A question that we get asked a lot by our clients is, how do you create professional looking images for your social media posts and your blogs?
It can get a little pricey if you have a graphic designer that’s creating every single image for your digital marketing strategies. Every social media image, every Pinterest image, every Instagram, every blog. And so, we wanted to talk to you today about a tool that we use for our clients called Canva.
Reasons why you should use Canva
It’s affordable
The one thing I really like about Canva is, it’s really affordable. Now we’re talking about your social media posts and your blogs.
If you are needing images for your website, your branding materials, we highly recommend working with a graphic designer, and a branding expert to really pull in that voice. Once you’ve worked with a branding expert, you usually have a set of thoughts and brand colors that then you wanna be able to incorporate into your social media posts and your blogs.
With Canva, there is a free site and a paid site. I think the paid site is only, $14.95, and I highly recommend it.
Maintain brand consistency
One piece with social media is really to make sure that you have that brand consistency. So whether they’re looking at your website mobile-y, on the computer, they have a brochure, a business card, social media posts, they know that it is your practice from your brand’s colors.
If you look at any large company, they follow through with that. Their TV commercials to their promotional products, their social media, their website, everything has the same look and feel. And that’s exactly what you want to do with your social media marketing strategy.
You can also upload your brand kit, which is really cool, because like I said, we have those brand colors, those brand thoughts and we want to make sure we have the right logos. So, we can upload the logos in here. You can upload the exact brand colors and your brand thoughts.
In every image, our three brand fonts are gonna be this playlist correct? This one the playlist here and then Raleway. And so on each of our images for our blogs or our social media, you’re going to see one or all three, depending on the text of these fonts. You’re also going to see our brand colors.
Now, if you look on our website, you’re going to see more of these teals and the light mauve and beige. Sometimes what we have is aspect color, so we have a logo that is this yellow and this teal and that helps kinda just make up that image pop, but it’s still within our brand’s color, so we may not use this orange all the time, but we may use it as an aspect color on one of the images. So this is a great way to really stay true to that brand that your design team have put in place.
Create images for your digital marketing
The other thing with Canva is, if you click on Create A Design, they have every size you need. So this makes it really easy. You can do a poster, a logo, a card, you can do brochures, but most importantly, you have all of your digital marketing templates in here too. You have a YouTube cover. You have, if you need help making your Twitter header the right size, or your Facebook page, but most importantly social media.
So, the social media template is what we use for Instagram and for Facebook, it also does work on LinkedIn. Canva does link to Pixabay. So there’s free images in here and there are paid images.
Resize images for you
The one thing that’s also really good about Canva is you can resize them.
So let’s say you want this image you’re doing and you did a video to go with it, but you want to resize it to the YouTube thumbnail. You can click resize and you can either create a custom size Pinterest, you can type in YouTube, so this can be the YouTube thumbnail. It will look just like this, but in the YouTube thumbnail size.
So it’s going to be easy to upload, keep that brand consistency, and not have to recreate that image. Like, okay, what size was this? What did I have here? It does all the hard work for you. So that is a great tool.
Free ready to use templates
So, with Canva it will tell you if something is free, or if you have to pay for it. And they have by categories too. So if there’s something that specific that you are looking for, so let’s just type medical and they have all these different templates already in here.
Now some of them are free and some of them are paid for. One thing that I recommend if you’re looking at, let’s say you love this template, but it is not free, you can purchase it. They’re usually between $1 and $5 and then you can re-use them, but you can also create that image by yourself without having to pay for that template.
How to use Canva
This is my favorite part of social media, creating the images. It’s also the most time-consuming because you want that image to be perfect.
And so, what I always recommend and what we do for our clients is we create different templates. So we may create 7 to 10 different templates for that client. Let’s say these are the recent ones I’ve used, and so, they’re all gonna be within these 7 to 10 templates with their branded colors, their brand fonts and we rotate that.
