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Visually appealing content is essential for lead generation, engagement, and brand presence. If you’re looking for an inexpensive way to boost your small business’s visual marketing content, then look no further than online design tool, Canva.
Canva is revolutionizing graphic design with their built-in templates, array of fonts, and cross-platform publishing capability. There’s not much Canva can’t do, but the best part of it is that it’s accessible enough for non-designers. (According to Canva it only takes 23 seconds to learn).
Follow these tips to make easy and attractive brand designs using Canva:
It is common for small businesses to focus on their product over their brand. However, businesses trying to stand out in concentrated markets need to do everything they can to differentiate themselves. Canva helps companies share what is unique about them with their audience.
In order for your visual marketing content to be 1) recognizable and 2) consistent, you’ll need to stick to a set of brand colors, fonts, and logos. Canva makes it easy to apply all of this to your designs with its “brand kit.” Using Canva’s brand kit feature you can upload hex numbers, your logo, and select your brand fonts. Go to “Your Brand” on Canva’s home page to get started.
URLs are also important for brand recognizability. You can add yours using the Canva link feature. If you save your design as a PDF the backlinks will stay, allowing your audience to reference your company’s homepage.
If you’re a graphic design rookie or if your small business hasn’t hired an in-house graphic designer/marketer, Canva’s built in templates are a godsend. These are free (yes, free!) templates that allow you to choose from categories ranging from infographics to Facebook covers and apply your brand colors using the aforementioned brand kit. Add your copy and you’re good to go!
If you prefer creating your own graphic instead, you can save your graphics as templates to refer to for future topics or new copy. Simply click “file” and “make a copy.” Now you have a template unique to your brand and made specially by you!
As a small business, you may someday be in the position to present your business to an investor. In order to make your deck stand out, clean design and branding is a must. Canva’s Presentation and Slide Maker is a perfect first step to sharing a compelling brand story to potential investors.
You can choose from presentation templates or make your own, quickly add your “Brand Kit” to these slides, and easily access a million stock photos and design elements right from the Canva app. Here are the elements to keep in mind when curating your investor deck according to Forbes:
We cannot overemphasize the importance of maintaining a strong brand presence on social media. We also cannot overemphasize how easy Canva makes it to do so. With Canva, you can create one design and quickly size it for whichever platform you’d like using the magic resize tool. The ability to change the dimensions of your design with ease will not only save you time, but also boost your content across all platforms. This is a Canva Pro feature, but it’s more than worth it. Click “file” and “magic resize” to navigate all of the downloadable formats.
We used to be able to pop over to our coworker’s desk to show them a draft design or present it in a live meeting, but times have changed. Now that most of us are working remotely, collaborative tools like Canva are essential to getting team projects done and streamlining the design approval process.
Similar to Google Docs, you can add collaborators to your Canva design by clicking “Share” and “Link.” This cuts out the step of downloading and sending draft versions of designs to team members. It also makes quality control easy and ensures that the designs you are sending out to potential and current customers are truly top notch. Canva’s team templates feature allows you to create reusable templates and share them with your team. That way, if a new member is assigned a design project they can refer to your template and keep brand designs consistent.
About Mary Jenkins: Mary is a marketing and communications intern for Swyft, which is a PR firm in Austin and Houston and a top digital marketing agency in Denver since its founding in 2011. Swyft recently opened a satellite office where it offers PR in San Francisco.
