Four Free Online Tools for Quicker Digital Campaign Completion
Whether you develop digital campaigns as an in-house member of your company’s marketing team, or do so within a marketing agency on behalf of your clients, there are moments where you get stuck on something that’s keeping you from reaching the most satisfying point of these projects — hitting “Schedule” or “Publish.”
I’ve been there
I’ve been on both sides — a marketing execution specialist and later a lead in W2 roles and, starting in 2016, a freelancer and eventually a business-owner consultant who works with businesses on their marketing campaigns.
The benefit of the good ol’ browser bookmark
While providers of marketing campaign development tools like Canva and Photoshop stuff ever more AI-powered help features into their solutions, at times like what I mentioned above, a robust library of bookmarks in your browser can be your best friend.
The internet is awash in free tools to help you on your campaign publishing journey. However, there are land mines along the way in the form of spammy redirecting websites, tools that embed their logo in your image and video output, and more dangers and annoyances.
Based on my 18+ years of digital campaign development experience, here are four free help tools I use that you can trust. Bookmark away!
CloudConvert. Over the years, I’ve tried close to 10 converter tools, and this one is the best. Developed and based in Germany, this is like the BMW of doc, image, and video converter solutions — it’s a lean machine that just works. As you can see at the top of the screen, they give you a ton of convert “from” and “to” options. One that I’ve used often is the PDF to JPG converter. Check it out and benefit from repurposing existing content into new formats that you can publish on more channels.
This 16:9 Ratio Calculator. This is one I found more recently and have used to set thumbnail images for videos. If you need to choose an image for your video that’s not a still frame from the actual video, and you know your width (often, 1920 or 1280 pixels for HD videos), this tool will tell you where you need to crop the height to make the thumbnail image the right dimensions. There is also a calculator on this site for 4:3 aspect-ratio videos and images.
Emoji Finder. I am so glad that this tool exists! It’s my go-to for adding emojis to everything from email subject lines to LinkedIn post copy. While the aforementioned LinkedIn — along with most other publishing platforms, such as Hootsuite — include an emojis icon where you can click to access the full emoji library, I’ve found that the emoji search bar in these tools isn’t as good as the search function on Emoji Finder. Plus, on Emoji Finder, when it pulls up a human-skin emoji like a face, hand, or arm, you are given all the skin tone options — very helpful when you want to align your posts to your brand and/or target audiences.
LinkedIn’s Post Inspector. This tool helps you understand what will be shown on LinkedIn for a link image, title, and featured snippet text when you drop a link into a post to publish from your profile or your company’s LinkedIn page. A great thing about it is that you can change the associated image and/or title for the link you want to use, add your updated link in the field, click “Inspect,” and the tool will re-scrape your link to provide a current assessment (no need to worry about browser caching getting in the way). And while this tool is part of LinkedIn, you can use it to preview your links for sharing on all platforms.
Related post
Staying on the topic of free content development tools, are you still using Photoshop? If so, did you know that the free Photopea solution has basically the same tool suite and layout/interface as Photoshop? Check out my post on why I switched from Photoshop to Photopea last year.
