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Visuals have a huge impact in marketing. Not only do they make content more sharable — 40 times as much — but they help us retain information. When details are paired with an image, we remember 55% more of it.

That can be pulled off with infographics — the nifty images that visually break down complex statistics. They’re customizable, sharable, and they’re easier to create than you might think.

Sure, you could hire a professional to create the infographics for you. But if you’re restricted by budgets or time, there are some great DIY resources out there for making compelling visuals.

We scouted the web for some of them — check them out below. (And for more on how to create an infographic, check out these tips.)

8 Helpful Resources for Creating Beautiful Infographics

1) Canva

Cost: Free, with an upgrade available for $12.95/month or $119.40/year

Oh, how we love the ease and intuitiveness of Canva. From the very beginning, it asks you a series of simple, colorfully-illustrated questions about what’s brought you to their site. (Today, it’s infographics, but there’s a ton of other stuff you can create there, too.)

Once you’ve let Canva know what you want to do, the site generates several templates you can use as a foundation for your infographic. Plus, it’s got a library of roughly 1,000,000 images that you can add to your project.

From there, you can edit the text, background image, shapes and other aspects of the infographic to make it your own. And it’s so easy — here’s a goofy one that I put together on how my dog spends his day:

Source: Canva

2) Piktochart

Cost: Free, with paid packages available starting at $15/month

Similar to Canva, Piktochart can be used to design more than just infographics — it can also build reports, presentations, and posters.

But the templates available for infographics are numerous, and there’s an upgrade available. “Pro” memberships — which run between $15-$30, depending on the features you want — allow access to even more templates, as well as removed watermarks and hi-res downloads.

When it comes to creating the infographic itself, the features are fairly similar to Canva’s — the background, text, and images can all be changed, or users can upload their own files for greater personalization.

3) Venngage

Cost: Free, with paid packages available starting at $19/month

Like its predecessors above, Venngage has quite a few design features, including its great social media templates, which users can download to create their own personalized Instagram posts, blog headers, and more.

For infographics, there’s a decent range of templates, each categorized by type — statistical, process, and timeline, to name a few. Some of the templates are limited to premium members, reflecting Venngage’s four-tiered approach to pricing — free, premium, education, and non-profit. Plus, there are templates available for those latter two categories. Here’s one that helps non-profits visually communicate highlights from an annual report:

4) Easel.ly

Cost: Free, or PRO for $36/year

Upon visiting Easel.ly’s website, you’re immediately presented with a plethora of infographic templates, most of which can be immediately clicked and customized without having to create an account. If you want to save and share your work, though, you will have to join — for free.

Unlike its predecessors listed here, Easel.ly seems to be a no-frills platform that’s comprised of infographics. You can choose which category you’d like, but it’s not quite as organized as some other sites — the drop-down menu is a bit hidden to the left of the templates. Still, most of templates appear to be available for free (more become available with a Pro membership), and they’re fairly easy to edit.

5) Freepik

Cost: Free, with paid packages available starting at $7.50/month

As its name suggests, Freepik is a resource for, well, free pictures. Infographics are just one type, but after performing a search for them, there are plenty of options — most of which are complimentary.

The only drawback? Freepik doesn’t quite allow the same level of customization that some others in this list do. You can download the images for free, but you’ll need a vector graphics editor in order to customize them — Brittany Leaning and Megan Conley of HubSpot’s content marketing team both suggest using Adobe Illustrator.

6) Infogram

Cost: Very limited options available for free, with paid packages available starting at $19/month

Like many of its visual peers, Infogram is a resource that helps users create both picturesque charts and infographics. It’s definitely one of the more “grown-up” sites available for building these images, which might explain why very few of their tools a re free — including restricting your work from public consumption.

However, Infogram also has the option of enlisting professional help with infographic design. So if you’re short on time and have a bit of room in your budget, this route might be the best one for you.

7) Zanifesto

Cost: Free, with paid packages available starting at $14/month

At the very top of Zanifesto’s website, there’s bold red banner that reads, “Create something.” Love at first visual, if you ask us.

When you click on that banner, a list of pricing options appear, one of which is free and all of which are reasonable. The only drawback? It looks like you have to create an account to access any of the resources, even the free ones. Plus, the free option restricts you from being able to uploading any custom graphics.

But once you do create a free account, there are plenty of template options and, despite not being able to use your own graphics, Zanifesto’s library of icons provides a decent selection.

