There are many things that impact how successful your business is, but branding can play a huge role in how potential customers perceive your business… and ultimately whether or not they choose to buy from you.
There are many things that impact how successful your business is, but branding can play a huge role in how potential customers perceive your business… and ultimately whether or not they choose to buy from you.
Your ‘brand’ is everything from your logo to the message you portray to your audience. Using strong visuals and presenting consistent imagery helps you to stand out from your competitors and makes you easily recognisable to your audience.
The more people see your brand the higher probability that you will catch their eye as they scroll, and it also helps you to be the first person they think of the next time they’re looking for what you sell.
There’s plenty of resources to help you created branded materials, but a popular choice is Canva.
Canva is a firm favourite for a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs. It’s a graphic design tool often favoured over designing tools like photoshop, illustrator and the likes due to its intuitive and easy to use features.
Getting started with Canva
The free plan provides you with everything you need to get started, but Canva also have an affordable Pro upgrade that offers a wider range of features for around £10.99 per month (£99.99 if paid yearly).
The free Canva account should be sufficient to begin with and allows you to save one palette of font colours to your account so that you can easily keep all your creations consistent with your brand.
A Pro account gives you access to a more extensive Brand Kit. This allows you to upload custom logos, fonts, and graphic elements into one place to help you save time and stay on brand.
This is particularly useful if you’re a designer or virtual assistant working with several businesses and their brands. This means you can add all of their individual colour palettes to your branding kit as well, making it easy to switch between your own and your client’s work.
Canva has lots of fonts to choose from but if you can’t find your chosen font, you can easily upload your own front from your desktop.
Canva also has a more general upload feature (available on the free plan) which allows you to upload different brand elements and graphics, and sort them into relevant folders.
Using Canva’s templates
Don’t worry if you’re not the most skilled designer, Canva has you covered.
One of the best features of Canva is their huge selection of templates and pre-set sizes ready to use. For one, it saves you the hassle of figuring out which ratio you will need for each creation as the pre-set size templates allow you to select whatever you need (Instagram post, A4 document, business cards – the list goes on!) and you can rest assured they will be the right ratio to fit.
Canva also has a large selection of ready-made templates, that are already designed for you. All that is left for you to do is alter the colours, fonts, imagery, and logo using the brand kit feature to ensure all your creations are consistent and on brand.
Taking your design to the next level
Here are a few other Canva tips that will help you to build your brand and boost your business…
Background remover
If you’ve ever attempted to remove the background from an image in Photoshop, Word or PowerPoint, then you probably know it’s not exactly a straightforward process.
Luckily Canva have once again reduced the stress by introducing their one-click background remover on the paid Pro plan.
Resizing your designs
With every platform requiring different sizes for images, Canva’s resize tool comes in very handy. This allows you to alter the size of your design to a variety of templates with just a few clicks and even change the dimensions of one design into several different types.
Therefore if you create a Facebook banner, that you want to use on your Instagram feed, it will only take a few clicks to adapt your design with the resize button.
Animation
Canva now has the option to animate certain elements as well as uploading videos and GIFs directly into your designs.
This will really bring your designs to life and is a sure-fire way to grab a viewer’s attention.
Scheduling direct from Canva
Canva have recently released their scheduling tool that allows you to post your finished graphics directly from Canva to your social media channels. The content planner lets you schedule posts to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack and Tumblr – with more platforms on the way.
Collaborate with your team
Collaboration is easy with Canva and can in fact be done in a couple of ways.
The Canva Pro £10.99 plan allows for teams of 1-5, the price then goes up dependent on how many members you require.
Alternatively, if you are on the free plan you can share your designs – either with a link to edit, use as a template or just view – at no extra cost.
Hopefully you’re now clearer on how Canva can help build your brand and boost your business as you do, and for even more tips, advice, and information to help you keep your business growing, sign up to my mailing list here to access my free vault of resources.
If you’d like some support in your small online business and have been thinking about hiring a VA, then drop me a message here and we can discuss your needs further.