Adobe Creative Cloud Apps For Marketing

Adobe Creative Cloud Apps For Marketing

Home > Digital Marketing How To's > Adobe Creative Cloud Apps Explained: For Your Marketing

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See below, the transcript from this episode of Giant Wednesday if videos aren’t your preferred method to consume digital skills. See also the Giant Cheat Sheet from this episode.

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If you’re looking to create some sweet new content for your business to help with your marketing, you really don’t need to look any further than the Adobe Suite.

But with so many separate programs to choose from, which one is best for you?

P.S. This is no way endorsed, I’m just a big fan.

Well let’s find out, I’m Alex, and this Giant Wednesday. 

 

It used to be several years ago that you had to buy Adobe programs separately, or as a bundle, but you were basically locked into one version of the program, with the need to upgrade every time Adobe brought out some shiny new features.

Bring on the pain of moving the old version you paid for into the recycling bin…

But thanks to Adobe’s clever marketing, the Creative Cloud (or CC) is a subscription service that gives you access to the latest tools and programs from the Adobe arsenal.

So long as you are subscribed, you always have access to the latest versions and the best tools for your content creation.

But with great power, comes great… confusion?

If you’re new to the incredible possibilities of Adobe software, you may be a little intimidated by the level of choice.

So let’s go through the big dogs of the Creative Cloud and see how they can each help take your marketing to new heights.

 

Photoshop For Marketing

So unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should have a fairly basic idea of what Photoshop is. I mean, it’s literally become a term in the dictionary.

Photoshop is the program to use when you want to easily edit your photos and create new graphics for your website or marketing materials.

Within Photoshop, you can edit existing photos to adjust the lighting and then save them as a format that works for you. Even doing fancy things like removing backgrounds, which we’ve covered in an episode of Giant Wednesday Creative!

You can also easily change the dimensions of an image, and use the Save for Web feature to save a high-quality image, with a low file size – perfect for web graphics.

 

Illustrator For Marketing

So when I first started as a content creator, I always ignored Illustrator because I thought it was similar to Photoshop. But this isn’t the case! Illustrator is a fantastic program for creating vector graphics.

Let’s explain the difference;

Programs like photoshop work with raster graphics, which is basically pixel data. This means that the dimensions of your image are finite, and if you blow it up too big, or zoom in too far, you’re going to end up with a screen full of pixels.

Programs like Illustrator deal with vector graphics, which is basically your computer doing quick maths to follow a path, so the graphics can be rendered at any size – you want your graphics on the side of a skyscraper? No problem!

This is because, behind the scenes, the data being created by Illustrator is instructions, rather than an actual graphic itself. 

Use Illustrator for campaigns where you want the same branding across multiple file-formats, for example, a flyer, your landing page and a poster. You can load both up in the same screen and easily copy graphics and colours across from one to the other.

If you’re making a logo, we’d recommend using Illustrator too, as many print companies these days will only accept files in .ai or .svg format, which you can only really get out of Illustrator… 

You can create entire artboards with all of your company graphics and logos in one place – ready to export at whatever size is needed.

 

InDesign For Marketing

You’re joking, not another one? 

I never joke about creative software. InDesign is the program to use for publishing and typesetting. In other words, the composition and layout of text.

If you’re putting together a brochure or magazine that’s very text-heavy, you’re going to want to be good friends with InDesign. 

Within InDesign, you can easily layout text into multiple columns, control things like line spacing, and even make text curve around images if you’re really clever!

You can create documents with multiple pages so you can see your whole project at a glance. 

You can then easily export out as a PDF in a colour format that’s ready for physical print, or online viewing.

 

Premiere Pro For Marketing

Okay, you may be pleased to hear this one isn’t an image or text editing piece of software.

Premiere Pro is the program for you for all of your video editing and GIF making needs.

We edit all of our episodes of Giant Wednesday within Premiere Pro, so if you’re a fan of the series, you can kind of get an idea of what you can do with the software.

Within Premiere Pro, you can import image, video, and audio files and stitch them together into a movie masterpiece, with full control over the video dimension and format for whatever social media platform you wish.

You can even now automatically add subtitles to your video which is an absolute gamechanger and something you shouldn’t definitely be doing!

If you’re interested in learning the basics of how to use Premiere Pro, check out this video which will give you a quick introduction to the key features!

 

After Effects For Marketing

Even among experienced marketers, After Effects can be intimidating, but once you get the hang of it, you can use it to make your content even more dynamic. 

After Effects is a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application.

You can build a brand new composition from scratch, complete with animated text and graphics, or add to an existing video – you want to have a lightsaber in your latest piece of content? Wish granted!

Again, if you want to learn the basics of this beast, we’ve got you covered in this previous episode – aren’t we kind?

After Effects is a great tool to add some extra dimension to your motion-based marketing materials and really stand out.

 

So, that was a quick look at five of the main Adobe programmes that we use for the creation of our marketing materials on and offline.

Each programme has its own benefits for your marketing, however, they are a whole new language to learn so get ready for lots of confusing buttons and options.

If you want your marketing materials to stand out, then mastering these programmes will help.

But if the price tags put you off, then I’d say to you that it is a worthwhile investment…  however there are free tools out there, though limited, that can give you a taste for what’s available.

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