Marketing tool picks: Week of May 26, 2025
Design stunning visuals, create AI-powered videos, and master your site's SEO.
Welcome back to Weekly Tools from The Branding Corner! This week we're diving into three fantastic tools to help you elevate your visual content, leverage AI for video creation, and gain crucial insights into your website's search performance.
Synthesia.io
AI Video Generation
Synthesia.io is an AI video generation platform that allows users to create professional-looking videos from text in minutes. It features AI avatars and voiceovers in over 140 languages, eliminating the need for cameras, microphones, or actors.
✅ Key Benefits:
AI Avatars & Voices: Choose from a wide selection of stock AI avatars (9 included in the Starter plan, 180+ in Creator) or create custom ones (with higher-tier plans). Generate realistic voiceovers in numerous languages.
Text-to-Video: Easily convert scripts or text into engaging video content.
Templates: Access to 60+ pre-designed video templates to speed up creation.
Cost & Time Efficient: Reduces the cost and time typically associated with traditional video production.
Scalability: Suitable for creating various types of videos, from training materials and product demos to marketing content.
💲 Pricing:
Free AI Video Generator: Offers a way to try the platform. G2 mentions a free trial with 3 video minutes per month.
Starter Plan: €16/month
Canva
Graphic Design
Canva is a user-friendly online graphic design platform that empowers users of all skill levels to create a wide variety of professional-looking visuals. It offers a drag-and-drop interface and a vast library of templates, images, fonts, and graphics to design everything from social media posts and presentations to posters, videos, and logos.
✅ Key Benefits:
Ease of Use: Simple drag-and-drop editor, making it accessible even for non-designers.
Vast Template Library: Access to hundreds of thousands of free templates (over 250,000 on the free plan, with more on paid plans) for various design types.
Rich Content Library: Millions of free photos, graphics, and videos are available on the free plan, with significantly more premium content on paid plans.
Collaboration Features: Canva for Teams allows for real-time collaboration, task assignment, and brand management.
AI-Powered Features: Includes AI tools like Magic Design, Magic Expand, and Magic Media for enhanced design capabilities (more prevalent in paid plans).
💲 Pricing:
Canva Free: $0/month, includes basic tools, over 250,000 templates, millions of free photos and graphics, and 5GB of cloud storage.
Canva Pro: Approximately $12.99 - $14.99/month (or $119.99 - $120/year). Offers everything in Free, plus a larger library of premium templates and stock assets, Brand Kit, Magic Resize, background remover, 1TB storage, and more advanced tools.
Canva for Teams: Starts around $14.99/month for the first 5 users (or around $100-$149.90/year for the first 5 users, some sources suggest higher recent pricing for teams with more AI features). Builds on Pro features with additional collaboration and brand control tools.
Free versions are also available for Education and Nonprofits.
Google Search Console
SEO/Analytics
Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps website owners, SEO specialists, marketers, site administrators, and web developers monitor their site's performance in Google Search results. It provides tools and reports to understand how Google sees your site, identify issues, and optimize your content for better visibility.
✅ Key Benefits:
Performance Monitoring: See which queries bring users to your site, and analyze impressions, clicks, and average position in Google Search.
Index Management: Submit sitemaps and individual URLs for crawling, review index coverage, and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
Issue Identification & Alerts: Get alerted to issues like crawling errors, security problems (like hacking or malware), and mobile usability problems, and see which URLs are affected.
URL Inspection Tool: Provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about your pages directly from the Google index, helping to understand how Googlebot sees a specific page.
Content Optimization: Use the data to make informed decisions about your SEO strategy and improve how your site appears in search results.
💲 Pricing:
Free: Google Search Console is a completely free service provided by Google.
🔗 https://search.google.com/search-console/
Hope these tools help boost your marketing efforts! See you next week for more Weekly Tools.
Read my latest blog here: Learn why "quick hit" content backfires and how sustainable strategies drive real success