Things you need to know about Visual Marketing Tool Visme (Review)
Content Marketing

Things you need to know about Visual Marketing Tool Visme (Review)

16th August 2016

Earlier this year I wrote an article called “18 Free Visual Marketing Tools to Boost your Content Marketing Efforts”. In this post I described tools the do-it-yourself-marketer could use to optimise their efforts in visual (content) marketing.

One of the tools I mentioned in that article, Visme, approached me to see if I wanted to take an extra close look at their tool. And of course, write a review about it. For a period of time, I had access to all the features Visme offers. And started playing around. I had fun!

Visme-home

What is it

Let’s start with what Visme actually is. In my article on the visual marketing tools I put it in the section “Visual Marketing Tools for Image Creation”. In retrospect that was wrong. Not because you can’t create images with Visme, you can. It was wrong because Visme is much more than that.

Visme brings together a lot of what other tools do separately. Sometimes there are tools that help you create images. Sometimes there are tools that are useful for creating infographics, where others are better for creating reports of wireframes. Visme actually brings it all together. It has everything.

With Visme you can build quite a few things:

  • Presentations
  • Infographics
  • Reports
  • Web content
  • Product presentations
  • Wireframes

The lot.

create-anything

The features

Now what I could do is describe all the features of Visme for you. I’m not going to do that. For the simple reason that there are other websites who already do that. And because there are so many! But to give you an idea of all the things you can do, Visme created this video themselves:

What I’ll do is describe the things I liked and didn’t like about the tool.

Things I liked about Visme

Let’s start with the good stuff. Things I liked. There was a LOT in there. In many ways.

They have it all

A big plus for Visme as said before: they do it all. You don’t need to go to other tools to get other things done. Everything you need to do can be done in one place. Especially when you have the full subscription, that’s a plus.

visme-templatesTheir library

One thing that was a lot is their library. I think this was the feature I fell in love with right away. Their library is insanely huge. It has lots of icons, lots of templates and lots of images to choose from.

And they aren’t just any stock photo either. The images are good, really good!

The templates

Visme has a lot of templates as well. Templates in all sorts of different forms and shapes. For presentations, for infographics and many more. The good thing is that you can change them to your likings. Yes, you start of with a ‘generic’ template. But you can change colors, order of things and images within really easily.

No extra costs

The annoying thing with some tools is that the model is based on the ‘extra things’ you want to buy. So each template or picture will cost you x-amount of money. This can lead to high costs or a lot of searching for the ‘free’ images.

Not with Visme. When you have the full subscription, everything is in there. No unexpected extra costs. All the images, all the templates are free to use. This is really nice, because it is so much easier. You will find everything inside the tool and thus work a lot faster.

Things I didn’t like

I really like Visme, but there are some things that need improvement I think. As well as some things that make that this tool isn’t for everybody.

Searching icons

Visme-icon-searchAs said, their library is big. Very big. For images they have a great search feature. Search for dogs and you will get dogs. With the icons that is less so. You can scroll through icons, but to find that one icon that does it for you can sometimes take a while. If they would only implement the image search on the icons…

The download into zip files

This is the one thing that annoyed me the most. And the strange thing is, the little things can be a killer. Visme offers some great possibilities for sharing the images. You can embed it, or publish it as a link. That is great. You can also download the image. And that’s where it goes wrong for me.

I’m a fan of downloading the image and then using it where I want. If I want an image on State of Digital, I want it on our database, not somewhere else. Downloading should be simple. And at first, it seems to be. But then I saw that the download actually is in a zip-file. Big deal? Maybe not, but for me, that meant I needed to do extra work before I could re-use it. And the zip-file made for more useless data on my computer. I just want the image, give it to me!

NOTE: after publication, I received a remark from Visme that they actually changed this last week! So while publishing this was fixed! Talk about a quick response huh ;-).

Flexibility

I know is a more general thing, which I instantly will admit can be different for each user: for me Visme not as flexible as I would like it to be. I don’t know if that is me being used to other tools or if it’s the UI, or maybe my own experience. I felt I was ‘guided’ too much. I need more flexibility.

The templates Visme has are great. And they can be adjusted. But we have to be honest: if you are more experienced in designing, you’ll feel restricted. Once you choose your template, you will create something based on that template. It’s not just a ‘just go for it’ designing tool. You want to build an infographic? Let’s build that and not something else. The templates are nice, but it takes a while to adjust them for the less knowledgeable ones and for the more knowledgeable ones they are too strict.

This can be a setback for those that want more freedom in what they design.

But then again: this might be different for others.

What makes it special / who is it for

Which brings me to the last part of this review: who should use this tool? What I noticed right away is that the tool is great, it has all the features you want, but it needs to ‘fit’ you.

The good thing is that you can build a lot with hardly any knowledge because of the templates which are easily adjustable. But if it’s ‘just the image’ you want, it’s too big for you. It’s a shame to leave all the features if you are not using them. On the other hand, if you want to dive into things and not just use the simple stuff, it seems less flexible.

This means it’s most fit for those ‘in the middle’. If you are doing quite a bit of designing, but aren’t the expert. This tool is perfect for you. Bloggers, solo-entrepreneurs. People doing presentations: really useful.

But if you use it: go for the full subscription. If you use Visme, you want to use it to the full extent.

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Written By
Bas van den Beld is an award winning Digital Marketing consultant, trainer and speaker. He is the founder of State of Digital and helps companies develop solid marketing strategies.
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