Adopting Canva to Give Clients an Easy Creative Marketing Tool

As part of my toolkit, I have Adobe Creative Suite. It is a great set of applications when it comes to creating content. But, the various applications have a high learning curve. Now for a business with a creative department, this isn’t an issue. For an individual or a small business, it can be a problem. High cost and learning curve do not make a good tool to get started creating content. That’s where Canva has come in. They have lots of templates for inspiration and it’s easy to get started. Also, a free plan and they support teams to enable rapid collaborations. Check out Canva for yourself!

Easy and Free and Ideas, Oh my!

Now I know that’s a lot of “talk” if you will so I thought I’d show you instead. Let’s go through setting up an account. Then we’ll go through making a simple image and touch on the collaboration. Once you click the create free account button and choose your login method you’ll see this screen:

As you can see there are several options to choose from. Usually, I’ll have clients pick the “Small Business” or Personal. After that, we go through setting up a team. Then I show them how to invite team members.

After the basics are out of the way they’re now ready to go off on their own. Developing their own digital marketing media. Granted Canva can do a lot more but we’re going to stick with digital marking content. This example will go through making an image for an Instagram post.

Click “+Create Design” and off we go!

Oh, and Instagram Post was clicked of course. After countless seconds of deciding on a template, one was chosen. Then saved to the Instagram folder (oops, I missed that step) which was created as part of the team setup.

Once a design has been created, you can make any revision comments in the design itself. Changes can be done on the fly in response to those comments. This has come in handy a few times to speed up the time it takes to complete a deliverable.

It really is that simple!

I’ve found Canva’s templates are amazing for inspiration. The variety gives my clients a level of confidence when creating their own content. Beyond having a large number of templates, it allows the user to create content from scratch. If they decide to go down that road.

Wait, didn’t you just cost yourself work!?

Yes and no. In theory, if they can create then they won’t ask me to create. The truth in that sense is they could always contact someone else to get work created.

It is far more important to me to give them the freedom to choose how things get made. Canva is a tool that does that in a literal sense.

So with that said, I hope you can see why I shifted to Canva.