Canva - It Does More Then You Know
In this episode I introduce Canva.com to people who are unfamiliar with the platform or who don't know its full potential.
Did you know you can create CD Covers, Book Covers, Postcards, Animated Social Media Posts, Flyers, Business Cards, and much much more?
Easy to use and the idea generation is amazing.
Keep in mind that we may receive commissions when you click our links and make purchases. However, this does not impact our reviews and comparisons. We try our best to keep things fair and balanced, in order to help you make the best choice for you.
. .
**Transcript**
Speaker 1: (00:02)
This is digital marketing tool talk, never miss out or fall behind on the latest digital tools for social media, SEO content reviews and the entire digital marketing space. I'm your host, Brandon Hughes. Welcome back everyone and welcome today. 300 of home quarantine or at least it feels that way. I don't know about you guys but I am going a little bit stir crazy. I know it's what we need to be doing and everyone out there is doing their best, but boy, Oh boy, everyone is just going a little bit nuts. I tell you what, social media is definitely helping me through this whole situation. The means that are coming out are top quality and today I wanted to talk to you about a tool that can help you make better social media posts, book covers, posters, banners, different blog headers, things for YouTube, video types of things, backgrounds for your zoom conferences.
Speaker 1: (01:11)
I'm sure many of you have been introduced to that or maybe it's something you've been doing for a while and you're teaching others. You've probably heard of this tool. It's very cool. It's a very popular, hopefully I'll share something a little bit unique and new with you today so you can learn something. For those of you that haven't heard of Canva while you're definitely in for a treat today, okay, Canva, canva.com what is it? What does it's used for? Well, if you were to ask me what it does better than anything else, I'm going to tell you right now, it does resizing and proportional things better than anything else. If there's one thing that drives me crazy, it's getting the right size for all these different type of images that need to be placed all over in the digital world. So whether you're doing a Facebook post, a Facebook header, maybe a Facebook icon image, they all have different sizes.
Speaker 1: (02:18)
Oh Lord. God forbid you go to Twitter now. Everything changes. It's different format. Go to Instagram. That's different depending on what social media platform it's on, it can be all over the place. Then you're going to get on your website. You want to do banner images, you want to do footer image images. You want to do images within your blog posts. If any of you are touching any of these points, you need to have Canva. This is probably the most used tool for any type of images, layouts that I use. If you take photographs and you have images already, Canva is perfect for you because the sizing, you can literally just go right in there and say, I need to put a YouTube channel piece of art together and it just pulls up the blank canvas in the proper sized format that that's probably, that's what I feel it does better than anything else.
Speaker 1: (03:16)
Is it sizes? Everything for you. Now I have the pro version and if you're, if you're touching images and you're resizing, things don't, the free version is awesome and I know a lot of people when I see them posting, they're like, all you need is the free version. Sure, yeah. All you do need it is the free version. And I use the free version probably for about two years before I kind of just ran into this situation where I said, you know, I really would like to be able to remove the background, make transparent images, and just a quick click. And now that I've done that, I've never looked back. So if anything, if you're on the fence about going to the pro version, just get it. And if after like three or four months, it's not worth it for you, then go back to the free.
Speaker 1: (04:10)
But the tools, it's just well done. It's just well designed. So. So let's talk a little bit about Canva and what you can do. So I, you know, I mentioned Facebook posts. If you're handy and you're, you've got good artwork or maybe some good photos, logos, you can go in there, they have all the logo layouts that you can imagine. There's just hundreds of them. Now, nothing beats a professional graphic designer of course. But for, you know, all of the things that you can do, if you get good at it, you can make some amazing quality type Lael type images type presentation, um, for whatever it is that you're working on. If you do flyers and you want to send them to the printer, you can, you can do that. They have flyer layouts in there and just really well designed for, when I'm talking layouts, I mean these are professional designers who, who've done things that say, Hey, here's an announcement flyer with some graphics, like a megaphone, and they have the way the font is lined up and the color contrast, and then you can jump in there and work with that template and change the color, change your wording and just kind of tweak it a little.
