9 Time-Saving Marketing Resources

1. Canva is a user-friendly, free alternative to PhotoShop for professional quality digital and printed marketing collateral. It even has stock photos inside the program. Pro tip: It’s well worth paying for the pro version at $10/month for one login.

2. Emojipedia Add emojis to your email campaigns to make them standout in inboxes.

3. Convert Case is a timesaver when you need to convert copy from all caps to sentence case or any other combination. Just paste in the text you want to convert and choose the desired output.

4. Rhyme Zone is very handy as a thesaurus and for finding rhymes when you’re naming things. You can filter for number of syllables, word type, etc.

5. ChatGPT can craft descriptions and marketing messages for you. Feed it info, format, audience, and purpose. Adjust the output by providing feedback until it’s close enough for you to finish editing on your own.   

6. UTM Builder adds important tracking data to your inbound links from your digital and printed material, so you can see the source in your Google Analytics. Here’s an example of a link from a newsletter: https://www.visitpetaluma.com/restaurants/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sept-locals Make sure your URL has an ending forward slash (/) before pasting into generator.

7. QR codes make it easier for folks to head to a specific webpage without typing. They are also perfect for putting interior page URLs or URLs with tracking codes on printed materials. QR Codes can be created with QR Code Generator, Canva, Bitly and Adobe Express.

8. National Day Calendar lists day, week, and month observances from official to silly. Keep this bookmarked so you don’t miss those days that are relevant to your business. Peak at this calendar when creating your social media calendars for the upcoming months.

9. Make sure you have decent high-res photos. Your social posts, digital and print ads, fliers, and calendar listings are only as good as your photos. Bookmark these free sources of stock images that have filters for orientation, color, depth of field, etc.

• Adobe Stock (put “free” in the filter)
• Unsplash (Most free ones are low res; good for digital, but not print.)

A word about smartphone photos and resolution

If you’re taking photos with your phone (not ideal, but sometimes necessary), make sure your phone’s photo app keeps the full version of the photo on the phone. You can check and change that in your phone settings. You can also continue to have the phone save the low-res version on the phone to save room, but download the full version of the photo from the cloud.

High-res is 300dpi or more. Most phone photos are 72dpi. That’s a noticeable difference. Especially for printed images or larger displays. However, 72dpi is fine for social posts. You can’t increase the resolution without photo-editing software, and even then it’s only enhancing after the fact with limited results.

How to find the resolution of a photo

Look at the photo on your phone and hit the “i” to view details. if you’ve already transferred it to your computer, right click on the file to view properties on your PC (“Get info” on a mac). Look in the “details” tab and find resolution. In addition, many desktop photo viewing apps provide this information when you open a photo in them.