’re faced with a lot of limitations, like cheesy stock photos, limited access to a graphic designer, and quick turnarounds. But we also know images are important for attracting attention and boosting click-through on social media.
Check out these stats from BuzzSumo:
Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images.
Articles with an image once every 75-100 words got double the number of social shares than articles with fewer images.
If you’ve been trained in graphic design and are comfortable with software like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, you’re probably in good shape.
But what’s a marketer with limited design skills and budget to do? Here are a few tools and resources for healthcare marketing when it comes to visuals.
If you're looking for more resources, check out our 2017 List of Software for Healthcare Marketing, Sales, and Media.
Adobe Spark
Looking for a way to create those slick quote graphics that are so popular? Need to create an invitation to an open house at the office? Maybe an animated video? Adobe Spark is powerful, free option.
Source: The Digital Picture
Spark is a very handy tool, even for experienced designers who want to create a quick set of images without firing up Photoshop.
For non-designers, start with a theme and make a few tweaks with your own text and images. Spark makes is very easy to resize and export proper image sizes for social media, web pages, etc.
The video tools are pretty powerful – use a combination of photos, video, text, even record voiceovers directly from the editor.
Stock Photos
Everyone needs photos for their marketing, but it’s not like management is budgeting for photoshoots every quarter. Unless there is a shutterbug on the team, it’s time to turn to stock photo websites.
Stock photography websites, especially the FREE sites, can be hit and miss. Here are several of the best:
- Pixabay: Over 1 Million free photos, illustrations, and videos. A great place to start.
- Pexels: Another quality site with over 300,000 images and adding over 3,000 each month.
- Death to the Stock Photo: Great name and branding, works a bit different. Submit your email address and you will get a fresh batch of photos delivered to your inbox each month.
- io: A really good collection with hundreds of images added weekly.
- Unsplash: Rich, unique photos. Not a fit for every project, but there are some very stunning photos in this collection.
- Gratisography: New photos added weekly by Ryan McGuire. This collection is a bit more whimsical, best if you’re looking to push the envelope.
Spredfast Image and Video Size Cheat Sheet
It’s tough to keep up with the dimension for images, videos, profile pics, cover images, etc.
Thankfully, there are some great resources to help you keep things straight. First, Spredfast as a great infographic that details all of the dimensions and even shows where and how these images are used.
If you’re looking for a simple list of dimensions, check out HubSpot's handy list of social media image sizes.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the free resources for healthcare marketers wanting to create quality images, or perhaps step up their design game. There are plenty of others, let us know some of your favorites.
Casey founded Gravity Digital in 2000 after serving as the Internet Services Director for a Nashville-based Ad Agency. He's a rare breed that operates both left and right brain, so along with oversight of the company he's active in the creative process for our clients.
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