8) Google Charts

Cost: Free

Okay, maybe a chart isn’t exactly the same as an infographic. But, given the interesting selection templates made available by Google, we would be remiss to exclude it.

There are a few items of value in Google charts. First, we love the selection of charts available. From animated bubble graphs — like the one above — to clever word trees, the features allow users to bring information to life. (I mean, admit it — adding animation to data always makes it a little less boring.)

Plus, these charts can be created to be interactive. One of our favorites, GeoCharts, allows data to be assigned to different regions of a map that appear when hovered over. Check it out:

Source: Google GeoCharts

We’ll admit that some features of Google Charts might be a bit more advanced than the other resources we’ve listed. But, if you’re ready to step up your visuals game, give it a try.

Start Creating

There’s no shortage of resources when it comes to creating your own visuals — charts, reports, and infographics. And, depending on your budget and needs, there’s a veritable plethora of options available, all of which have their pros, with very few cons.

What are your go-to resources for creating beautiful infographics? Let us know in the comments.

Imagine someone arrives at your website, Facebook Page, or advertisement. Now, imagine that you could change your marketing dynamically, right there on the spot, in response to their emotional reactions.

It would be nothing short of a game changer for your business, right?

Yet this is not fantasy. Exploding with investment and technological advances, the world of emotion detection and recognition technology will change the face of marketing in the years to come.

Emotions are what drive your audience to purchase. In fact, studies by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio found that people with damage to the part of the brain that triggers emotions — in other words, people that are unable to feel emotions — find it extremely difficult to make decisions.

The lesson? If your marketing is not evoking an emotional response from your target audience, you are making it extremely difficult for your prospective customers to purchase from you. That’s right, your own marketing is potentially causing prospects to turn away from you and your brand.

What’s a marketer to do? Let’s dive into some research. 

The Power of Emotions

Many of the most successful marketing campaigns and initiatives are focused on emotions. Take Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, which was an attempt to change the conversation around women’s beauty. Or Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign, firing up the inner-athlete in everyone. Or MasterCard’s “Priceless” campaign, which has been powering brand success for a whopping 19+ years.

All of this marketing aims to move your heart, and then relies on the experience to build a lasting bond with the brand. What it doesn’t do is rely on feature sets, discounts, or new technology to move you to a sale. None of it speaks to the number of offices, employees, or years in business of the brand. Google Senior VP of Global Marketing, Lorraine Twohill, states, “If we don’t make you cry, we fail. It’s about emotion.”

Twohill is not alone with this sentiment. Multiple studies point to emotional marketing as more effective than other forms of marketing (e.g., product-focused marketing). Based on an analysis of 1,400 successful ad campaigns, the book Brand Immortality by Hamish Pringle and Peter Field reveals that advertising campaigns focused on emotional content performed approximately twice as well (31% vs. 16%) as those with only rational content.

The power of emotional content should not come as a surprise. After all, emotions drive us to action. As consumers, we first decide on a purchase based on emotion, and then try to justify it through the more rational parts of our brain. Longer-term, emotions are what cause people to prefer brand names, even if generic alternatives are available.

Findings from a 2015 Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience study of 100 ads across 25 brands in the consumer goods market revealed that ads with the best emotional response generated a 23% lift in sales, meaning that emotional marketing is not merely effective as an engagement vehicle but also as a true business driver.

And don’t think that emotion-based marketing is applicable to only B2C marketing and individual consumers. Business buyers are also creatures of emotion. In fact, successful B2B companies like GE, Cisco, IBM, AutoDesk, and Qualcomm all focus on emotions in their marketing. Similar to the Pringle and Field findings, the research report “From Promotion to Emotion: Connecting B2B Customers to Brands” by CES and Google explains that B2B brands achieve roughly twice the impact with a target audience when appealing to the personal value to the buyer including emotional benefits. 

A Mountain of Investment

In consideration of the power of emotional marketing, it should be no surprise that the emotion detection and recognition market is projected to be worth $22.65 Billion by 2020, according to the market research firm MarketsandMarkets. As a result, investment in the space is exploding.

Apple, one of the most valuable companies on the planet, has been keenly interested in emotion recognition for years. In 2014 the company filed a patent that described software for analyzing and identifying a person’s mood based on a variety of signals, including facial expression. Earlier this year, Apple acquired Emotient, an emotion-recognition technology company.

