The Top Visual Content Marketing Tools for 2021

Updated for 2026: visual content marketing has moved away from stock photography and static infographics towards short vertical video, screenshots of real work, and simple charts you build yourself. The tools got cheaper and the bar for polish got lower, so what decides whether an image works now is whether it proves something, not whether it looks expensive.

Visual content has become an essential of element of digital marketing, for a few years now. With so many social networks moving more and more towards visual content and with visuals generating better results in terms of engagement than text-only, visual content marketing has become a necessity. In fact, visual content marketing has become one of the most important forms of content for marketers all over the world – right behind blogging. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to hire designers, photographers, and start buying pro equipment right this second, especially as an SME – rather, it’s a case of making use of all the amazing resources and tools that the Internet has to offer. In this blog post, you’re going to find your complete guide to visual content marketing. We’ll be covering:

• What types of visual content you can create and why
• Where to find quality images, video footage, and quality audio
• How to create visual content for your marketing campaigns: images, videos, infographics, presentations (the only list of visual content marketing tools you’re going to need!)

Types of visual content

There are a myriad of different types of visual content and so many different ways to use them, too. Here are some of the best performing types of visuals that you can incorporate into your marketing campaigns: For your website: use visual content to enhance the visitor experience and to boost your conversion rate

• Screenshots
• Infographics
• Videos (product videos, tutorials, demos, examples, special offers)
• Data visualizations

For your blog: use visual content to enhance your articles and to offer different types of content to your readers

• Screenshots
• Infographics
• Images
• Data visualizations
• Memes

For lead generation: use visual content to help you generate more leads for your business

• Infographics
• Videos
• Tutorials
• Presentations

For social media: visual content helps you generate more likes, more followers, and more engagement overall on social media

• Photos, quote images, photo collages
• Memes
• Short videos
• Infographics

Blog and social media images: where to find free images

If you blog and/or use social media, then images should be a huge part of your strategy. On blogs, images help:

• Improve the reader experience
• Make your blog posts easier to read and understand
• Get your point across more effectively with powerful images
• Improve your SEO

While on social media, they help:

• Attract more attention + more shares and engagement
• Make sure your points get across – an eye-catching image with text over it is much more likely to be read than a text-only update; you almost do it involuntarily every time you see an image with a message – after all, it only takes a second to read.

In order to create beautiful images for your blog and social media, you don’t necessarily need a professional photographer and/or designer; with a little work and research, it’s easy to not only find quality images to use, but also to edit them in order to make them unique and more eye-catching. Here are some of the best sources of free stock images:

Unsplash

Where: Unsplash What: high-resolution photos Categories: business, nature, people, technology, food, travel, etc. Why I love it: you can find some truly stunning images – so good you can barely believe they’re free. Plus, they’re all completely free to use!

Pixabay

Where: Pixabay What: photos, vector graphics, illustrations, videos Categories: backgrounds, architecture, business/finance, communication, food and drink, music, nature, travel, sports, science and tech, etc. Why I love it: It’s completely free and it offers a very wide variety of visual content (not just images) in numerous categories

Grab my free content calendar template to map out your posts.

Pexels

Where: Pexels What: photos Categories: business, fashion, food and drink, tech, marketing, landscapes, travel, etc. Why I love it: for one, it’s free to use, and plus, it has a great selection of photos in dozens of categories

StockSnap

Where: StockSnap What: photos Categories: business, nature people, fashion, food and drink, architecture, landscapes, etc. Why I love it: although there are a lot of photos that are a bit too stock, if I may say so, you can still find some great images for free

Burst Shopify

Where: Burst What: high and low-res images for businesses Categories: startups, fitness, finance, architecture, nature, products, food and drink, business, people, animals, backgrounds, etc. Why I love it: beautiful images – and you can download the low-res versions without signing up

Flickr: The Commons

Where: The Commons What: historical photography with no known copyright restrictions Categories: historical photos Why I love it: if you have any need for old, beautiful images of people and locations, you’ll find something amazing options thanks to this Flickr project in partnership with The Library of Congress

 Albumarium

Where: Albumarium What: photos Categories: nature, architecture, technology, animals, food and drink, cities, black & white, etc. Why I love it: there are some low-quality images, but you can easily find some truly beautiful oneswith no licensing

Death to Stock Photo

Where: Death to Stock Photo What: photo Categories: receive monthly photo packs in different categories Why I love it: love the concept – you sign up for free and every month, you’ll get an email with a free set of high-quality images that you can use how you want

Gratisography

Where: Gratisography What: high resolution images with a twist Categories: animals, nature, objects, people, urban, whimsical + bundles of multiple photos in different categories Why I love it: because the images are truly different, unique, and often times, very funny – like this one:

Picography

Where: Picography What: photos taken by regular people and photographers Categories: nature, architecture, people, technology, culture, etc. Why I love it: while there are some images that aren’t that great, there’s enough of the good stuff to spend some time exploring!

