Canva Tutorial Improve Your Ad Creative

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As important as it is to make sure that you have all of the campaign settings set up properly, and you’re following best practices for your campaign, it’s also important to think about the user on the other side of the monitor. What’s going to be their experience with your company? One of the first things that they normally see is your ad creative. So it’s important that it makes the right impact.

If you’re anything like Joe and I, you’re probably not a creative designer. You would not want me to make your ads from scratch, they would be embarrassing at best. But the good news is we don’t have to come up with things from scratch, because there’s software that can help us with that.

In today’s video, I want to talk through one of those platforms that I personally use on a regular basis for my client accounts, as well as some of the things that we do on this YouTube channel, that’s called Canva.

It’s a platform that helps you easily create different creatives, video assets, all sorts of things that you can use in your digital marketing experience across the web. So today, I’m going to run you through the platform and show you how you can use their templates to start to get your ads looking better and better.

When you jump into your Canva account, and you can create one of those for free at Canva.com, this is what your homepage is going to look like. As you can tell, there is a decent amount going on, you’ve got all of your control panel stuff over here off to the left.

There’s a lot of different features, benefits, pricing options all that kind of stuff up at the top, and then we’ve got this also what will you design section in the middle. Just as a preface for this whole video, I’m only really going to focus on the two main benefits that I see for Canva from an advertising perspective, that’s going to be their templates and the ad builder itself.

But there is a world of different capabilities you can use within Canva. I’ve been using Canva for a number of years now, and I know I still have not gotten into all of the different capabilities it has, so I wouldn’t even be the right person to teach you about all of that. But even using my limited scope within the platform, it has been immensely helpful for all of the advertising campaigns that I’m running and that I use it for.

So as I mentioned, I’m going to focus on the two key areas that I think Canva excels in, and the first is going to be its template library because as I mentioned in the intro, I am not a designer. So it’s nice when designers can give me a starting point, and then all I have to do is customize it to my specific needs after that.

There are a number of different ways you can access the templates in Canva, first, you can use these little icons down here below, to filter the results that you see down in this first section. You can also type in anything specific. So let’s say we wanted to create a Facebook Ad, you could just type that in.

You can see here that there are a few things that have kind of a magnifying glass next to it like a search bar, but if you hover down, it does have Facebook Ad, and then it has dimensions next to it, which is 1200×628. If you’ve been doing this for a while, those are the horizontal Facebook Ad dimensions, so it’s a preset option.

There’s also a Facebook app ad which is already at 8/10 by 450, pretty easy. Let’s say we wanted to stick with the original Facebook Ad, I would just click on this. Now it’s going to take me to an entire template library of all these different Facebook Ads that we have available.

Very cool, but this is jumping ahead just a little bit, so I’m going to head back. So rather than starting from that Facebook Ad-only page, what I want to do is I want to actually head just into the templates section. If I hover over this, you’ll see that there are a number of different options available just from the start by hovering over the template section.

Social media, personal business, marketing, but I’m just going to click on templates, and that brings us here. Again, we have a search bar where we can start to look for certain things, but what I wanted to show is basically just what all these looks like.

Because I’ve been in here trying to prep for this video, I’ve been clicking on a bunch of things and kind of filtering around, so it’s starting me off with a section of you may like and it’s got a number of different stories ads that are showing up here. But as you can see I’m in the recommended section, right now their photo books are brand new, so they’re trying to post those.

But I’ve been in here a while creating Instagram posts, Facebook posts, I was using a presentation for a little bit, it’s a number of different things.

But you can start to filter by the presentation, social media, so if I click on that it’s going to narrow down to just Instagram posts, Facebook stories, WhatsApp statuses, Facebook covers, there are all sorts of different preset options it’s got in here even YouTube intros, YouTube thumbnails lots of different areas that you can choose from.

Rather than trying to show you all of it because that would take probably three hours by itself, I’m just going to click into one of these, and let’s just do Instagram stories. Each time you click into one of the preset options, it’s going to show you something that looks about like this, you’re going to get a little header section, then down below is where we can really start to narrow it down.

You’ll see that you can always start with a blank story, and we’ll get to that in a little bit or a blank design, but then there are lots of different options of templates that they have just pre-built that at any time you can click on, you can preview the template by clicking on the three dots, clicking preview it’ll pop up, and show you this.

You could then customize it, it gives you a little bit of information about what it is, you could start if you want to come back to it, for right now I’ll X out of it. But you can also come up here and you can start to filter if you’re not quite seeing what you want, but you know that there’s probably something good in here.

So the first thing there are a few sections up here, so if I just clicked Halloween, now it took me to an entire section of just Halloween Instagram story templates that you can start to customize, even though it’s got thanksgiving and all sorts of stuff in there. So that’s kind of cool, I’m going to go back to the previous page. Then we can start to use these filters on the left.

So depending on what your style or aesthetic is around here, you can choose from any of these different options that are available, so let’s say we wanted to go with abstract, and now it’s filtered all these different story templates for what it thinks are abstract, they may or may not be, but you know we filtered for it and it is what it is.

You can also filter for different themes, so depending on what you want to do here, you could do something that’s in the theme of pink which is interesting or something that’s on sale or in a fashion or marketing, let’s just do marketing and see what that looks like. So now these are what Canva considers marketing and abstract templates, which sure, I could see some of that.

But then you’ll also notice down here you can choose from different color palettes. So if for whatever reason, let’s go ahead and just ditch this abstract thing, because I feel like it’s limiting.

Now I’m going to scroll down and let’s find something that has some bright colors to it, so let’s find something that has orange in it, and now you can see all of the different templates that have popped up have orange in them because we filtered for that color. So it’s giving us as many different options as it possibly can for orange.