Emotient has a patent for a method of collecting and labeling up to 100,000 facial images a day, supporting a computer’s ability to recognize facial expressions. It’s reasonable to believe that Emotient’s emotion recognition technology will start appearing in iPhones and iPads before you know it, and then possibly used as a platform for more targeted and dynamic engagement when users are in their browsers.

Last year the consumer-research company Nielsen bought Innerscope, which uses biometrics such as brain scans and galvanic skin response (GSR) to measure subconscious emotional responses to media and marketing.

Affectiva, an emotion recognition technology developer, raised $14 million just a few months ago. Affectiva boasts the world’s largest emotion data repository, with 40 billion data points and close to 4 million faces analyzed using its technology.

Overall, those using emotion analysis to test audience reaction to their marketing include major marketers such as Unilever, P&G, Mars, Honda, Kellogg, and Coca Cola. For example, Kellogg’s used Affectiva’s software to determine its ads for Crunchy Nut cereal, with the goal of generating high engagement rates with the audience. Viewers were shown multiple versions of a commercial featuring animals. A version of the ad featuring a snake produced the most laughs, but low engagement rates when viewing the ad a second time.

The facial recognition software revealed that an alternative version of the ad featuring an alien produced the desired engagement levels. Kellogg’s therefore decided to rollout the alien-based ad instead, helping to drive the cereal’s sales.

Nothing Short of a Revolution

Being able to adjust one’s marketing dynamically, based on the real-time reactions of your audience, will empower marketers to provide the right message at the right time to the right person.

In the future, it’s likely that you’ll be able to calibrate your marketing mid-stream with just about any digital experience — no two prospects may experience a brand’s marketing in the same exact way.

Going beyond advertising, you can already see how Facebook is on a path to incorporating emotional reaction into a user’s News Feed by introducing “Reactions” this past February. Rather than simply “Liking” a post, users can now designate their reaction across six emotions: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry.

Facebook interprets the use of Reactions as an indication that a person’s network on the social platform wants to see more of those types of posts. That type of primitive application is sure to evolve moving forward. Sammi Krug, Product Manager at Facebook, explains, “Over time we hope to learn how the different Reactions should be weighted differently by News Feed to do a better job of showing everyone the stories they most want to see.”

As of the time of this writing, Facebook Ads treat Reactions the same as Likes. Ad reports do not include a breakdown of individual Reactions, although the breakdown can be found in Page Insights. For ad delivery, as well, Reactions are treated the same as Likes. Of course the next logical step will be for Facebook to treat different emotional reactions differently, rewarding Love more than Like, for example, and demoting an ad’s visibility if users express anger.

The Future

It’s safe to say that we should expect a great deal of change in the world of marketing moving forward. Gabi Zijderveld, CMO at Affectiva, provides a peek into the future by explaining the evolution of emotion recognition technology:

Initially, the technology was used to understand how consumers engage with their brand content and advertising, and how these emotions then influence brand awareness and purchase intent. Now the technology is also used to infuse consumer experiences, apps and interactive advertising with Emotion AI. This will help to transform the face of marketing and advertising by reading human emotions and then adapting consumer experiences to these emotions in real time. The technology gives marketers the power to truly delight and engage their customers with uniquely dynamic and personalized interactions.”

Web development is already on the path towards more personalization. As emotion recognition technology becomes more sophisticated and more deeply embedded in our array of devices, it will become expected that our computers and phones provide us with a continual progression of customized triggers and messaging. The technology will be found even in future car dashboards, refrigerator doors, and conference room walls — essentially any surface will become a possible means for detection of emotions.

Social media will constantly focus on each user’s emotions. For example, in the future expect Facebook’s algorithm to focus just as much on one’s emotional reactions as it does to one’s historical click behavior, providing a unique social environment that goes far beyond prediction of the types of posts, pages, and ads one would like. Expect Facebook Ads to provide advertisers with the ability to hyper target not only based on age, geography, and job titles, but also on the individual’s emotional state or progression of emotional states.

Online marketing will likely evolve into sequential experiences, with deeper engagement upon recognition of positive emotional reactions. You can also expect more deeply embedded forms of marketing similar to product placement. Ultimately, expect emotion recognition to be just another core component of marketing, similar to how “digital marketing” is now really just “marketing.”

Emotion recognition technology is clearly bringing about a revolution in marketing. Are you ready to start capitalizing on the opportunity?

We complain about spending countless hours in unproductive and mismanaged meetings.

But the greater crime is all the wasted time we spend scheduling the meeting.

