Creating consistent content with Canva

For those who aren’t familiar with Canva, what is it?

It’s a graphic design platform that you can use to create social media tiles, posters, price lists, leaflets; pretty much anything you need for your business.  It’s very beginner-friendly and you can do an awful lot for free.  There is also the option to pay a fee and upgrade to Canva Pro, which will give you access to more features and design options. 

It’s an incredible tool for people who want to work on their brand, who don’t necessarily have the budget for a professional graphic designer. It’s perfect for hair and beauty industry businesses and professionals.  I speak to so many people in our industry who have just discovered Canva and are completely mind-blown by what it enables them to do.  Honestly, it’s absolutely incredible.

What is the key to mastering Canva?

Consistency. You must create consistency within your branding if you want to be noticed by your dream clients. If we take social media as an example, we are flooded with millions upon millions of different bits of information when we scroll through our feeds.  We see posts from brands, businesses, clients, friends. We see sales posts, information, news, cute puppies, funny memes.  We’re flooded by content.  And so are our target audience.

So, how do we ensure we actually get seen, and noticed, and remembered by our dream clients? There are a few steps to this, starting with actually defining who your dream clients are, and then establishing a brand, and brand messaging, that aligns with them. 

The second step is what we call ‘getting them to turn heads for all the right reasons’. 

And you do this by creating cohesive content that consistently uses the same colour palate, the same set of fonts, the same key messages.  

How do you ensure content remains consistent?

It really starts with honing in on colour and the vital role that plays within your branding. If we look at Timely, they have a very consistent colour palette. Timely’s social media, their website, their printed marketing, their brand activations; every single touch point has very consistent colours.  You instantly know that what you’re seeing is from Timely. 

You can set a brand colour palette on Canva, which will enable you to keep the colours consistent throughout your content. But the tricky bit can be actually deciding, and finding, the right colours.  How often have you seen a colour on Pinterest, Google, or Instagram, thought that it was perfect for your brand, but not been able to match it?  

The good news is that Canva has a tool that will do this for you. You simply grab the image that contains the colour you want and upload it to Canva’s colour generator, which then extracts the colours for you. It’s incredible.  

All colours are identified by something called a hex code, and the Canva colour generator instantly gives you the hex codes for the colours you want.  You can then take those codes and add them to your brand colour palette. 

Is it important to always use the same fonts?

Absolutely.  Establishing your brands fonts, and consistently sticking to them, is as essential as a consistent colour palette.  I really can’t overstate the importance of consistency in your brand and your content.  I highly recommend having absolutely no more than four fonts. More than that will make your content look inconsistent, and you’ll lose brand recognition. 

As with colours, you can set your brand fonts in Canva.  And, also like colours, it isn’t always easy to find the fonts you want. I’m often asked which fonts go together, and Canva has another fantastic tool that will helps with this.  It’s a font pairing tool that puts together great font combinations.  

Example custom Canva designs created by Digital Bloom for their clients in the past.

What are your top tips for using Canva to keep content consistent?

Set your brand colours and fonts in Canva’s brand kit, and stick to those colours and fonts throughout your content.  For ultimate consistently, use Canva to create templates that will ensure all your content is on brand and instantly recognised as yours. 

Visuals are processed 10,000 times faster than they are words. Consistent, eye-catching content is easily recognisable, it’s easier for the brain to compute, and it’s more likely to make you target audience and your dream clients stop scrolling and actually notice you amongst the flood of content being sent their way.