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12 Canva Tips for Small Businesses
Are you a small business owner that can’t afford a graphic designer but needs GOOD marketing material to help your business grow? Well stick around! I’m going to share with you my top 12 Canva tips and tricks that you can use to grow your small business. To preface, most of these tips require you to have Canva Pro, which I highly recommend.
What is Canva?
Canva is a graphic design software that offers free or Pro plans for full access to their easy to use designer software with thousands of ready to use templates. Content creators are able to create and sell templates that are created and edited in Canva, and thousands of these templates are available right in the Canva website. There are so many things you can do with Canva, but the basic use is very simple. These Canva tips will help you up your Canva-game and make content like a pro!
BY THE WAY: I have a free Canva template for a Pitch deck available here! If you’re interested in that, you may also be interested in this blog post about how to build a pitch deck for your small business!
Canva tips for your small business
- Use your Brand Kit!
- Save your favorite templates.
- Save your favorite elements, too!
- Find more good stuff!
- Refine your search.
- Spice it up with text effects!
- Create a simple Reel.
- Lock it in place.
- Tidy up real quick.
- No background, yes please!
- Remove photo backgrounds.
- Get styled!
1. Use your Brand Kit!
The brand kit is number one on this list for a reason… it’s a life saver! The Brand Kit, found on the toolbar on the left side of the Home screen, allows you to upload branding material to keep it uniformed across your designs. You can upload logos, fonts, and color palettes for your company. My favorite part is that you can add multiple color palettes so if you have multiple businesses or clients, you can organize everything in Canva. You can access the components within the Brand Kid within any design you start on your account.
2. Save your favorite templates.
If you really love a template but don’t need it right not, that’s okay — Canva let’s you “like” a template and access it later! You can always access them through the “Folders” tab on the left side of the screen under the “Likes” section. To like the template, hover over it and click on the three dots in the upper, right-hand corner. From there, click “Add to Likes” at the bottom of the panel.
3. Save your favorite elements, too!
Canva also allows you to do the same thing with Elements. You also have the option to add the element to a folder instead of liking it, which lets you organize the elements. These work the same as the Templates from Tip 2: click the three dots, click the action you want, and access them through the “Folders” tab.
4. Find more good stuff!
You know how you’ll find a template that you love and you wish you could have an entire set of it? Well, chances are, you can! Most of the Canva Creators have tons of incredible graphics available to use. If you want to see all of their graphics, just click the three dots in the upper, right-hand corner and click “View more by…”. You’ll be taken to a branded search which gives you all of the designer’s available templates.
5. Refine your search.
You are able to apply color and language filters to any Template search. You can even click the color searcher and put in the HEX to search for your brand colors specifically. All you have to do to access this is click on the filters icon in the search bar.
You can do this for Elements as well, but they have animation and availability, instead of language, as filters.
6. Spice it up with text effects!
If you follow us on Instagram, you may have noticed that we love to use text effects. They add a little bit of *spice* to any graphic.
All you have to do to use an effect is add text to your graphic and select “Effect” from the top toolbar. A panel will open on the left side of the screen with effect options. Once you have an effect selected you will be able to edit things like the color, direction, transparency, and more.
7. Create a simple Reel.
This is probably my favorite tip because it’s such a time saver. For those days you’re not feeling ‘camera ready’, you can create a Reel right in Canva.
All you have to do is click “Create a Design” and search “Reel”. You can either select “Instagram Reels Video” or “Instagram Reels Video End Frame”, depending on what you want to make. This will determine the templates you are shown.
Once you open the design and go into the Templates, you’ll see a ton of pre-made Reel templates that you can fill in or customize to your brand guidelines.
PRO TIP: I personally love using the End Frame, which I make 1.5-2 seconds at the end of my Reels. It’s a super simple way to include a Call to Action in your Reel.
8. Lock it in place.
Aren’t you tired of putting text over a background design and then messing it up completely? Yeah, me too. Luckily, Canva lets you lock anything into place with the click of a button. Select the object you want to lock in place, and click the lock icon in the top-right corner of the screen.
Keep this in mind: you can unlock objects at any time, but you do have to unlock them one by one, so it can be time consuming. I recommend only locking background objects you won’t be editing again so that you don’t have to lock and unlock things too many times. Also, you can not edit the color when an object is locked.
9. Tidy up real quick.
This tip is so satisfying. If you’re like me, you genuinely believe that your designs are never straight and centered. Canva has a “Tidy Up” tool that straightens and evenly spaces out your objects.
10. No background, yes please!
There’s a super simple way to find images without backgrounds on Canva. When searching in the “Photos” tab, perform your search as normal but add “cutout:true” to the end of the search.
Example – “flowers cutout:true”
11. Remove photo backgrounds.
Canva Pro makes it super easy to remove the background of just about any picture. I’m talking “one-click easy”.
Here’s how you do it: select the photo you want to remove the background from, click “Effects” in the top-left corner, and click “Background Remover”. This will load the Background Remover, which gives you two brush options: erase and restore. Only use these if some of the background is still there or part of the subject is missing. Once you are happy with the results, you can click “Apply” and use it within your design.
PRO TIP: These are great for social media graphics and Reels cover photos.
12. Get styled!
I love this feature! This allows you to see all of your brand elements in one place, along with ideas for new, trending combinations. It includes colors and fonts so you can always stay up to trend! In this industry it’s super important to stay up to date and this is a super easy way to at least look like you are.
Now you know all the best Canva tips for small businesses!
Let’s review!
- Use your Brand Kit!
- Save your favorite templates.
- Save your favorite elements, too!
- Find more good stuff!
- Refine your search.
- Spice it up with text effects!
- Create a simple Reel.
- Lock it in place.
- Tidy up real quick.
- No background, yes please!
- Remove photo backgrounds.
- Get styled!
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