Picjumbo

Where: Picjumbo What: photos Categories: abstract, nature, business, fashion, travel, people, food & drink, etc. Why I love it: there is a great selection of free images and a lot of them are perfect for businesses

New old stock

Where: New Old Stock What: vintage photos with no known copyright restrictions Categories: the photos aren’t categorizes, but you can use the search bar to find the images you want Why I love it: there are some truly great photos, both black and white and in colour of everything you can think of: astronauts in space, animals, landscapes, people, and much more.

Blog and social media images: where to find paid images

Here are some of the best sources of paid stock images:

Shutterstock

Where: Shutterstock What: photos, vectors, illustrations, music, video footage, editorial Categories: abstract, animals and wildlife, beauty and fashion, business and finance, food and drink, travel, industrial, etc. Why I love it: although a lot of their images look a bit too stock-y, there are some great options; plus, their library is huge

Dreamstime

Where: Dreamstime What: photos, illustrations, vectors, videos, and audio Categories: business, nature, people, food and drink, animals, travel, etc. Why I love it: the selection is absolutely amazing – about 77 million stock images and counting!

Deposit Photos

Where: Deposit Photos What: photos, vectors, and videos Categories: abstract, architecture, business and finance, beauty and fashion, animals, celebrities, technology, etc. Why I love it: another amazing library of photos – up to 80 million stock photos, in fact. As you can notice from this list, I’m actually a bigger fan of the free services – it’s easier to find images that don’t look too generic/stock.

Blog and social media images: useful tools

When you’re using photos and other visual content to help market and promote your business, you should always take the time to customize them to make them unique. For example:

• Add your branding – logo and website – so that every time your images get shared online, your branding will be clearly visible (great for brand awareness and even a bit of extra traffic)
• Add text to deliver a call to action or to add a quote, an interesting fact, or a statistic
• Use them as backgrounds for your marketing messages
• Create collages of beautiful images
• Add different elements and illustrations to enhance the photo
• Change sizes and formats to suit your needs and optimise for specific social networks

Here are some of the best tools for creating and editing your blog and social media images:

Canva

Where: Canva What: library of free and paid images + use it to create: blog titles and graphics, social media photos, infographics, presentations, marketing materials, magazine and e-book covers, email headers, and ads What I love about it: A lot! It’s super easy to use, it’s free, and it has an amazing selection of templates for all the different types of visual content

Crello

Where: Crello What: social media images, blog titles and graphics, presentations, animated posts, marketing materials, covers and headers What I love about it: it’s very similar to Canva in terms of the types of content you can create and the builder. What makes it stand out though, is the fact that you can also create animated posts

Pablo by Buffer

Where: Pablo What: social media images: quotes, announcements, promotions, etc. What I love about it: it’s great for creating optimised social media images as quickly as possible, add your logo, and a quote or any text

Stencil

Where: Stencil What: create images quickly for social media, blogs, advertising, and more. What I love about it: they have over 650 different templates to choose from, an extensive library of free images and a library of quotes - you basically have everything you need in your dashboard

BeFunky

Where: BeFunky What: image designer/creator, image editor, and collage maker; create images for social media, your blog and website, and for most business needs What I love about it: it’s super easy to edit your images and customize them + they offer a lot of great templates to help you get started

PicMonkey

Where: PicMonkey What: image editor, collage maker + image creator for social media, email headers, blog images, online ads, and custom designs What I love about it: it’s an easy-to-use tool for all your editing and content creation needs – so basically, for pretty much the same reasons why I’m a fan of BeFunky

Postcron Art Studio

Where: Art Studio What: social media images and headers What I love about it: it’s a quick way to create stunning optimised social media images and headers

FotoJet

Where: FotoJet What: create social media images and headers, ads, marketing material + image editor and collage maker What I love about it: easy to use, no login required, and you have access to lots of great templates

Screenshots

Screenshots might seem like an odd choice at first glance; but actually, screenshots can have some powerful effects when used right. And they are particularly beneficial when it comes to converting your audience into customers. For example, here are some of the ways you can use screenshots to boost conversions and sales:

• Show users how your product works/how easy it is to use/how great it looks/etc.
• Take and show off screenshots of your great results with other clients
• Share positive reviews with prospective clients
• Back up any claims you make with actual evidence – aka, screenshots
• So basically, use them to build trust and show your worth to prospective clients

Screenshots also help enhance other, less promotional types of content too – like blog posts and how-to guides. They help you illustrate a point and they also help build trust – if you show someone how to do something, for example, they’re so much more likely to trust you if they also see evidence – i.e. screenshots – that back up all the claims you make. So, don’t overlook the importance a screenshot; it’s actually a very powerful tool, one that can help you generate better results for your business. The following tools help you get more out of your screenshots by allowing you to add all kinds of annotations so you can get your point across:

Skitch, by Evernote

Where: Skitch What: take screenshots, and add annotations easily: shapes, sketches, and text What I love about it: easy to use software, plus all the features you need from a screenshot tool: adding arrows quickly, words, drawing, shapes, etc.

