Canva. How a powerful tool changed the face of the Digital Marketing World?

If you’re a digital marketer focussing on visual designs, you might have noticed the dramatic shift from complexity to simplicity. It happened because of Canva. It is an undisputed truth.

The reason for a massive surge in the usage of designs by a huge population. Comparing 2021 to 2015, the number of people/companies using visual messages through social platforms was less.

Or is it, Canva simplified the industry which led to this tectonic shift?

Either way, Canva is now the face of the Digital Marketing world and If you’re not familiar with it, let’s change that status quo.

Also, we’ll be discussing the FIVE not-so-known features available inside Canva.

Workflow Before Canva

If I am not wrong, the only all-in-one graphics tool available before Canva was Adobe Photoshop. Even though Photoshop is not an exclusive graphic tool, it offered the highest level of customization.

In fact, Photoshop was considered as industry standard for designs.

But the customization came with a huge drawback. Complexity.

Youtube wasn’t popular before. If someone wants to learn Photoshop, they didn’t have many options.

Especially in third-world nations, people didn’t have much awareness.

Yes, we can do anything in Photoshop. But it’ll take a long time to learn and create what we wish to create.

We can compare the life before Canva with ‘Life before WordPress website builders.’

Ten years ago, if you want to create a website for your personal/business needs, you’d have to hire a coder. They’d say many technical terms and charge you a hefty fee.

If you want to change/update anything on your website, you’d have to go to your coder. They’ll say new technical words this time and charge you a hefty fee, again.

But the DRAG & DROP website builders changed the perspective of the websites. You don’t have to know how to code. Still, you can build your website. If you want to change/update anything, it became a piece of cake.

The same happened in the designing industry. Canva made it possible.

Canva Features

Nowadays, as digital marketers, we’ve to focus on multiple platforms. Our content should be updated on all those platforms. But they do not have the same dimensions.

For example, Instagram square posts are 1080*1080. If it is a horizontal post, the aspect ratio would be 16:9. For Instagram reels/IGTV it would 1080*1920.

This is for Instagram only. The dimension varies for Pinterest pins, Facebook posts, Twitter posts, etc.

If we have to create it manually, it is a time-consuming process. Our workflow should be in a way where we automate the repetitive tasks and focus on our creativity.

Instead of spending an hour manually adjust the dimensions for every social media platform, we should focus on our next designs. That is precisely what Canva does for us.

The templates are already there. We can create for one dimension and we can resize* them for other dimensions.

Create a team

Post the pandemic, everyone was forced to move their business to online platforms.

Bigger companies would be able to provide all kinds of collaboration tools for their employees.

But if you’re working with limited resources, you cannot provide expensive tools for your team to bring them together online.

In Canva, you can create your team for multiple projects and add the members to the specific team. Even though designing is mostly an individual task, curating a design demands everyone to come together.

That way, we can analyze every design through every possible angle and work to improve it. By bringing your designing team together, you can increase their collaboration which will automatically increase the quality of designs they do.

Brand Kit

Colors are very important, especially in the marketing world. They attract people. Colors convey a sublime message. It creates a mood around our brand. It unifies our targeted customers with our product.

Color theories are an interesting study. You might have heard about this a lot.

For example, Orange eases the customer’s minds and they get relaxed. If your product has to convey non-polluted, economical, and such, green is the way to go.

These are some of the well-established psychological facts about people, we should employ in our designs to stimulate our customers.

If your brand/company/product has a predetermined color palette, you can save your palettes on the brand kit tab.

You can use it on the free version, but you cannot save more than 3 palettes. In the Pro version, there is no limit to it. If you want to be consistent with your designs, try this option.

Automate Schedules

As much as the content, the timing of our posting also matters the most when it comes to digital marketing. In my workflow, I’ve observed the most reach between 1800 and 1900 hours.

It is the perfect sweet spot when people are done with their office works and scrolling their social media pages.

Instead of waiting, we can automate our posting schedules on Canva. Of course, there are many third-party tools available in the market to achieve this purpose. Since we’re already using Canva for designing, we can automate our schedules here to avoid switching between windows.

Background Remover

Background remover is a magic tool integrated within Canva.

A decade ago, if you want to remove the subject from the background in a photo, it would be a tedious task to do.

Photoshop was used in this process. We have to use the lasso tool to mask the subject. It’ll take at least 15-20 minutes to create an average mask. Then you have to clear the imperfections and clean them. Even then, it wouldn’t be perfect.

Now, Adobe has upped its game and photoshop does a pretty good job in removing the background. The same quality can be achieved in Canva too.

We have to admit that there is no lack of content out there. To make content that stands out to capture the eyes of our viewers, we have to work hard to make new designs.

Background remover is one such tool, which gives us flexibility and saves a ton of time.

Present & Record

If you’re preparing a video tutorial on any subject and you’ve prepared the content on Canva, you can record the whole video tutorial in Canva itself.

Tutorial videos are a great way to reach the maximum audience. For some explanations, it is better than writing a blog or creating a carousel.

If you’re planning a video call with your potential customers or co-workers you could do that inside the conference application itself. But if it is meant to be shared on Youtube, you could just use Canva for recording your presentation.

It saves you from downloading, installing a third-party tool, and switching windows.

Font Selection & Color Combinations

In any design, the font selection and the color combinations play an important role. They should go well with each other. If not, the designs would look awkward and unattractive.

If you’re not sure about how to select your font combinations, Canva’s blog provides around 30 font combinations for you. Depending upon your preference, you can choose from them.

On the color front, they’ve got you covered through the Color wheel and palette combinations. You can choose your primary color and they’ll give you the best combination of complimentary/analogous/triadic/tetradic colors that goes well with it.

You can create a palette from it and use it in the future also.

My suggestion?

Go through the concepts from those two blogs and understand those concepts properly. It’ll help you streamline your font and color selections in your works.

Canva Courses

Canva also offers courses on how to build your personal branding, the basics of graphic designs, social media masterclass, and such.

It is available for free on their website. So do check it out for covering your basics.

In Designing, we have to seek inspiration for varieties. If not all our designs would look the same. So keep your mind open and seek out inspiration.

To conclude

Something that would take at least an hour on Adobe Photoshop would take only 15 minutes or so in Canva. I don’t think we need any other plus point than the previous statement to start using Canva. Social media platforms are algorithmically supportive of those uploads multiple posts in a day. To propel ourselves on this vast sea of content, Canva gives us the advantage of saving time and streamlining our workflow.

Create your free Canva account here.

Would you like to learn about sales and marketing funnels to raise your revenue, check out this article here.