Using Canva for Your Small Business
If you are on social media, you’d know how important visual content is. In today’s digital age, visuals actually weigh as much as text (or maybe even more) and it’s something that you need to put your efforts in.
While text-based content is an integral part of marketing, the use of visual content will set you apart from others. It will bring life and more engagement to your overall marketing content. And that is where a design tool comes in, which in this case is Canva.
Why do small businesses need Canva and how significant is it really for your online efforts?
What is Canva?
Canva is an online user-friendly graphic design tool that can be used by anyone regardless of graphic design experience to create visual pieces for personal or business purposes. It has a free and paid version. The paid version is highly recommended as it unlocks so many features that will be very helpful for you to create your materials according to your brand.
Canva can be used for pretty much any marketing collateral. Anything from business cards to brochures to media kits, to PowerPoint presentations to infographics, you can design all of them and more in Canva.
Setting Up Your Canva Account
Create your Account
Upon creating an account, you’ll be able to access the free features of Canva. If you are creating an account for business purposes, we highly recommend you get the paid plan. If you’re having doubts if the paid plan is worth it, you can avail of a free trial for 30 days to experience it.
Setup your Brand Kit
With a pro plan, you’ll be able to make a brand kit. This feature is very helpful in creating professional branded designs for your business. Upload your brand colors, logos, fonts, etc. Your brand kit will be available to access whenever you create a new design making your life easier.
To learn more about Canva Pro, here’s an in-depth review of it.
Canva Tips and Tricks
Lock Feature
When editing and organizing your design, the lock feature is a great tool. By selecting an item that’s already in the perfect position, you can lock them so they won’t move when you’re editing anything else.
This lock feature works great with larger items. You can toggle this feature on and off whenever you need it.
The Canva Brand Kit
You can find the brand kit on the left side of your home dashboard. This feature is a time-saver and very helpful to keep you organized, but this is only available for Pro users.
You can save your brand logo, fonts, and colors under this feature and they will readily be available whenever you make a new design.
Canva Page Manager
This is a great tool that will let you customize the appearance of how your project looks on your screen. You can find this at the bottom right-hand side of your screen.
The Canva Page Manager lets you select a full-screen view, a bird’s eye view layout of your project, as well as different magnification of each design. You can also move your pages around, delete them one by one, and duplicate them according to your needs.
This feature is very useful when you are working with large documents. Another tool that makes life easier, tbh!
Hyperlinks
This tool is very helpful when you are making ebooks and PDFs. Hyperlinks will allow your viewers to click on the links in your PDF.
To create a hyperlink, just highlight the text you want to make a link to. Once you’ve selected the text, click the link icon on the top right-hand side, add in the URL for your link, and click apply.
Just remember that the links will only work when the document is downloaded as a PDF.
Instant Image Background Remover
Another wonderful feature of the Canva Pro is it makes the tricky process of removing the background super easy with just one click. Any photo of any product, headshot, and logo will do.
Select an image and click the ‘Background Remover’ in the Effects section. The background will disappear in an instant. This is probably one of the most useful tricks in Canva!
Aligning Text and Images Perfectly
Aligning texts, images, and elements in Canva is simple. Instead of manually positioning each object, you can easily use the position tools to align the texts and images automatically.
To align images, elements, and texts, click the element, click the “Position” from the toolbar above the editor, and choose the alignment you want to apply to your element.
Creating a Drop Shadow to Your Images
Adding drop shadows to your graphics makes them look more three-dimensional. It makes your graphic designs pop out and more alive. With Canva, you can also easily make this effect to beautify your design. Full tutorial here.
Save As A Template
This is another Canva Pro feature that saves you up a lot of time.
When you make a design and it’s something you’d want to use again for the future, one feature you can do is to save that document into a template.
You can easily do this by clicking on ‘Show More’ under the ‘Publish’ button, and click the “Templates’ option. Select the folder to where you want that template to be saved and select publish.
Your saved templates can be easily accessed on your home page. Remember, this feature is only available on Canva Pro.
Canva is a very useful tool in designing visual content especially when you own a small business. When you don’t have an in-house graphic designer, you can totally create your own graphics. Thankfully, Canva is here to help you out as it has so many different pre-made templates ready for you to use.
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