Social media is the future. You already knew that. But have you really grasped the full extent of its reach, particularly when it comes to Facebook and Instagram?

People spend more time on social media than they spend watching TV.

59% of global consumers say social media guides their purchasing decisions.

One out of every five minutes spent on a mobile phone is spent on Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook and Instagram are heavily used by millennials, the demographic group with the most buying power in the history of the U.S. economy ($600 billion per year, to be exact).

Given all that, it’s no surprise that advertising on the two biggest social media platforms has become incredibly competitive. In order to cut through the noise and capture some of that immense market share, it’s more important than ever that your ads be well-crafted, engaging, and maybe about avocado toast or something if you really want to get those millennial eyeballs.

So, the question becomes, how do you go about making great ads? What tools can you use to give yourself a chance in the battle you are waging against the zillion other marketers out there?

Here are some of the best Facebook and Instagram marketing tools for optimizing your ads, increasing your conversions, and building up your followers. While not every tool will be applicable to every situation, they can be mixed and matched as needed to create clickable, high-converting ads.

Take Your Editing to the Next Level

While Instagram is the most obvious visual medium, Facebook is not to be ignored. Facebook posts with images get more than twice as much engagement as those with no image.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that a survey of marketers showed that the number-one concern in the field is figuring out ways to create more compelling visuals to go along with their ads.

You can’t have awesome visuals without great editing software, so it’s important you pick a good one. The team at VSCO has built an industry-leading suite of editing tools for both images and video, and they offer educational tools to make the entire editing process as simple as possible.

A key part of editing when it comes to Facebook and Instagram is choosing a good filter. If Instagram’s presets are Photography 101, VSCO’s are like a Master of Fine Arts. No one can match them for their range and selection, which allows you to find just the right one to make your image pop.

Optimize Your Headlines to Drive Clicks

Headlines are key drivers in getting people to watch videos as they make your content searchable on Facebook and Instagram, and they provide context that whets the viewer’s appetite. Plus, 70% of millennials say they read the headline before watching a video.

CoSchedule has an array of tools for marketing optimization, but arguably their most helpful feature is their free headline analyzer. This tool quickly ingests any headline and presents you with relevant tips to improve your writing so as to drive up clicks, views, and shares.

Straighten and Sharpen Your Images

The quickest way to shoot yourself in the foot while advertising on Facebook and Instagram is to use an un-optimized image. There are stats on this, but intuition is probably a better guide: when was the last time you clicked on an ad where the proportions were off, or the image was blurry?

If you want your images optimized for either Facebook or Instagram ads, a great tool to use is Image Optimizer. They resize, compress, and enhance images so that you never have to think about doing it manually. It’s all done online, and it’s entirely free.

While tools like Photoshop can certainly do this as well, buying an Adobe product to optimize your images for social is like buying a Ferrari for a two-mile daily commute. Sometimes all that power is overkill and only serves as a distraction. Rather than fussing around with a complicated tool, you can simply use Image Optimizer and then get on with your day.

Get Your Ad in Front of the Right Audience

As Benjamin Franklin put it, “For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.”

While that’s an absurdly bold claim that might only apply if you are a genius polymath, the general idea has a lot of merit when it comes to optimizing your ads. It doesn’t help to create the best ad if no one sees it, so it’s important to use a good scheduling tool to make sure that you are reaching your audience at the right time. Good scheduling and being organized go hand in hand.

Sprout Social has a well-regarded tool that analyzes your social performance and tells you the optimal times to post. You can then automate the entire posting process and make sure that your content is getting in front of the right people at the right time without a ton of lift on the part of your team.

When you reach your audience with timely ads, it can reduce the likelihood that you get unfollowed.

Create Stunning Infographics

90% of the information transferred to our brain is visual. So, if you want people to remember your ad, it’s critical to have awesome visuals. And what’s more awesome than an infographic?

Whether as part of a video slideshow, an Instagram story, or as a standalone ad, they can help you quickly tell a story with data. Even better, they can help improve ad retention. When a relevant image is presented alongside a piece of written content, it provides a massive boost to the consumer’s ability to remember what they saw.

Easel.ly makes the process of creating infographics simple. They have free templates that you can easily customize using drag-and-drop tools. Easel.ly can help you go from design-challenged to a slick creator of intuitive graphics in no time.

Convert Text to Video

By 2021, it is estimated that 78% of mobile traffic will be video. If you are a company that is used to doing most things via text ads, you are going to want a tool that will help you tailor your ads for a mobile-first, video-obsessed audience.

A tool that can help quite a bit in that regard is the text-to-video service from Lumen5.

Of all the tools on this list, Lumen5’s ability to translate text into video represents the most jaw-dropping technology. I can’t pretend to know what sort of sorcery goes into their code, but they somehow use AI and machine learning to quickly transform your articles into videos. Once you input the text, they use AI to summarize the content and match the words with relevant videos.

This could be especially handy if you have popular blog content that you want to repurpose to get the most value out of it, or if you are running a lean team that doesn’t have much experience with video creation.

Make Video Ads Like a Pro

Video views on Instagram have been growing 80% year on year, and 500 million people are viewing videos on Facebook every day. That’s a lot of potential eyeballs to capture, and the reward for doing so is high — shoppers who view videos are 1.8 times more likely to buy than non-viewers.

Thankfully, you don’t need to hire an expensive videographer or a high-end marketing team to make video ads that will capture people’s attention. You just need to use Shakr, a tool built to make life easier for marketers who want to stay on the cutting-edge.

Shakr allows anyone to create stunning video ads. With over 2,000 preloaded designs created by professional designers, over one-million stock images, and pre-licensed music, customization has never been easier. Plus you can easily add in your own images, text, and video clips.

Tools for Growth

By 2020, 75% of the world’s population will have a mobile phone. Translation: pretty soon there will be billions more people who can potentially view your ads. Don’t let this opportunity slip away by using clunky, outdated, or inefficient ad creation tools.

The sky is truly the limit for the innovative companies that take the time to learn how to use the best Facebook and Instagram marketing tools.