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9 Creative ways to use Canva to elevate your digital marketing

Ashley Doan

Before Canva for digital marketing, marketers relied on expensive design software like Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator for their graphics and documents. However, with Creative Cloud access costing over $1,000 annually, many smaller businesses needed an alternative.

Canva is that alternative. It’s a free (with paid subscription upgrades) cloud-based design software that is easy for beginners and professionals. At $150 per year, Canva is the price-conscious alternative, with perhaps even better features than the Adobe suite. 

In this article, we’ll share 9 creative ways to use Canva to elevate your digital marketing in 2025. 

But first, the difference between the free and paid tiers

Many start with the Canva Free plan and can get by with that subscription while they test the software and even beyond. The free version includes a small sample of free images, templates, and other content. For more free content, you’ll need to subscribe to the first paid tier or pay a few dollars to purchase elements a la carte.

The Canva Pro tier includes all images and templates (and there are a LOT). You also have access to create “Brand Kits” to set your colours, fonts, and styles so they’re consistent across your materials. You also have access to other premium tools and content.  

Whether you choose free or paid, you can use Canva for digital marketing to create all kinds of material, including:

Even with all its impressive capabilities, you don’t have to use every one. Here are a few ways you can use Canva to elevate your digital marketing deliverables and processes:

1. Using templates for inspiration (then make your own)

Canva has thousands of professionally designed templates that you can use. They make choosing a template easy. Simply customize them to your brand by changing the colours, brand elements, and content. They’re great if you’re looking for some inspiration to get started on your own designs and templates. 

2. Ensure brand consistency in digital marketing with Canva’s brand kits

It kills us when we see a brand being inconsistent in their collateral branding. They don’t have consistency in fonts, colours, styles, and content, and that’s NOT the way to build brand recognition and trust. 

Canva has a great feature that allows you to set your fonts, text styles, colours, and logos in the app. Then, when you create a new doc, you can apply or insert these branding elements into your canvas. It’s a great way to remember your brand elements and create on-brand content with every design. 

3. Creating (and resizing) social media graphics

It was the bane of your designer’s existence to create multiple sizes of the same social media graphics to appease every social media account. Now, with your Canva paid subscription, they only have to make your images once. With the press of a button, Canva can automatically resize every page of your graphic to match the ideal size for any social media platform. 

Now, they can create multiple versions of a social media ad, each with the specific height and width required by each platform. 

4. (Correctly) sizing templates for every use in Canva for digital marketing

Another design struggle is remembering the dimensions of images needed for all your content. With Canva, search for the image you want to create (like a Facebook page banner or iPhone background image…etc.), and it will create it in the right size for you. 

There are probably hundreds of pre-sized documents (and templates) for every imaginable use, including:

5. Creating engaging presentations through Canva for digital marketing

Death by PowerPoint is a thing of the past with Canva presentations. Design from scratch or using their templates. These engaging presentations can be presented directly within Canva. You can also easily share the link with others to contribute, share a link, or the presentation into other formats like images and PDFs. 

6. Designing stunning proposals and docs

Does your business create proposals and other documents? Imagine creating a proposal template or a lead magnet in a Canva document with their fun (and professional) graphics and content. You can make a template for any document you need then fill it with boilerplate content and placeholders. 

Your professionally designed project proposal will look great in comparison to your competitor’s version done in a Word document. And, with document templates from Canva, you can save so much time, too. 

7. Editing video with Canva for digital marketing

While not a complete video editor, Canva includes helpful tools for working with and exporting short videos. We love using it for social media videos! You can clip your videos, add overlays, and include music from the Canva library or your own collection. 

8. Creating a lead magnet, digital course, or ebook

Canva recently launched a new feature to create online courses! Don’t spend hundreds of dollars on another learning management system (LMS). Try using your Canva subscription to create and manage simple online courses or digital workshops. 

You can also write and design a professional ebook within Canva. They have so many templates and styles to customize and use. 

9. Whiteboarding your meetings

Virtual meetings are great for those who need flexible schedules. However, they can make collaborative notetaking or brainstorming difficult. 

Canva includes a handy whiteboard feature that you can use to brainstorm ideas or take notes for everyone to share during meetings. Start with a blank canvas or use one of their cool templates to create content including:

Did you know picnic uses Canva?

The picnic team loves using Canva! We use it for our business marketing and to help our clients by producing consistent, professional content for their digital marketing. Another reason we love it is because it supports business continuity. For example, if Gabriel (our graphic designer) is away, we can still access graphics and make changes on our own when needed. 

It’s also been a helpful tool for us to share our strategic plans and other content. Canva has been a helpful tool for us and our clients, and we know you’ll love it, too. 

Did you find this article helpful? Visit our blog page for more insightful marketing strategies.

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