Choose a template
Start by choosing a template. So let’s say we want to use this one – It’s world day for safety and health at work today.
So sometimes, this is the National Nurses Day, happy National Nurses Day, so sometimes they already have templates in here, and you can come in here and just change the brand colors, so we can just change this to the colors that we would have for our client.
Make necessary changes
As I have said earlier, we can change the colors to suit our brand colors. Then, we can add our logo on to it. We would change the content here, so if we wanted to change this to an accent color, but then keep this message, we can do that, or we can take out this content all together and put in our own content.
Edit texts
Now, the fun part of the text. So February is National Heart Month, so let’s add in this. So we wanna make this larger, so they have obviously different sizes that we can have, maybe I wanna make this really big, and then do this. And then National Heart Awareness Month. And let’s make this larger. So I’m using my brand colors and I can move that content wherever I want it.
So we go back to that template that we liked, we have the content here, maybe we want this to align with that there, and then we wanna have, we want this to come up a little bit, and then we wanna have in our just like our website down here, www.heartplus.com whatever your website is. We want to bring this down here with maybe some contact information.
Pick an image
Now, we obviously need something here. So you can type in a keyword. It will show you that these are the paid ones. If you click on to here, it will say free, and then you can apply filters.
So you can pick any image that you want. And again, this is where it can get a little time consuming, so you do have to play around with this a lot because it’s important to know how to search for the different images.
Play around with templates, images, and texts
I also like using ones that have the image in the back with the text overlay. I think that those are very clean and you just want to make sure that whatever your brand message is, whatever that message is, you just make sure that this image is clean and easy to read.
So maybe you’re talking about healthy eating. So again, you can just drag this image over on top of the image that’s already there and it will automatically replace it.
So now, you can change out your content here, you can change the background color if you want it to be one of your brand colors, you can do that.
Save the image for future use
So all you have to do is come in here each month when you’re creating your content, and there’s two ways of doing this. If you come back to the main page here and you go to all your designs, you can copy this design for each week.
Let’s say February is National Heart Awareness Month. And so then now you have created this template. So then next month, all you have to do is come in, change February to March and put in whatever March’s National Awareness Month is.
Change out the logo if you need to, or move it down here, add more content, or contact information. So now we have two templates, so we’re going to do the same thing. We’re going go to add new page and go to templates again. Now, if you didn’t like any of these, you can use any of these that you want and change it around.
I always like to be able to look back at the images and especially if you need to make a change, you don’t have to re-create that image all over again. So you can come in to here and you- can, the templates that we have created right here, we can then just click this and do make a copy, and then you can label them every week.
So week of February third, week of February 10th, and then you have five or seven templates in here with the content, so you can just download them.
Canva has templates based on holidays
Again, I would take some time with this to really look at which templates you like. Are you doing a lot of testimonials? Testimonials are a great way to promote your practice. So maybe something along these lines, you can do something like this where you have the testimonial here with maybe pictures of the staff that, that patient is talking about, there’s a ton of different templates in here and the thing with Canva is they’re always adding new templates based on the holidays.
So if you wanted to put out a Happy Valentines Day, you’ll find some templates here. Even if you want to use this template, you can change these colors to your branded colors. And so that’s a really great way to still have that, those posts that are, Happy Holidays, Happy Valentines Day, Groundhog Day, whatever you wanna talk about, but still keeping that brand consistency.
So take some time scrolling through here to really figure out which templates you want, and you don’t have to always just use those 10, maybe you have a brand template of 20 of them.
Final thoughts
Canva is simple, it’s fun to use. It does take a little bit of time in the beginning, but really once you have those brand templates down, it’s just changing the content and being able to download those and implement them in your social media strategy.
If you need help on how to create your branded templates or if you would like help with the management of your social media marketing, we are here for you. You can head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com and schedule a free 30-minute consultation, and we would love to see how we can help you with your digital marketing strategy. Have a great day!