What Is CANVA & Why You Should Be Using It
Are you struggling to put out social content that looks professional? Or would you prefer to create branded material for your products, services, or clients? If you are not using Canva, you need to be.
But what is Canva? Canva is an Australian-based, woman-created, and run design platform that allows you to quickly and effortlessly create social media graphics, portfolios, presentations, newsletters, posters, brochures, menus, and so much more. I’ve been using it for the better part of three years and I am in LOVE.
This should be a tool you take advantage of if you’re looking to communicate across multiple platforms, utilizing consistent branding. You can showcase your brand personality and drive the ROI of your business with simple and effective content marketing.
I am always looking for ways to make my business (and tbh, yours) look more put together and professional with absolute ease. I don’t remember a workday where I didn’t use Canva. For me, it is a quick and easy way to impress my clients and bring their business and mine to the next level.
Check out these 5 reasons why Canva is my go-to and should be yours too. Disclaimer: I am not being paid for this, in fact, I pay for Canva Pro. Canva also offers a 100% FREE version that you can use to get your toes wet. I promise you will fall in love with this tool too.
Easy to Use
For me, the number one reason why Canva is so special is because of how easy it is to use. You can put simple things together without a tutorial or training and start off at full speed. The website is very intuitive and easy to use. There is an iPad and phone app you can take advantage of too to make it work in the way you need it to.
Now, that being said, in order to effectively use some of the more elaborate features, you might need a little guidance, but overall, you can create beautiful projects with incredible ease.
Dynamic Features
Canva has a wide variety of fonts so you can add text to your graphics. And as for images, well Canva has over 200,000 images, illustrations, and icons ready for you to choose from in the free version (Pro has over 60 million). You can also download your own fonts and images and include them in your designs as well.
If you still feel as though you don't have the design skills to create a graphic from scratch or are short on time, Canva’s predesigned templates are awesome. With an abundance of professional templates to choose from, you can quickly create professional-looking content in minutes. You can make them your own by changing colors, inserting images, changing the fonts, resizing the text, adding your logo, and more.
And if that’s not enough, want to make your graphic move and come to life? Even with the free version of Canva, they have digital stickers to make your graphics move like a gif. CanvaPro, on the other hand, provides the ability to not only use stickers but also allows you to download your image with a swift animated motion.
Customized Brand Kit
When you create content for your brand, you'll want to stick with your brand's color scheme and fonts to keep a consistent theme and strong brand. Staying consistent will allow your brand to appear reliable as well as professional. Using too many offset colors or fonts will cause your brand to become unrecognizable and will reflect poorly on your brand. Luckily, CanvaPro has made a way for businesses to easily stay on brand by creating a Brand Kit.
Not available in the free version, CanvaPro provides this wonderful feature so you can store all your brand's colors, fonts, and logos in one place. There will be no need to continuously upload your brand's assets each time. When you open up Canva to create a new graphic, your brand kit will be there ready and waiting.
Custom Sizing
Canva allows you to optimize your designs for each platform you use- one image size just simply won't work for every social media platform. Posting images or graphics in the incorrect size will look unprofessional, lack quality, and will get you no closer to reaching your social media marketing goals.
CanvaPro makes it simple to resize your designs with a click of a button (once again not available in the free version - sorry). Canva has most social media platform image sizes already listed out, but there is also an option to customize dimensions if needed. It will also help your brand stay consistent as well as have a better chance at grabbing and keeping your audience's attention.
Teamwork
This is such a great feature of Canva that most other platforms don’t provide.
You can share designs and images with team members via email or link and determine the amount of access they have to make edits. Canva also allows you to share the image directly from their website to Facebook and Twitter.
Creating content that engages your targeted prospects is often the hardest part of an effective content marketing campaign. Canva enables you to create that content quickly and easily, even if you have little to no graphic design skills. You’ll be able to use your Canva-created designs to create a wide variety of engaging content that will attract your targeted prospects and give you a more polished and professional brand.
