Canva is a graphic design software for creating marketing collaterals, sales decks, social media materials and other design products. It has attracted millions of businesses due to its easy to use drag-and-drop feature and layouts. Whether you’re a small or large business, Canva will help you create and share amazing graphic designs.
The founder and CEO of Canva, Melanie Perkins started the company in a bid to make designing simple and easy for everyone. In this article, we’ll explore Canva’s humble beginnings and how their company grew. You’ll also discover how you can use Canva to put your small business front and center of your competition.
Small beginnings
Canva’s story began back in 2007 when co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht created an online school yearbook design business, called Fusion Yearbooks. They set up an office in Perkin’s mother’s living room, with limited resources and little business experience.
Fusion allowed school students to collaborate and design their profile pages and articles online, which were printed and delivered to schools across Australia. This was the prototype version of what would become the Canva system. The business was a success and became Australia’s largest yearbook publisher. It has even expanded into France and New Zealand.
But for Perkins, it was just the first step to make her grand vision a reality, so she began chasing investors. Before long, the young couple was winning over major investors and launched Canva to the world in 2013. Now, the Sydney-headquartered company has more than 55 million monthly active users in over 190 countries.
How to Use Canva for Small Businesses
Are you ready to get started with Canva? Here are five different ways to use Canva for your small business.
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Online Video Editor
As a small business owner, it can be difficult to create professional videos for your business.
Up until today, creating videos has required complex and expensive software. With the launch of Canva Video Suite, video editing has now become simpler and easier than ever before.Canva Video Suite is an easy-to-use platform that combines intuitive editing, recording, and collaboration features, thousands of customizable video templates, and an extensive media library. Powerful functions like the ability to add animations, add scene transitions, or split clips, are also available.
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Access Free Stock Photos
In addition to thousands of free templates, icons, and fonts, Canva offers 100+ million premium stock photos for Canva Pro users. Having stock photos right in your dashboard allows you to save time hunting for the perfect assets for your project.
Whether you need stock images for your website, social media, blog article or whatever design project you’re working on, getting access to millions of free stock photos is a huge saving and just one more reason why small businesses should start using Canva.
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Design a Brand Kit
Whether you have a small or large business, a brand kit is essential to communicate a consistent message to your audience. As your business grows, you want to make sure your brand image and message don’t become misrepresented. Use your brand kit to ensure that all marketing and communications are accurate and on-brand.
Set up your own brand kit on Canva to keep designs on-brand across your team. You can also set up brand control to restrict them from using only what’s in your brand kit.
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One-Click Resize
If you regularly use social media to reach your audience, one of the things you’ll notice is every platform has different image requirements. Whether that be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest or YouTube. And if you don’t crop your images in advance, they will crop them for you. That is why it’s best to optimise images for social media to make them more eye-catching for your audience.
This is where Canva Pro’s Magic Resize feature comes in. With the click of a button, you can recreate your design in every size you need. To make the magic happen, all you need to do is click Resize, choose the dimensions you need, and hit Copy & Resize.
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Remove Image Background
If you want to remove image backgrounds, you can use photo editing software like Photoshop, Lightroom or Luminar AI. But if you’re not a professional graphic designer, this can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Fortunately, Canva Pro’s background remover can do the hard work for you. It’s the fastest way to automatically remove image backgrounds without compromising the quality of your photos. After removing the image background, you can then place the image over your brand colors or add text in your brand font.
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Create & Share Posts
Schedule social media content to 8 platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. Canva is a handy tool to create captivating social media graphics. But the best thing about this tool is that you can post and schedule upcoming social media content directly from Canva Editor to a range of social networking platforms, like Facebook pages and groups as well as Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, Pinterest, Weibo and Tumblr. This solves the need for manually downloading your designs and paying for social media scheduling tools.
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Create a Canva Team
With Canva, you can invite team members and collaborate on any design. They can post comments, tag other team members, assign tasks, share designs, and resolve suggestions directly in Canva. From presentations, social media graphics, video content to print products, you can keep your collective ideas and creativity flowing. Simply invite your team, choose their access permissions, and start creating stunning designs in seconds.
If you want to take your business to the next level, it’s safe to say that Canva can no longer be ignored. It’s one of the best tools out there that can simplify and quicken the design needs of your business. For more information on why we love this tool and how to sign up for a free account, click here.
