10 Ways to Use Canva for Your Business

Here is the reality for business owners: you are responsible for getting your company out there and visible to the public.

You want your new business’s marketing to make it into the mainstream, of course, but, how is this possible without years of experience or countless hours of Youtubing ‘how to’ videos?

There is an answer, there is a will, and there is a way my friends.

Most of us know Canva as an easy-to-use platform for creating social media posts. But did you know that it is also a highly effective interface for customizing the brand and marketing approach of your business? This graphic design platform provides multiple templates, features, and tools for free that help you produce the unified brand and communication strategy that you envision for your company.

Over the last five years, Canva has skyrocketed for business use. Adapting to the needs of the business community, Canva has begun providing brand kits and membership services that help create a workflow for team members in the same office or even miles apart. Since its’ launch in 2012 in Australia, Canva has been able to cater to all levels of designers and entrepreneurs by offering free membership, pro membership, and an enterprise membership.

So how can you use Canva to help start-up or streamline your company? Read here to find 10 ways that you can use Canva for your business.

1. Make your publishing consistent and captivating.
2. Form a Canva team to optimize collaboration.
3. Streamline your social media to illustrate a consistent image of your business.
4. Construct one unified brand template by setting up a brand kit.
5. Finalize your business brand through company products.
6. Construct videography that can be used on multiple platforms.
7. Give presentations that catch everyone’s attention.
8. Create seamless organization with Canva’s content planner.
9. Get educated through the design school tutorials and courses.
10. Maximize their membership benefits.

#1. Make your publishing consistent and captivating.

I would argue that there is nothing more important than a first impression! Your business needs to have a consistent message and captivating image to gain both credibility and quality for your brand. Designing your logo, brand, and marketing materials is just as important as the product or service you are selling.

With Canva, you can make your vision come to life.

Canva services range from magazine covers to posters to business cards, each providing multiple options for colors, fonts, designs, stock photos, and graphics.

Anywhere from your proposals, newsletters, brochures, and event invitations, they will all illustrate the same style – which marketing 101 tells us streamlining is a best practice within the industry.

Not to mention, they provide templates and design support for book covers, letterheads, invoices, and presentations. Each of these are easy to edit and develop according to the unique brand and clientele of your company.

#2. Form a Canva team to optimize collaboration.

It is definitely true in the business world, teamwork does make the dream work!

This means that every business owner needs a dependable interface from which they can work alongside other designers and users on product or service marketing. Canva makes it unbelievably easy to invite members to join a Canva board, folder, or portfolio.

As a Canva user, you can easily see which designs are solely yours and those that are shared with you. From the shared folders, you can view graphics, presentations, posters, social media posts, any and all work – you name it. What is even better is that you comment and collaborate in real-time or asynchronously with other team members on products and publishings.

While this feature is free, with the enterprise membership on Canva, you will also be able to set specific visible elements and delegate assignments to certain team members.

How easy is that? This is a major step up from platforms such as AdobeSpark, where only one user can be editing a project at a time.

#3. Streamline your social media to illustrate a consistent image of your business.

It is almost impossible for a business owner to grow success without reaching clients through social media platforms.

Whether it be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Tiktok, or all of the above, Canva has this covered. There is an entire collection of social media templates that are easy to find right from the homepage. Each template is presented in a gallery and is specifically marked as free, at cost, or paid for by pro or enterprise membership.

To help with organization, you can even construct a design page where you are able to add, duplicate, delete, or comment on templates and posts.

Canva extends beyond just basic post graphics, but also helps you to create thumbnails, background banners, stories, reels, channel art, and animations.

#4. Construct one unified brand template by setting up a brand kit.

One of the very first things that you can do as you begin your business is to decide on your brand, culture, and vision for the company.

When your clients take a look at your website, social media, and marketing, what do you want them to see?

Canva offers a brand kit that can help bring this idea to print and design. When selecting your brand kit, you are using the opportunity to create a professional and unified look across all of your products and marketing.

This includes selecting custom fonts that you will use, a color palette that best fits the style of your business, as well as graphics that bring out the vibe of your products or services. Not to mention, this is a great starting point in designing your logo and adding a watermark to your advertisements, social media posts, posters, presentations, and business cards. Canva offers storage and support in your brand kit composition for free with the pro membership.

