What is Canva and How To use It For Digital Marketing

What is Canva?

Canva is a tool loaded with enough easy-to-use features and functionality that anyone can create a variety of engaging content that gets shared.

Canva is helping small businesses get past two of the greatest obstacles to implementing an effective content marketing campaign: “Producing Engaging Content” and “Producing Content Consistently”

Create Many Types of Content

As you can see below, Canva really offers a variety of content types. From pre-sized social media image and header templates to marketing materials, documents, presentations, invitations and ads, you’ll find almost everything you need.

How Do You Use Canva for Digital Marketing?

The primary way to use Canva for digital marketing is to create and publish engaging content that will attract your targeted prospects both online and off.

To help you get started, here’s a walk-through of the process to create an image to use as a Facebook update. These types of images can go viral easily; especially if they’re funny or useful.

Step 1

The first step is to select your template. We’re using the Facebook Post template as indicated by the red arrow and to do so, all we need to do is click on it.

Step 2

The next screen is where all the magic happens. There are a lot of features stuffed into this area, so here’s a quick overview to orient you:

Step 3

Now it’s time to create an image! We’re going to start on the search tab which, as you can see, enables you to search by keyword or by element category:

We’re going to select the “Charts” category and then add an icon:

Step 4

Next, we’re going to upload an image using the upload tab. Once it’s in there, we simply need to click on it to add it to our image:

Step 5

Now it’s time to add some more text so it’s off to the Text tab. We liked this ready-to-use text element so we clicked on it to include it in our image:

Step 6

Next, we’ll edit the look of the text element as well as what it says. Canva makes this easy with its contextual menus:

Step 7

To make the chart icon overlap our text element like we wanted, we just need to click “Back” while the text element is selected:

Step 8

We’re almost there! In this step, we finish editing the text element, added a heart image (using the search form) and then played around with the size and position of each element so it looked right:

Step 9

Next, it’s off to the Background tab to well, add a background. We chose a crinkled paper image to finish off our image:

Step 10

Now it’s time to download our completed design. First, we click on the Download button:

As our image was created with entirely free elements, this is the message we received during the download:

If we had used one or more of the $1 premium images, the next step in the download process would have been checkout:

Step 11

Now that we’ve downloaded our design, we can post it to Facebook so it can go on to viral glory:

Conclusion

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.

Whether you use your Canva-created designs online or off, you’ll be able to create a large variety of engaging content that will attract your targeted prospects; and isn’t that what marketing is all about?

Image: Canva/YouTube