The endless back and forth communication and steps — reviewing calendars, finding out the best place to meet, setting up a call-in number, adding the meeting to the calendar, and inviting all the necessary attendees. The process makes your meeting a hassle before it even starts.  

Whether you’re trying to find the perfect window of time to catch up with your busy team, or looking for the best way to coordinate with your clients, these meeting scheduler tools have you covered. 

Meeting Scheduler Tools To Improve Your Day

Rally

Finding a time for a group of people to meet can be a nightmare, especially if your team is large or includes remote employees. Rally lets you create a simple, straightforward poll where attendees can vote on a day for an event that works best for them. It also includes an open comment section on the meeting page, so attendees can plan the meeting agenda or discuss details before the event.

Doodle

With Doodle, you can pick date and time options, and poll a group to see what works best for them. You don’t have to sign up for a Doodle account to participate in a poll. You can also create a public Doodle URL, where individuals can request a meeting with you based on your listed availability. 

HubSpot Meetings

A lot of meeting scheduler tools connect to your inbox, but what if you need your meeting schedule available in your CRM as well? HubSpot’s Meetings tool integrates with both your calendar and your HubSpot CRM, so setting up meetings with customers, prospects, or leads is a painless process.

The Meetings tool provides users with a personalized booking link they can share via email to invite people to view their availability and book time. When someone schedules a meeting, it will automatically be added to your calendar, and pushed to the CRM.

Assistant.to

Assistant.to lets you work directly from Gmail and Google Calendar to select available meeting times and share those open slots with the person you’re trying to schedule a meeting with.

From within the message compose screen in Gmail, you can select the meeting duration and location. This information is included in an email, allowing the recipient to click on the time that works best for them. Once you’ve agreed on a time, the app adds the meeting with all the relevant details to your calendar. Currently, group scheduling is not an option.

Calendly

Calendly integrates directly with your Google or Office 365 calendar, and gives you a personalized URL where people can view your availability and schedule times to meet you. They offer a basic free plan, and a paid premium plan that allows for group scheduling and other additional features.

To help you stay organized, the app lets you set up custom meeting types and durations, e.g., “30 Minute Check-In” or “60 Minute Project Review.” You can add also add custom questions to the form people use to sign up to meet with you, include a link to a document or web page people should review prior to your meeting, or even make events private. 

Timebridge

Timebridge is a free service that offers two ways to schedule meetings. With the “outbound” method, hosts indicate their own availability, list the attendees, and Timebridge sends out an email to collect everyone’s preferred times. After it’s determined the ideal time for everyone to meet, the app will schedule the meeting for you. With the “inbound” method, Timebridge gives you a personal URL where users can check your availability and request times to meet with you.

NeedToMeet

NeedToMeet doesn’t require you to sign up for an account to use their service. You simply enter a brief description of your meeting’s purpose, block off your availability on a calendar, and send the link to attendees. The free version doesn’t sync with your calendar, but they do offer a premium subscription which integrates with Outlook.

This tool differs from services like Rally and Doodle because it allows attendees to indicate their preferred date and times, rather than only choosing from a list of dates and times set by the meeting host.

YouCanBook.me

If you find yourself struggling to make your availability known to clients, try out YouCanBook.me. This freemium service offers users a custom URL where users can view free spots on your Google Calendar or iCloud Calendar and book time with you. 

The service allows you to customize your booking page with different layouts, colors, and your company’s logo.

Pick

Pick automatically scans everyone’s Gmail calendars to find open slots, and then delivers a list of mutually available times. You can then send a calendar invite to all attendees directly from the app.

All members of your team need to be on Pick in order to share their availability. The app also provides users with an individual URL so you can share your availability with people requesting a meeting.

Clara

Meet Clara, a virtual assistant fueled by machine learning who can schedule all your meetings and get acquainted with your scheduling patterns. Once you sign up, you indicate your preferences as to which days and times you are available for meetings and your favorite locations for coffee, lunch, or drinks.

If someone requests a meeting, you can CC Clara’s email address (which can be customized to your company’s domain), and the virtual assistant will determine a time, date, duration, participants, and location for the meeting. She also understands human commands like, “I’m sick, can you reschedule my meetings on Tuesday?”

It currently only works with Gmail, and it does have a hefty price tag, but it could be worth the cost if scheduling is a major pain point for your company. Especially considering it’s still significantly cheaper than hiring a human personal assistant. 

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in July 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.