Author Review: Visme, a Powerpoint-meets-Canva Product
It's no secret that I love Canva. As an author, it is the tool I usually use to design my book covers and social media graphics for both business and pleasure. So, I was super intrigued when the team at Visme reached out to me after reading one of my blog posts about what tools authors need in their arsenal. They asked me to review their new product, which they market as PowerPoint-meets-Canva. After using the product myself for a few months, here are my thoughts on Visme as an author!
Before I began seriously pursuing my writing, I worked in corporate America at a healthcare technology company, where I created PowerPoint after PowerPoint for client training purposes. My first impression of Visme is that boy, I wish I had access to this tool back in those days. The customization for branding presentations and business documents is amazing. I would recommend any company that is looking to enhance the look and feel of their presentations to try out Visme.
But since I'm no longer a huge corporation, I was a little nervous upon launching Visme that this tool was too corporate for me. Visme offers a wide range of project templates for PowerPoint presentations, infographics, documents, charts & graphs, etc, which is totally great in a large company space. But as an author, I wasn't sure how this tool would really aid me in my own marketing goals.
The good news: Visme isn't just catering to big companies and corporations with their available templates. Visme also allows users to design web graphics, video/GIFs, and the all-powerful social media graphics. With Visme, I can create sleek, on-brand graphics to post on my social media, blog posts, and website. But more than that, Visme offers a wide variety of content creation options. Need a flyer or poster for an in-person author event? Visme can help. Need to publish survey results from your reader newsletter? With Visme, you can design charts, graphs, and survey results galore!
Check out these cool design features below:
Create printables with Visme such as author event flyers: https://www.visme.co/flyer-maker/
Create Graphs and Charts from newsletter data: https://www.visme.co/graph-maker/
Publish newsletter survey results: https://www.visme.co/survey-results-report/
The best news: Visme is a free tool! I know that they have plans available for purchase in both monthly and yearly subscriptions as well (which range from $15-$29/month), but this powerful software doesn't require any financial commitment.
As an author, I find that Visme is a worthy design tool for content marketing materials. Whether you're a traditionally published or independent author (or both, like myself), it's important to keep your branding consistent with the rest of your visual materials so readers know they are still reading "your" work - whether on paper or online. Using Visme, I am able to manage a "My Brand" page, where I can upload logos, my website, colors, styles, and fonts that I use daily on my social media. With those branding items loaded into Visme, I can create graphics at a click of the button that pulls my adorable Sarah E. Burr logo, as well as my favorite colors (purple and gold) into a showstopping design. Once your brand information is loaded into Visme's interface, it makes it easy to create marketing materials for my book tours, blog posts, and more.
There is a bit of a learning curve with Visme; the interface can often feel very busy because the platform allows you to do so much. This brings me to my next point: Visme's customer service. As a former call center survivor, I know how demanding customer service can be. I also know that it's possible to deliver kind and courteous service to your clients. I was so impressed with the customer care I received from the Visme team. Whenever I had a question, their support team readily answered. If I ran into an issue, they were on it. Their feedback/enhancement process was also very transparent which was a pleasant surprise. The Visme team also offers new and existing clients access to free webinar training which I HIGHLY recommend you take advantage of. I learned so much about their product and how to better use it to meet my own book marketing goals.
I have been using Visme for several months now, and I am still enjoying the platform for my social media needs. It allows me to create beautiful content, and it's really made for people who don't actually have extensive experience in multimedia design. For authors who are shopping around for content designing applications, Visme is definitely worthy of your consideration. It's a great tool for authors who are looking to promote their books online but don't know where to start with designing promo materials. It is a worthwhile investment because you can create professional graphics without any design experience.
I am an author who is always looking for tools to make book promotion easier. When marketing becomes more streamlined, I have more time to write. Visme offers authors the ability to manage their own branding and take their social media content to the next level. From custom animated videos showcasing your new release or a meme-inspired image of what you do best, Visme can help you craft images that will engage your readers in ways you never thought possible!
Take your book promotion to the next level with Visme and enjoy more time to do what you do best: write!