One of the most fundamental elements of building a successful small business is efficiency. And finding programs that eliminate daily hassles and learning curves or speed up complicated projects are essential to improving efficiency. This is why Canva has become a popular option for small businesses looking to create marketing materials, edit photos, and work on their branding.
But is Canva able to do everything necessary to create a strong brand for your business and successfully market it?
Canva does excel in a few areas, but there are also some reasons you need more than Canva to build your business. Here are some reasons Canva can be helpful to your small business.
Reasons to use Canva
Social media posts
Canva can be an excellent timesaver, and creating social media posts in difficult-to-learn programs like Adobe Photoshop can be time-consuming. Social media is a time-suck in nearly every facet, so if there are ways to speed up the process they are almost always worth taking.
Access to stock photos
The stock photo database alone can be worth the subscription price ($12.99/month). Stock photos are especially useful in small print marketing materials like handouts/flyers and in social media. If you don’t have the ability to photograph your products or services, this can be especially useful.
Brand consistency
Canva simplifies this for you. In other programs you may have to do a little more work to ensure you are always using the same fonts, colors, weights, etc. But in Canva you can set these from the beginning and never look back, making your process more efficient.
Content collaboration
This is another timesaver if you are working with multiple people in your design and branding. You can easily share your work with other people by sending them a link where they can add their comments or (with your permission) edit the project. Or the person helping you with design can share their work for you to easily review.
Reasons you need more than Canva
You cannot create a vector file
For some of you this may not sound like a big deal. But as a professional designer, I know this alone eliminates my ability to use Canva for nearly all of my work. If you want to create something easily resizable and able to be used in unlimited formats, it is essential to create it in a vector format. Otherwise, if you decide to use it in a larger format you will have to recreate the entire design.
Canva is template-based
This isn’t a big issue with social media posts. And your ability to edit the templates as desired helps. But eventually you will notice distinct similarities between your marketing materials and many other businesses’ marketing materials. This is especially an issue with items like logos and brand icons. You need your business to stand out. When you begin using template-based design, your business will lose its unique marketing edge.
Legality issues
This is the biggest problem with using Canva for branding. When you create your business branding, you need to own it and have the right to use it how you want. Canva does not allow this because your branding will be their intellectual property. Canva will own your logo and other elements of your branding. Canva’s licensing even states that you are not allowed to use their key elements or features to create your logo. If there is someone looking over your shoulder determining what you can and cannot do with your branding, this will create crippling issues down the road and eventually require you to rebrand at a point in time when your business probably isn’t ready.
You should find professional insight for professional branding
The final reason is that a program isn’t able to cover up a lack of experience or insight in branding and marketing. A program—no matter how useful or powerful—is simply a tool. And even tools as useful as Canva or Adobe aren’t useful to people who are unsure what to do with them. The reason to hire a professional marketing expert or graphic designer is because of their knowledge, skills and experience, not because of what programs and tools they have access to.
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