Awesome Screenshot

Where: Awesome Screenshot for Chrome What: Chrome extension for capturing screenshots, add annotations easily, and record your screen as video What I love about it: completely free and it’s very handy to have directly in your browser

Infographics, presentations, and data visualizations

Infographics are basically a way to present interesting data and statistics into an-easy-to-digest format – which is also much more entertaining to the viewer than a long drawn-out research paper, for example. There are several ways you should consider using infographics in your content marketing strategy; most notably:

• They drive a lot of traffic and shares – like a lot of visual content in general!
• They help you build backlinks and improve your SEO; the extra shares and traffic will help with your SEO as well, but another benefit of creating infographics is that it’s likely that other bloggers will embed your infographic on their blog too – and link to your website. That is, if you create a great infographic with both interesting data and good design
• They’re more entertaining and fun – which makes them a perfect tool to break up your blog posts from time to time
• They’re very eye catching – and especially when shared on social media, that is very important as if you attract people’s attention, then you’re likely going to attract more shares and clicks too

As mentioned earlier, there are 2 important elements to any great infographic: an interesting topic with interesting/shocking data and amazing design. The topic is up to you – but I can help you find some awesome tools to help you create infographics without any design experience – in a bit. First, let’s talk presentations. Are you using presentations to help promote your business? if not, it’s definitely worth looking into as you can leverage this type of evergreen content for years. They’re basically kind of like infographics – only in a lot more detail and spreading over numerous pages/slides. There are all kinds of ways to use presentations in your marketing strategy; for example, you can:

• Turn your best blog posts into presentations to give them a new boost of life (and generate more results from your content)
• Publish presentations on Slideshare to reach a whole new audience, improve brand awareness, and drive more traffic to your website (some of the top viewed presentations on the popular platform get hundreds of thousands of views)
• Improve conversions by showing your products’ or services’ value with a well-designed presentation on your website and landing pages

Visme

Where: Visme What: infographics, presentations, charts and reports, graphics Why I love it: Free tool with a lot of amazing templates and an easy to use builder

Piktochart

Where: Piktochart What: infographics, presentations, posters, and reports Why I love it: very easy to use and lots of templates to customize

Infogram

Where: Infogram What: infographics, graphs, charts, reports, maps, social media images, etc. Why I love it: there is so much that you can create + it’s free and there are plenty of templates to help you get started

Venngage

Where: Venngage What: infographics, reports, posters, social media images, promotional visual content Why I love it: you can create your visuals very easily, in just 3 steps: choose the template, add your visuals, text, and charts, and finally, customize it to your liking

Easelly

Where: Easelly What: infographics, reports, resumes, processes Why I love it: amazing templates, and you can get started just by clicking on one of them

How to create videos

Did you know that one third of all online activity around the world is spent watching videos? Video is one of the most popular forms of content in the world. Only YouTube has over a billion users who watch over 500 million hours of video every day – and that’s just one platform. And most other social media channels have also embraced video over the last couple of years – something that’s easy to notice every time you go through your home feed on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. So, why use videos? Well, apart from the reason above – i.e. people love them – videos can also:

• Help you generate more engagement and shares on social media (1200% more shares on average than text and images combined)
• Help with conversions – in fact, studies show that marketers who use video in their content strategy have managed to grow their revenue 49% faster than those who don’t).
• Improve your landing page conversions
• Help you market your business and showcase your products and services in a highly effective format
• Boost your email open and click-through rates – just including the word “video” in the subject line will help you achieve this

Video marketing best practices – before you create any more marketing videos, check these tips:

• Keep things short unless absolutely necessary; few people have the patience to watch a long video, especially on social media. And if it is a longer video, make sure you get your point across in the first 10-20 seconds
• Add subtitles to social media videos – most people don’t have the sound on when watching videos on social media (maybe they’re already listening to something else, or they’re at work – but generally, they don’t turn up the volume on social media) so you need to make sure that anyone watching will understand everything with no sound
• Experiment and optimise – try different types of videos, both in terms of topic and of look and feel (animated, live action, whiteboard, etc.), to find out what types of videos work best for you and improve future videos for better results

Now, here are some of the best tools to help you create videos yourself – no footage or music necessary!

Wave.video

Where: Wave.video What: social media videos with subtitles Why I love it: it’s very easy to use and they offer a huge library of over 200 million videos and stock images + effects and music; plus, you can optimise your video for all platforms at once

GoAnimate

Where: GoAnimate What: animated social media and marketing/business videos Why I love it: Because I never would’ve thought it could be so easy to create an animated video!

