Whether you’re a marketer, casual graphic designer, or simply a business owner who has dabbled in creating social media content, you’ve probably heard of Canva by now. Maybe you’ve even experimented with using it!
In the relentless, fast-paced world of social media, keeping the wheels turning with effective, high-quality branded content can be a time-consuming task…and falling behind can mean being forgotten by your target audience.
Of course, there is no shortage of services and software claiming to make life easier. However, with so many choices, it can be hard to determine which options are best for your needs.
At Sociality Squared, one of our favorite go-to resources for collaborative and scalable graphic design is Canva. Easy-to-use yet powerful, this graphic design toolkit accelerates and simplifies the design process by offering hundreds of thousands of templates, graphics, photos, videos, and more, all in a straightforward, user-friendly interface. A mobile app also allows you to access Canva’s features on-the-go, for quick and convenient design no matter the time or place.
There’s a reason Canva has become so popular — it’s an excellent asset for busy content creators. But how can you get the most out of it? In this article, we’ll outline our six favorite things about Canva.
6 Reasons Canva Belongs in Your Social Media Management Toolkit
Canva Has a Wide Variety of Templates and Stock Imagery
There’s nothing more discouraging than the blank page (or digital canvas). But with Canva’s extensive, curated library of over 400,000 professionally-designed, completely customizable premium templates, you’ll never have to design from scratch again.
In just a few clicks, quickly apply your branding to presentations, emails, videos, company templates, or social media graphics in the perfect size for each platform. Then, reuse your templates to boost efficiency, consistency, and convenience.
Canva’s library contains ready-to-use templates designed for a diverse range of needs, from branding, e-commerce, and entrepreneurship projects to advocacy, business, education, special events, and more.Social posts, ebooks, posters, ads, reports, infographics, mood boards…the list of template categories goes on. On top of this, Canva has a great library of stock images, stickers, and other elements to customize your content further — all at one affordable price.
Canva is Budget-Friendly
Three Canva plans and price points are available for individuals and teams, starting with the free version. Additional free plans are also available for teachers and school districts.
Canva Pro, at $119.99 per year, grants individuals, solopreneurs, and freelance designers unlimited access to Canva’s premium content. Meanwhile, Canva for Teams adds features designed for teams of any size to collaborate easily for $149.90 per year.
Eligible nonprofit organizations can also register for a free version of Canva, tailored for creating impactful communications.
Compare these prices to the cost of products such as Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, which can run nearly $700 a year. Of course, that price may be worth it for professional, full-time graphic designers, photographers, editors, and so on. But when it comes to generating high-quality, brand-consistent digital marketing content as efficiently and collaboratively as possible, Canva is the clear choice.
Stay On-Brand with One Click Using Canva Brand Kits
When creating content across multiple communications channels, visual consistency is a top priority.
As we have discussed previously on this blog, creating and adhering to a visual brand identity helps customers recognize your brand more easily and builds trust.
Elements of a brand’s visual identity include color palettes, font choices, logos, and templates — all of which you can build and access using Canva’s Brand Kit feature.
You can build your brand from scratch or upload existing assets, set brand colors, fonts, and templates, and apply them across all your designs.
Plus, if you are managing more than one brand, you can store and manage up to a hundred different brand kits, all in one place!
Keep Your Canva Designs Organized with Folders
Another great feature that contributes to Canva’s ease of use is the ability to create folders for your designs and media.
Each folder can contain up to 200 items for Canva Free accounts and up to a thousand at other pricing tiers.
Furthermore, managing your folders in Canva couldn’t be simpler — you can create or delete folders and add, move, or remove content, individually or in bulk, just as easily as you would on your desktop. You can even drag and drop items!
Additionally, you can share folders of designs and files with your entire team or specific people in it only.
Collaboration is Easy with Canva, Even On-the-Go
In today’s world of remote work and teams made up of members from all around the world, collaborative accessibility is critical for any creative platform. Fortunately, Canva is up to the task.
Whether you use Canva Free or Pro, you can invite up to 3,000 members or up to twenty teams to contribute to projects in Canva. You can also assign roles, such as administrator, to members using Canva Free or higher, and Canva Pro also allows you to assign ‘Template Designer’ roles, too. You can even share designs with external parties so they can add comments, tasks, or approve work in real time.
Brands don’t have to worry about where the working files of their content exist, and content creators can easily jump in if there’s a small last-minute copy edit, making everyone’s lives easier on the design front.
As previously mentioned, Canva offers a mobile app for quick content creation and collaboration from anywhere in the world.
Easily Animate Posts with Canva
Posts that use video or animation instead of static images are more engaging — and the data to support this conventional wisdom is abundant.
But how can you easily and quickly generate eye-catching animated content at scale? Without having a massive production budget?
Once again, Canva has the answer!
Canva’s library of thousands of animated, customizable post templates makes it easy to create personalized, on-brand, engaging animated posts in minutes.
Not only that, with premium animation styles, you don’t need to master animation software to make your visuals pop…or bounce, slide, fade, or more. Adding motion to parts of your image can easily be done in just a few clicks. Simply select an animation style to apply to your post and then download it as .mov or .gif file — that’s it!
Grabbing attention and bringing your posts to life has never been easier, more efficient, or more affordable.
Canva for the Win!
These are just a few of the reasons we at Sociality Squared rely on Canva as one of our design tools in our content creation process. To learn more about our favorite methods to increase efficiency while maintaining consistency and quality, reach out to us today by clicking here.
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