#5. Finalize your business brand through company products.

Did anybody say free merch?

Once you have designed your custom logo or watermark, print that onto your package labels, business mugs, stickers, t-shirt designs, and postcards.

Canva will even give you tips to make your customizable commodities stand out against the general brands. You will be able to market your business as a whole or market for specific campaigns. The design templates are chic, stylish, and easy to personalize.

At the end of the day, we have to admit that we all love freebies and the extra love we feel when a business thoughtfully gifts them to us. Am I right or am I right?

#6. Construct videography that can be used on multiple platforms.

Canva will not only improve your business’s print graphics but videography as well. By layering textures, animations, speech bubbles, sound, and special effects, you can create any montage you need to market your business.

Canva is popular for helping users build video collages, Youtube channel art, and Pinterest video pins.

Need a virtual tour of a new space? Want to construct a commercial for an upcoming campaign? Have a new product launch that you need to showcase?

Done, done, and done.

It is possible to design a video for almost any industry with the array of templates that Canva provides in this service whether it be for advertising or presentations!

#7. Give presentations that catch everyone’s attention.

There is nothing worse than viewing a multiple slide presentation with awful text-to-background contrast, poor outline structure, and lazy copy.

I cannot emphasize this enough: as a business owner, you are selling your vision (whether that be product or service) and how you choose to present your information will impact its perception by the consumer community.

Boring presentations exist no more with Canva. Bring on the graphics, attitude, and voice!

Client portfolios, business proposals, educational presentations, and training programs can all come to life with the templates and features that Canva provides. With presets for business, architecture, technology, medicine, keynote speakers, collaborative brainstorm teams, education, and countless other industries – you simply cannot go wrong with Canva presentations.

Literally, anything that you need to present to anyone will have much greater influence with a little design direction and strategy. Let me put it this way: even educators are jumping on this train, and they have to keep the attention of five-year-olds!

#8. Create seamless organization with Canva’s content planner.

Anybody else love a beautifully organized, easy-to-read calendar to start off all your goals on a productive track? Canva’s content planner is where it is at!

This content calendar is easy to share with your team and helps you link your content to its scheduling or publishing date. This is so simple for asynchronous teams that are handling multiple projects at once and need a visible space for task direction. Each date will provide a visual of the design and icon for its intended accompanying platform.

This is a Canva Pro feature so it is not free to everyone, but in the business world, some things are just worth the money!

#9. Get educated through the design school tutorials and courses.

As a business owner, you don’t have time to research how to do every little thing. In regards to marketing and graphic design in general, you will never have the time to learn all of the best practices. There is just so much out there and everything is updating all of the time.

Canva has launched a design school that offers free courses for not only Canva tools, but also for marketing, branding, design, nonprofit, and education.

These workshops are offered both live and recorded for your convenience, and are hosted by expert entrepreneurs, Canva users, and designers. Through courses, tutorials, and blogs, you can get the information that you need quickly and confidently.

#10. Maximize their membership benefits.

Canva markets itself as a user-friendly graphic design interface. It does not have to advertise upgrades and memberships to every single customer.

It simply sells itself based on your unique needs.

There are three different membership options for Canva: Canva Free, Canva Pro, and Canva Enterprise. With an easy-to-read comparison chart, users can see what they can and cannot do with each level of participation. A lot of the variance between free and paid subscriptions comes down to design and cloud storage, the brand kit collection, team management, and content planner capabilities, available templates and stock photos, and access to enterprise support.

What will work best for you depends on your business goals, your business team, and your business brand.

The good news is that Canva will offer you a free trial of each paid membership, so you can feel comfortable with flexibility if a specific membership does not work out for you.

The demand throughout entrepreneurship is consistent: business owners need a reliable platform to streamline their product brand and marketing.

Canva provides graphics, templates, and tools that creative teams can use to market and develop their company profile. Whether creating a presentation, portfolio, social media post, video, and magazine, through Canva’s free online design studio anything is possible.

For more ways to optimize your business through social media, SEO and content, influencer marketing, and more contact the team here at Socialhart. We’re passionate about helping brands rise to #unicornstatus 🦄.