Grow Your Program
How To's
Elevate Your Marketing Graphics Game (for Free!)
It seems like every place you go online to post is shining with bright and interesting pictures.
It makes sense —people are visual, and eye-catching graphics are essential when grabbing someone’s attention. Well-created pictures motivate and inspire us to make decisions, boost the words that accompany them, and call us to action. Whether you’re creating content for traditional marketing, digital marketing, or blog posts —strong images will improve your marketing efforts.
Your program deserves awesome marketing. But you probably have to carefully tend your resources —both your budget and your time. Having high-quality materials can seem out of reach, even though you know that your program enrollment would benefit from them. And sometimes you want to make something to perfectly suit your program but don’t want to have to learn how to be a graphic designer to do it!
Fortunately, there are many resources for finding and designing captivating images you can use to market your classes. You don’t need to have special skills or a big budget to create striking, sharable image content with these two programs: Canva and Adobe Spark.
A Brilliant Pair
Canva and Adobe Spark are browser-based apps which allow you to create graphics to use for your programs for social media posts to flyers and everything in between.
The products have some similarities: each has a wide array of easy-to-use templates, allows you to create attractive graphics quickly and easily, supports the upload and use of your own images, and autosaves projects as you work on them (the best feature!)
You’ll be an ace in no time, no matter which you choose —and we’ve prepared the scoop on each of them!
Canva
Canva is a cloud-based, drag-and-drop graphic design program used to construct graphics for social media, presentations, graphs, charts, infographics, and even basic photo editing. Canva has templates designed for print or web.
- Can publish to pretty much any social network directly from Canva;
- Free stock images and paid images are mixed together in search;
- Completed piece does not contain a watermark;
- Full version “Canva for Work” costs $12.95/per month and is also offered free for nonprofits.
In addition, Canva even provides teaching materials in case you’d like to learn (or teach others!) how to use Canva!
An example post made with Canva:
Adobe Spark
Highly intuitive, Adobe Spark delivers quickly and easily. This suite of drag-and-drop online graphic design apps allows users to create content optimized for the web, including social media graphics, web pages, and even videos. (Learn more about Adobe Spark videos by reading our how-to post!)
- Download or share via Facebook, Twitter, Google Classroom, email, or by posting a link;
- Free stock images are easy-to-search;
- Change fonts, colors, etc. with ease; customized branding available with the full version;
- Content created using the free version of Adobe Spark will contain Spark branding which can’t be removed without upgrading to the full version, which costs $9.99/month. However, the cost extends to an entire team.
An example post made with Adobe Spark:
Putting It Together
Each of these tools is powerful and offers a wide range of options for creating impactful images for your program.
Attention-getting materials can help energize and inspire your community to not only register for your classes but also to become evangelists, sharing information about your offerings. You can make it easy by providing high-quality marketing materials that are easy to share, have a professional look, and fit your budget!
Now that you have two easy-to-master tools that will help you make brilliant, share-worthy materials – what will you promote next?
If you are looking for easy marketing of your classes, with great photos, and class pages designed to share, you may want to try CourseStorm for free.
Nic Lyons
Nic is skilled in scaling start-up edtech and education organizations to growth-stage success through innovative marketing. A former journalist and copywriter, Nic holds a postgraduate certificate in digital and print publishing from Columbia University School of Journalism's publishing course.