Unlocking the Power of Canva for Effective Brand Management

When you partner with a creative branding agency like Quill, you might be surprised when we suggest using Canva. After all, we’re professional designers, right? Doesn’t that mean we should be using the big guns like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator?

Our brand designers are masters of those industry-standard tools, crafting stunning visuals that make your brand shine. But we see Canva as another branch on the tree of professional tools, and it’s quickly becoming the go-to choice for many companies when it comes to in-house asset development.

At Quill, we’re all about empowering you to take the reins of your brand, and Canva provides a user-friendly platform that makes on-brand design accessible to everyone. Whether you’re a bustling enterprise with a team of marketing managers or a small business on a tight budget, we want to give you the tools to create on-brand content without needing a designer on speed dial.

7 Ways Canva Makes Brand Management Easy

1. Canva Keeps Your Brand Consistent

Consistency is king when it comes to branding. In today’s world, where people have higher expectations of brands than ever before, consistency is key to cutting through the noise and making sure your brand is recognized. Luckily, Canva makes it easy to stay consistent. By setting up brand kits and templates and aligning them with your brand guidelines, Canva ensures that everything you create looks and feels cohesive.

2. Canva Is Easy to Use

Canva is designed to be user-friendly for both designers and non-designers alike. Its intuitive interface makes it easy to use, even if you don’t consider yourself design-savvy. Plus, its mobile app means you can design from anywhere, whether you’re using a phone or a tablet.

3. Canva Is Great for Quick Projects

Not every project requires the full graphic design treatment in Photoshop or editorial layout in InDesign. Canva is fantastic for quick tasks—like social media posts, announcements, or flyers—and frequently used collateral—like sell sheets and presentations. By setting up templates for these pieces, you can quickly create new content as needed. Canva allows you to be nimble and respond to real-time needs without a lengthy design process.

4. Canva Has Powerful Brand Kit Options

When you work with a creative branding company to build or refresh your brand identity, you’ll get a full Brand Guide—a comprehensive book that lays the foundation for your brand’s identity, including things like strategy essentials, visual essentials, and application examples.

When you have a Brand Guide in place, setting up a Brand Kit in Canva makes it easy to be consistent and ensure that everyone working on your brand assets is on the same page.

With a Canva Brand Kit, you can set up and share templates, add assets like photos, logos, and icons, and establish a consistent look and feel with designated fonts and colors. You can even set up a brand guidelines document with direction from your brand guide for quick reference on the platform, ensuring that everyone, from seasoned designers to new team members, knows exactly how to stay on brand. 

5. Canva Has a Wide Variety of Tools

While Canva may not offer the full power of more robust professional design software, it provides a great selection of tools that make it easy to create high-quality content without a steep learning curve. You have access to a vast selection of stock photos, videos, and audio files, plus simple editing abilities like the background remover and magic eraser, which can elevate your designs and give them a polished, professional feel. 

6. Canva Makes Collaboration Easy

Teamwork makes the dream work—and so does Canva! With Canva, you can add multiple users and set permissions, ensuring that while designers can access all the brand kit templates, only designated brand managers can alter them. You can work with your team to build on ideas using comments, keep sync sessions on track with a timer, and easily share templates. Sharing a link to your document allows you to control your team’s access and manage feedback efficiently, streamlining the approval process across departments.

7. Canva Makes Scaling Your Brand Easy

Let’s face it—your brand is going to be big! (We believe in the power of positive thinking here at Quill and, of course, the power of our work.) As your brand grows, Canva templates enable you to scale your brand seamlessly. With templates and guidelines already created, you can maintain a consistent and professional brand presence and manageable workflow, regardless of how much your business expands. 

How Quill Leverages Canva to Help Your Brand Succeed

More and more often, our clients are asking us to show them how to use Canva. And here at Quill, we’re all about empowering you to take ownership of your brand. We believe in giving you the tools and confidence to use your brand to its fullest potential, and Canva is an excellent resource for doing just that.

The first step is getting Canva Pro. If you anticipate using Canva frequently to manage your brand, Canva Pro is a must-have and a great investment. All the powerful tools and features we’ve mentioned throughout this blog are available with a Canva Pro subscription.

During the brand identity development process, Quill will prepare a hit list of collateral items to showcase in your visual identity presentation. If we know that you plan to use Canva, we’ll flesh out your full Brand Kit, assess what types of collateral make the most sense to create in the platform, and create templates and assets right inside Canva for you.

Once these are in place, we can share the templates with the appropriate people on your team or even with other outside marketing partners you might work with.

To make sure you’re comfortable with the tools, we will even provide tutorials and walk you through the process of using the templates.

To help you start off on the right foot, we recommend that you share your Canva creations with us for the first month or two. This allows us to provide some art direction and guidance while you’re getting comfortable implementing the rules established within your brand guidelines and the Canva platform. During this time, we can also answer any questions you might have about your brand guide and help you understand the finer details of your visual identity.

The goal is to ensure that you feel confident using Canva and that your brand stays consistent and strong across all your content. That’s why we’re here to support you every step of the way, helping you learn and grow as you take charge of your brand.

Interested in learning more about how Quill can help you manage your brand and maintain consistency? Let’s chat!