Speaker 1: (05:24)
So it's yours, but still carry over all of those professional design elements that went into the flyer. So these, these templates just aren't empty and they have a lot. So if you were to go into something like said a pre infographics, okay, let's talk about infographics. If you're doing blog posts, you're writing content or you're a content creator, you know that infographics is an important feature normally for SEO, but for share-ability and for gaining backlinks, infographics is an excellent tool to be using. On top of that, it's excellent thing to share if you're on the Pinterest platform. So infographics, if you go into the infographic section in Canva, they have hundreds of different infographic layouts. Maybe you want, you know, nice symmetry blocks going down. Maybe you want alternating blocks, maybe you want bullet points, different graphs, different ways of showing the information. So as you scroll through there, not only will you find solutions for the infographic you need to make, but you'll also find inspiration.
Speaker 1: (06:33)
And many times if I'm talking to a client about, Hey, you know, how are we going to present this? What can we do just by scrolling through Canva, my creative juices just get flowing because I see all these things and I know what's possible. And if you're not a professional designer, a graphics person or somebody who can convey that, it may be difficult to visualize. So by going through the templates in Canva, you can really get some inspiration. Now, uh, another thing that that's kind of new for Canada, Canva is they have a lot of animated social media templates in there. Now. Now what kind of animation am I talking about? So you have all of these templates or you have your wording in your images and et cetera, but maybe there's just a little section where there's a couple of stars that are blinking on and off just to kind of highlight, create a little pop, put a little motion into your social media posts.
Speaker 1: (07:30)
Uh, for anybody who's doing social media, you know that the competition is thick and to stand out you got to constantly be pushing that envelope. So definitely doing something where you can animate your social media is going to be, is going to be very nice. A cards that, a couple of different cards. One, these are cards that you would maybe do like a birthday card or um, you know, a mother's day card or Christmas card. You can go in and design these right here and you can send them off to the printers and get them done. You can also do your business cards from within Canva. I designed, edited, and printed my business cards directly on Canva. Came in, uh, wonderfully packaged. Came though the sticker, uh, all the information in there. And in fact, on my blog, I did a packaging blog post on how to do it right and I featured the can have a box that I got because boy that they do it right.
Speaker 1: (08:35)
That, I mean, that's a, that's a separate thing. But, uh, you can, uh, take a look at that. But yeah, business cards there. Here's a new one. Here's two new ones. One is videos. They've, they've been adding videos now these are short little video clips that you can put text on top, put other images on top. Again, adding some dynamic images into your social media posts. Or maybe you're, you're putting into a blog post, just hundreds of them. All different stuff from space to the vacation to health and fitness, whatever your topic, they have these things in there. Right now we're heavy with zoom because everyone's stuck at home with the Corona VI virus situation and they have all of these zoom virtual backgrounds, so you know, spice things up, do things a little bit different. Be a creative invitation, Pinterest pins, desktop wallpaper, Facebook events, email headers, blog, bounders, photo collages, resumes, brochures, newsletters.
Speaker 1: (09:38)
Let's stop on newsletters. So the past, I think six episodes that I did, I talked about all these different email platforms and then I did a recommendation on, on, on based on what you do, which ones to use within Canva. They have all of these professionally designed email newsletter templates and you could just scroll through there, pick the one you want, go in and edit it for the text. The layouts are amazing and it is clearly obvious the difference between a professionally designed template versus one that you might do in one of those platforms on yourself. In addition to that, like I said before, a lot of inspiration, a lot of creative ideas can come from going through these types of templates. So definitely something you want to check out. Oh and did you know that you can do tee shirts in Canva? Yeah, they're, they're doing little t-shirt designs in their postcards.
Speaker 1: (10:40)
Maybe you're a musician and yeah, you have some artwork. Cool photo of the band could design your CD cover in here. Oh, you're an author, you're a poet. Design. Your book covers in here and they have the templates in there so you can jump right in. Copy something that's already been in there and just change the text or you can get inspiration, but they have the layout and everything done. It's just amazing what Canva has done in here. I encourage all of you to check out Canva. If you haven't already. For those of you that do have Canva, I'd love to get some feedback from you and find out, you know, if you're enjoy using it as as much as I do, maybe there is another tool out there that can compete with Canva, maybe is doing a better job letting me know. I would be interested to hear about it. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard today, please rate, review and subscribe to this podcast. If you have a digital marketing tool that you like or you use, or even one that you've created, let me know in the comments or send me an email@brandonpokumarketing.com I'll see you on the new school flip side.