Slidely Promo

Where: Slidely Promo What: marketing/business videos Why I love it: another easy to use video creator, with millions of video clips to choose from, as well as music

Wideo

Where: Wideo What: animated social media and marketing videos Why I love it: another surprisingly easy to use drag-and-drop tool for creating highly engaging animated videos

Powtoon

Where: Powtoon What: animated marketing videos, presentations Why I love it: not only can you create awesome animated videos easily, but you can also use it for creating unique presentations (and it’s free, which is always a huge plus!)

Conclusion

Visual content is hugely successful and only growing in popularity – it’s more engaging, more fun, more eye-catching and therefore it brings about a plethora of benefits from a business marketing standpoint:

• More traffic
• More conversions and sales
• More engagement on social media and your blog and website

How do you use visual content to your advantage? What types of visual content do you use the most to help market your business? Let me know in the comments section below and do share if you enjoyed the post.

Related: death blogging highly exaggerated.

Worth reading next: How to Use AI for Email Marketing as a Photographer.

2026 Update: What Has Changed in Visual Content Marketing Since I First Wrote This

I wrote this post back in 2021 and, honestly, a fair bit has shifted since then. If you landed here from search and you are wondering whether any of this still holds up, the short answer is: some of it does, some of it really does not. So before you scroll down to the original recommendations, let me give you the honest 2026 picture first.

The biggest change is AI image and video generation, full stop. Tools like Canva's AI suite, Adobe Firefly, and a whole wave of newer players have made it possible to produce reasonably polished visual assets without a designer on hand. That is genuinely useful for small teams and solo marketers. What I will say, though, is that the output still needs a human eye on it. AI-generated visuals have a certain sameness to them that your audience is starting to clock, so if everything you put out looks like it came from the same prompt, it will start to feel flat. Use the tools, but put your own stamp on the work.

Short-form video has completely eaten the space that static infographics used to own. In 2021 I was still talking about infographics as a solid content format, and they are not dead, but they have moved down the priority list for most marketers I speak to. If you are not producing short video content in some form right now, whether that is on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts, you are leaving a lot of visibility on the table. Tools like CapCut and Descript have made video editing far less painful than it used to be, which removes most of the excuses.

Brand consistency has also become harder to maintain, not easier, because there are now so many more surfaces and formats to manage. I have been recommending that my clients build out a proper visual brand kit, even a simple one, before they start spinning up AI-generated content. Otherwise things drift very quickly and your visuals stop feeling coherent across platforms.

One more thing worth saying: the sheer volume of visual content being produced has gone up dramatically, which means quality and originality matter more than ever. Churning out generic graphics faster is not the win it might look like. Think about what actually makes your visuals worth stopping for, and start there. The rest of this post covers the tools, but strategy comes first.

FAQ

What types of visual content work best in 2026?

Short vertical video and screenshots of real work beat polished stock imagery for most small businesses, because they prove something happened. Simple charts built from your own numbers do the same job for B2B. The pattern is that the image carries evidence rather than decoration, so a rough screenshot of a result will outperform a stock photo of a smiling team almost every time.

Do I need a designer to create visual content?

Not for most of it. Canva, your phone camera and a screenshot tool cover the majority of what a small business needs, and the gap between a designer's version and yours matters far less than posting consistently. Bring a designer in for the things that carry your brand for years, such as a logo or a sales deck, and keep the day to day work in house.

How much visual content should a small business post?

Enough that people recognise your work before they read the caption, which in practice means a few pieces a week rather than a daily grind. Repurposing is what makes that sustainable: one video becomes clips, stills, quote cards and a chart, so a single afternoon of filming can feed several weeks of posting. The content repurposing tools that do this well are worth setting up once and reusing.

The short version: Visual content is what stops the scroll and builds brand recognition, and 2021's top tools like Canva, Visme, Animoto and Piktochart make it possible to create scroll-stopping graphics, infographics and videos without a design team. Pick tools that match your content goals, whether that's social graphics, video or data visualization, and consistency will follow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free visual content marketing tool?

Canva remains the top pick for beginners and small businesses because it offers a huge library of free templates covering social posts, presentations and basic video content, all within an easy drag-and-drop editor.

Do I need different tools for video versus graphics?

Yes, generally. Tools like Canva and Piktochart are built for static graphics and infographics, while platforms like Animoto and InVideo specialize in turning images and clips into polished marketing videos.

How much should a small business budget for visual content tools?

Many businesses can start with free plans and upgrade only when they need advanced features like brand kits, team collaboration or premium stock libraries, so a reasonable starting budget is often between $10 and $50 a month.

Can these tools help with social media specifically?

Yes, most visual content tools include pre-sized templates for platforms like Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, which saves time and keeps your social posts looking professional and on-brand.