Canva Review

Introduction

Canva promises to be an all singing all dancing marketing app that can help small businesses and sole traders to create marketing materials. Those marketing materials can be used on a variety of differing platforms or shared in differing ways. As a result, Canva can make swift work of creating a marketing email blast out as well as Instagram, Twitter or Facebook posts - to name just a few. Importantly, due to the collaborative aspects of the tool, Canva can help ensure consistent branding for a company, as well as help cement that branding with easy to use tools that can help a brand be more cohesive and well rounded in look.

Price

• While Canva has many free features, its Pro plan starts at £99.99 a year

Key Feature

• Templates and stock photo library making designing marketing materials quick and easy

Key features

Canva has three main products that a person or company can utilise. It has its free package, its Pro package and its Enterprise package. It does have two other means to access its tools - through its Education and Not for Profit packages. These final two can only be bought or used if your firm meets certain criteria. For example, Not For Profit requires users to be from a charitable organisation.

Its free package is certainly worth trying if you are new to marketing. It has over 250,000 free templates and over 100 design types that can help you create social media posts, presentations, letters and much more - very quickly. The free package also allows you to access hundreds of thousands of photos and graphics for free as well as the ability to invite members of your team to help collaborate or comment on your creation. This tiered package also comes with 5GB free of storage.

The next tier, Pro, helps to make design even easier for you with unlimited access to more tools and even more content than Canva’s free package. With Pro, you have an even bigger library from which to access stock photos, videos, graphics and audio in addition to almost three times as many premium and free templates to use for your marketing campaigns. New designs are added on a daily basis.

Additionally, with Pro, you can easily save and apply your brand’s colours, logos and fonts which can make creating a ‘one brand’ look so much easier. You can also remove image backgrounds instantly with its Background Remover tool or resize designs in an infinite number of ways with the Magic Resize tool too. Finally, the last few notable features that make this stand out from the Free tier is the 100GB of cloud storage, the ability to save designs as templates for your team to use and the ability to schedule social media content to 8 platforms. This package costs £99.99 a year and can be used by up to 5 people.

Enterprise, in comparison, can be used by a minimum of 25 people at once and costs £24.00 a month. It has everything Pro has plus the ability to set Brand Kits where you can establish your brand’s ‘visual identity’ through effective and consistent use of the right logos, colours and fonts. Importantly, Enterprise can limit and control what graphics, colours, logos, fonts and apps your team has access to, to further ensure your company stays on brand at all times. Plus, Enterprise has built in workflows which require approval for designs before they are uploaded onto your company’s dashboard. From there, you can set what elements of designs your team can edit, yet again helping your company stay on brand at all time. Enterprise comes with unlimited storage, single-sign on and 24 hours a day, 7 days a week support.

Conclusion

Canva’s strength comes from turning technophobes into effective marketing and brand generators thanks to its easy to use tools that help people become designers immediately. It means you can save time and money which can be better spent elsewhere. Its tiered packages also ensure that you can access a product that is best for you and that you can gain the most value for money from. It integrates easily with other apps so that it can be further leveraged in a number of ways. Its power is therefore far reaching and has helped make it one of the most popular marketing apps and tools currently available.