Canva is an online graphic design platform allowing to create a wide range of visual content from presentations to social media graphics.
With Canva’s easy to use tools, anyone can make professionally designed layouts and impressive graphics without having a specialised training. This, among many other factors, makes Canva particularly popular among small business owners.
Here is a list of key reasons why you need to start using Canva if your enterprise is not particularly large scale.
- Perfect for a small business
In today’s digital world, visual marketing is a driving force for successful sales. However, employing a professional designer requires a considerable budget.
With Canva, whether you are a professional individual or a small business owner, you can easily create visually engaging content just free or at an affordable price, depending on using the platform’s free or paid version (we will discuss this later).
- Simple to use
As mentioned earlier, availability of easy to use tools is Canva’s main advantage. It is basically a drag and drop design platform with a huge collection of guided templates and libraries with thematic categories and subcategories.
So, is your digital marketing focused on your Facebook audience? Perhaps even more Instagram? Or on YouTube? Canva has covered them all. To create your eye-catching social media updates, there is a big number of platform specific templates for Facebook covers, YouTube thumbnails, Instagram stories, LinkedIn banners and many more. These templates are customisable, so you can make changes and add your personal touch.
- Multi-purpose use
Using Canva, you can work on various graphic design products, be it business cards, postcards, invitations, presentations, or social media videos.
And if you are concerned that your visual creativity is not that great, no worries at all. You do not need to bring your own ideas along, Canva’s wide choice of available templates will do the job, giving you either inspiration to start with or simply, you pick your favourite template and fill it in with your own brand’s content and corporate identity.
- Optimised for each social media platform
Today’s digital marketing is so highly centred on social media. But there are so many already that as your promotional efforts target different platforms, it can be confusing to know what would be the best size for a banner on Instagram or what is the best length for a Facebook video.
Coming to rescue, Canva offers optimised templates for each social media platform, depending on their specific needs. For example, you can find templates that are already optimised in the right dimensions for things such as cover photos, banners, headers and so on for specific sites like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. Moreover, Canva’s social media masterclass tutorials cover many useful topics from defining your brand style to tailoring your content.
- Create and edit videos
Being a video editor is a complex profession in its own right. However, unless you need to film and edit a serious clip, package or movie, having access to Canva is enough to make a striking short video.
To get started, do a search through Canva’s video library to find the style you like, then upload your own, or record a video to replace the video in your selected template and then make alterations you need, such as trimming a scene duration or changing colours and fonts of the subtitles.
- Animate your visual content
Among hundreds of thousands of content creators, you want your own work to stand out. To achieve that your visuals always grab attention, you may want to add some animation to your content.
Canva allows making visuals fade, bounce or slide, for example. No matter whether you are an expert in animation software, you can pick among 14 premium animation styles to make parts of your design pop out.
- Good for simple websites
Canva offers tools to add some striking elements to the website you already have or you can create a simple website from scratch.
So, in case you are just starting into the online world but do not have enough budget to pay for the costly work of a website designer, then Canva is indeed your best option. Remember, though, this option is good only for having landing pages for a specific product or a simple one-page website, while for multi-page websites and blogs you better build your new website with the WorldPress.
- Presentations that stand out
Having access to Canva, you can forget about boring presentations and tedious processes to create one. Using Canva, you can add videos and animation to your presentation and even allow your audience to send reactions, comments and questions using a feature called Canva Live.
After choosing the template presentation, you can customise its slides with thousands of free images, graphics and videos from the content library. Most importantly still, leave your anxiety behind as Canva allows you to use a presenter’s screen to view your notes, set a timer and preview the upcoming slides as you present. It is possible to export your files as PDF, PowerPoint or Video presentation.
- Enjoy teamwork
Canva allows team access to design projects with ability to share or not share each work with collaborators, or lock individual elements for further changes, depending on whether you are using a free or paid version.
For example, Canva Pro makes it easy to work as a team, share templates, and give comments or detailed feedback on each other’s work. So, if you are working on a complex presentation, why not make the process more fun and creative? Just invite your team members, clients or co-presenters via a link or email to suggest or make changes in real time.
- Free or affordable price
If you do not want to be a paid subscriber of Canva, you can still use it for free, getting access to its 250,000 free templates and 100 + design types for various products such as social media posts and presentations. This option gives you 5 GB of Cloud Storage.
Whereas having a Pro option means getting advanced control to collaborate, and also access to 100 + million premium quality stock photos, videos, audio and graphics to a team of maximum five members for a total price of £99.99 or 10.99 per month, depending on having an annual plan or a monthly plan. Each additional member would cost £5 or £6. Having access to Magic Resize feature for trimming photos, 100 GB of Cloud storage and ability to schedule social media content for eight platforms, are among other bonuses of Pro.
If you run a small business, Pro is your perfect choice. Though, there is another option for larger businesses called Enterprise with smarter design features. It is available for teams with a minimum 25 people and costs £24 monthly. The benefits include unlimited storage, 24/7 enterprise level support, and ability to control your team’s access to individual elements with template locking.
As you are a beginner with Canva and still unsure whether you want to pay or not for it, there is a 30 days free trial for Pro. Most importantly, once you have started using Canva, be it free or paid option, your visual design will always look much smarter and more professional than ever before.
For more information go to canva.com