It’s no secret: marketing brings in new customers to small, medium, and large businesses, with a strong emphasis on regular uploads in 2025. But posting 3-5 times a week whilst running a business is much more complicated than it sounds. Even trickier is uploading quality content that looks and sounds great. Whilst you don’t need to be a Photoshop wizard, the content that you post does need to represent your brand – and spending 30 seconds on a poster made in MS Paint might not give your business the best first impression! We have compiled a list of the best apps and programmes for creating engaging content that looks the part.
Canva
This is undoubtedly on A LOT of content creation lists, but for good reason! You can achieve similar work in Canva to basic posts and advertisements created in programmes such as Photoshop. Whilst Photoshop has a steep learning curve, Canva is intuitive and does much of the work for you. It offers templates as a starting point, making it easy to find a style that fits your needs. For example, if I run a carpet cleaning service but don’t have the creativity or time to create social media templates from scratch, Canva quickly generates strong starting points with a quick search in the templates tab. From here, you can change colours, fonts, and text to reflect your brand and sound more like your business.
And this is all just in the free version of Canva! In the premium version, you can create your own brand kits and get access to even more templates and graphics. If you haven’t already, we highly recommend you try Canva.
Instagram Edits
We have discussed the Instagram Edits app before and believe it is one of the best video editing apps available on your device. Even though Instagram creates it, there is no reason why you can’t use the final video on other apps – the exports come with no watermarks. Here is a list of some of the basic things you can do in the app:
- Trim and move footage on the timeline.
- Add text and auto-captions, and edit the colour and style.
- Add your own voice-over.
- Overlay footage.
- Overlay people onto the background using the “Cutout” feature.
- Mask footage and images quickly to shapes you want.
- Add music and SFX to elevate your production.
Whilst we know many of these features are available in CapCut and TikTok, we believe Instagram Edits is easy to use and offers a more precise mobile video-editing experience. Your videos can then be sent directly to Instagram through the app, similar to TikTok, or you can download your footage up to 4K without losing resolution (one of our favourite perks of the app!).
Agorapulse
Now that you have created your content, you probably want to schedule your posts. If you manage 3 or more platforms, this will take valuable time away from running your business, so we recommend using Agorapulse to plan all your content in one place. Agorapulse is a content scheduling platform that lets you choose when and where your content is posted. It saves us hours of switching between apps and devices to upload our content and our clients’ content. Without Agorapulse, we would have a much harder time managing content across 10+ businesses, which could ultimately lead to mistakes.
Agorapulse offers a free version that limits you to 3 social profiles (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.), 1 user seat (your business), 100 synced inbox items per month, and 10 scheduled posts. If you’re looking to put 5+ hours into your marketing a week, then this is enough to get you started, with the paid version giving you more of everything. You can schedule your posts in advance, allowing you to work on your marketing in bulk rather than returning daily to create and schedule posts.
Mailchimp
Email marketing is a direct way to reach your target audience, and Mailchimp is an excellent tool if that’s your approach. Mailchimp is a service that lets you create, schedule, and send emails to contacts and provides performance reports to help you improve next time. Mailchimp offers a free version, ideal for beginners who want to dip their toes into email marketing. With the free plan of Mailchimp, you can get access to:
- 250 contacts
- 500 monthly sends, with a daily limit of 250 sends
- pre-built templates
- forms
- basic reporting
- 30-day limited email support
Even with these limited features, it’s a great way to start looking into your email marketing, especially if you have an online shop.
Microsoft Teams
If you’re a medium to large-sized business and you aren’t using Microsoft Teams to coordinate between staff and jobs, then what are you doing? Of course, you could use any team management software, but Teams really does have it all when it comes to planning and generating content ideas. Within Teams, you can set up shared channels with other businesses to discuss content ideas, create task buckets, and, most importantly, store marketing imagery securely.
Teams can be used across multiple industries and are becoming more widely known as the team management software, so even if you don’t use it already for marketing, there are definitely ways to implement that strategy through the software.
We hope you have found some useful content creation tools here to plan, produce and post your marketing online to promote your business. If you’re looking for more helpful advice on marketing and building your business, make sure to check out more posts on our news page. If you’re looking for an experienced, creative team to represent your business online through social media marketing, PR, and website development, please get in touch with us. We want to work with even more amazing companies in the North East, and we’d love to chat with you to see how we can help.