Running a business can be something of a life’s calling. There are so many different ways to do it and do it right, and there are so many tools out there that help ease the demands of running an operation.
Whether you use freelancers to support the building of your marketing campaign or use work operating systems to manage your customer relationships. There are even some amazing financial tools out there to help with expense management and automatic invoicing.
That sounds great, but in the end, it’s pretty cut and dry. These tools help keep the engine running and push your business forward. It helps you with not having to overstaff and run up a lot of expenses in the beginning. There are also some tools that can be a lot of fun, such as Canva. Yes there’s a tool that can be fun and extremely useful to you and your business.
What Is Canva? Canva is the premier designing tool. It helps bring your creative side out in every possible format. You can make presentations, social media posts, video content and even help design physical products such as business cards or gift cards. Canva is your graphic design concierge.
One of the best features that Canva has recently added is to help design your branding kit. This is a premium feature you’re able to do from the beginning to help with the design templates when creating the various types of designs, presentations, social media content, and so on. To top it off they’ve also enabled a content calendar with the most common holidays and promotions throughout the year. Here you can plan out your content directly on their site, click on a date, and start designing!
To expand even further on the collaboration offering, there’s even the option to include others into your Canva portfolio to share content, templates, ideas and schedules with each other.
Social Media Facelift Let’s say you have an Airbnb Business for example. Obviously, you want to work on promoting your Airbnb location, and Airbnb does a good job of being a good booking system, but you also want to work on your own marketing efforts. You want to have a curated social media profile via Facebook and Instagram. Instagram can help showcase your property that is being rented out and be able to highlight the best parts, that can help seal the deal for people who are in between selecting properties.
With Canva you can drag and drop different types of elements, into the dimensions of what your Instagram post can look like. You can select text, shapes, images, whatever you feel is needed, and be able to save these as a template for future use.
The offering of images and content to use is also constantly updated by Canva as well, and there are seasonal options, so you can make your posts more festive, faster than ever. It also helps not only your social media posts and ads but also with your Facebook Cover.
You can make quick edits to it and add something festive or if you plan on rebranding, you can experiment with multiple options. It also has templates and settings for Linkedin, Twitter, email marketing and numerous other options.
This helps you get organized and in control of the sheer amount of consistent content that is needed to run and manage social media sites and relevant campaigns.
Physical Promotional Content Going back to the example of an Airbnb business, You can utilize this awesome tool to create flyers or posters to give to renters of your place whenever they come and stay. It can be a thank you note or a map of the best things to do in the local area. This helps bring that special and unique touch that people are sometimes subconsciously looking for when they rent out an Airbnb, instead of staying at a traditional hotel. It’s about authenticity, and using Canva to help bring your designs to life helps solidify that authenticity even further.
You can design special business contact cards to have, with your own unique logo that you or a graphics designer made for you, and build out your brand. As you grow your business, regardless if you’re an Airbnb host or any other type of business, the minute you start to expand, that’s when the branding and the consistency matters. Being able to create that type of content easily helps connect your locations together.
It can also help promote community in some locations, where you can make specially designed discounts or advertisements for local eateries and locations and help not only yourself but the entire community grow, which is important more now than ever.
Video Yes, Canva is so feature-packed, it even helps with making some types of video content, without having to have design software installed. This helps give a nice rounding out of the numerous types of content available with Canva. Considering adding video content to YouTube? Canva can help, and even help make some nice YouTube video ads.
This Sounds Amazing – How Much Does It Cost?
Well, there’s good news, there is a free-forever option, and this can be very useful from the start to fully see what the offering is. It may already start as overwhelming, so take the time to explore and experiment as needed. All the images and templates are free to use and there are hundreds of thousands of options all in with templates, graphics and images.
Why go premium then right? You will start to realize very quickly and with your marketing team, that you need more content all the time. Going premium helps by increasing the available content to hundreds of millions. Plus, features mentioned earlier such as developing your brand logo only come in premium.
The features don’t stop there and one of the best automation tools that are available is scheduling your content delivery. That means you can prepare a lot of the content beforehand and simply deploy it in a systemic way, until all the content has run out.
This keeps your social media pages up and running with fresh content and engagement-ready posts, without having to manually do it yourself (or with your social media manager). All the content you post in this way will also show engagement metrics that you’re looking for, without having to switch between Canva and your social media backend page.
The rest of the features are a push of collaboration with your marketing team and enhancing the sophistication of your content that you produce outside of Canva, such as image resizing or making images and logos with transparent backgrounds.
These types of features are usually packaged with much higher-priced digital marketing and graphic design software. With Canva, it makes it simple even for the newbie trying to build out graphics and designs.
Ok – But This Now Seems Something New I Need To Learn
That’s the beauty of it. Canva was built in a way to make anyone generate graphic content when needed. This means you can set up your imagery fast, and get ready to go without having to source a full-time graphic design team. A lot of the templates and pre-filled options are designed in a way that all you need to do, as the user, is to switch out some of the images and content to fit your needs and your business line.
When you’re in the Airbnb hosting business, or for that matter, any business where you’re wearing all the hats, and trying to get on top of everything, a tool like Canva helps you stand out. Without spending hours using Adobe Photoshop or Gimp 2.0 trying to make an image look proper with layering, shadows and other terms that you may not be familiar with.
Canva helps remove the complexity and secrecy that sometimes happens in the digital graphic design world and doesn’t make you worry about whether to warp or use magic wands, or droppers, or dozens of editing tools. You will spend upwards of a day just learning how to follow a YouTube instructional video to get a certain type of effect. With Canva, it’s ready to go as soon as you’re ready to sign up.
There’s no need to overcomplicate this process and your marketing team will thank you for having such readily available content to go. It will also help make them more efficient and produce content faster, with their trained eye and skillsets. This in turn will make your content more stable and uniform when being deployed. It’s a cascading effect when using such amazing tools as Canva for your Airbnb Business.
You may ask yourself if there are any real downsides and there are. The biggest downside of Canva is that it can be quite overwhelming in the beginning. It’s designed in a way to help you churn out content and graphical content at that.
The best approach to take here is to select one thing you feel like you need immediately and only work on that. Because there are so many options and possibilities, you want to really stay focused on just that one task from start to finish and that will help you grow your skills with Canva.
Once you use a tool like Canva and all those other helpful tools and your business becomes its own little enterprise, then don’t worry, Canva can scale with you. For those that have different business lines, but you want to keep it under the same umbrella, Canva already has you in mind. They help with what they call their digital asset management platform that helps protect and secure your branding and distribute it properly on a larger scale. Something to look forward to when you expand your business to that point!
Want to make the most of your digital marketing budget? Book a call with us today and let’s discuss how we can help.