Let’s say we just want to use one of these, because I think that that shows you kind of how the templates work, now you can filter, find what you want because you don’t have to use these for exactly what they say they are, so this one says an online course for everyone.

If you adjusted this, you could make this something else that’s not for an online course, but you at least had the framework to start. So look at these templates as if it’s something that you want the layout, potentially the color scheme, the different effects, obviously, this one looks this way, this final sale one looks a bit different it’s actually a video when you hover over it, it’s got a lot going on. So you can even create videos in the Canva platform.

So for now, I’m just going to come up here and let’s just use this creative marketing agency, you know as a little dig on myself for not being able to do creative stuff. So then I’m going to come in here and click customize this template. Now we’re into the second part of the big benefit that Canva has, and it’s the builder itself.

If you’ll remember back a number of months, we have a video that talks about the un-bounce landing page builder and conversion rate testing platform, you can check out that video at the top of the screen right now if you want to. But the functionality between that platform and this is going to feel relatively similar. Off to the right is where we’re going to have the entire customizable section, to where we’ll actually be working on the ad.

On the left-hand side over here is where we have all the different tools that we can use to customize the ad itself. So again, I’m not going to go into every single tool that Canva has available, but I’ll at least try to show you most of the things that I find the most beneficial.

So the first you probably saw when I hovered over the creative itself, that each of these pieces highlights its own little field and you can see all the different components that create this different ad. So we’ve got the phone number is separate from this text, the button is going to be separate from contact us.

This next section here houses a lot of things, I don’t know exactly what’s in it. So if I just click while I’m hovered over this green box, it’ll highlight this area, and then if I drag it, you can see that okay, it was just this white piece that was on there.

But then that also means that this orange piece back behind it is a separate piece in and of itself. So they created that effect by layering different elements together, to create the first effect that they had.

One really cool thing about this is when you do what I’ve done, and you mess up your very nice creative, all you have to do is come back up here and you can click the back button twice and it puts it right back where it was when you started.

But that also shows you how easy it is to customize different pieces, all you have to do is click on it, move it around and now it’s in a slightly different spot than it was before. Every time you move things in Canva, it automatically saves them, there is no need to save things as you work on, it’s going to operate very similar to a Google doc.

Updating text is also super easy, you just click into the box and start typing. I just changed the text to paid media pros, I realize it looks a little bit silly on just two lines, so you just space it out, just like you would anything else. It still looks silly, but it’s at least in line with what it was before.

Let’s say you decide for some reason that you’re not feeling the orange anymore, and you want to change the different colors, you can just click on one of the different components here and come up to the color bar that’s available, and you can change the color. So we want to change it to yellow, that looks kind of terrible. You change it to this teal, that also looks bad. Or you could change it to navy blue, which looks somehow less bad. But also, a lot worse all the same time.

At any point, if you want a custom color, you can come up to this section here and then you can either drag and move this color around to wherever you want, to find a different component or you can type in the actual color code of something that you want. So let’s make it look even worse and make it a light gray. See? Like I said even, worse.

But each of these different fields is pretty customizable. Every time you click into one of the text fields, you’ll get all of the text components up here at the top, you can change it to non-bold, you can make it italicized, I know it’s kind of hard to see because I made this color terrible. So you could change the color of the text to be something different, so it stands out a little bit more.

You can also change the fonts into a number of different font families that they have available, there are a number of them, but you will see that as you’re going through the entire platform, there are going to be some things that will have this little crown next to it, and that means that you need to have a Canva pro account to use it.

I do have a Canva pro account, so those are showing up for me that I can use it. If you do not have a Canva pro account, this little crown over here is going to be yellow. You won’t be able to use those fonts, images, effects without upgrading your account, and we’ll talk about Canva pro here in just a minute.

To close out some of the ways that this builder over here off to the right works before we start looking at the things on the left, there are a couple of different options of how you can add new things over here. The first is that this little icon here means that you can duplicate the page.

So it’s duplicated the creative I had, so now we can create two different variants very easily without having to recreate the first one before we make a new variant. So this is something that I do quite a bit if I want to test different text in the ad, if I want to use a different image, maybe a different color scheme, this is a very easy way to create new variants of the text that you’re already going to use. If you decide that you really just don’t want what you just created, all you have to do is just click the trash can and it goes away, and now you’re back to your one variant.

The other option is going to be this piece here which is add a page, there’s also add page down at the bottom, and if I click on that, it’s going to give me a blank Canvas. Now we can do a number of different things with this, and we’ll start to talk about the pieces on the left.

So first is that you can choose a template from the builder itself because the templates are still available. You can see there are a number of them over here. As I showed you a number of these have pro available, which I would be able to use if I wanted to.

But if you don’t have a pro account, it basically will not download for you without the Canva watermark, which is going to look really silly if you try to advertise with that. But you can use a number of different pieces that also have video effects, all sorts of things. So this is going to be very similar to the template section that we looked at before.

But you’re also able to add things in from scratch whether it is a certain element, so if you wanted to add in a square, you’ll see here that this is free, so that is in the free plan and everything you hover over will tell you which plane it is. So this image here is for pro, that’s for free, these are also for free.

But each one of these different pieces that you have available here, let’s say we wanted to add in this hexagon, you just click it, drag it, you can then resize to whatever shape you want. You can put it over on the side here, and as you move through the space, it’ll give you an alignment that’s available.

You then come over here, click on this, drag it and drop, maybe move it someplace where you can actually see it, which is kind of impossible, because this design that I’m creating is very ugly, but just for showing you what you can do. Anytime you decide you don’t want something, it’s very easy just to X out of it.

But all these different components are pieces that you can drag and drop into the ad creative that you have. So it’s very easy to just pull this over here, put this in the background, highlight the whole thing, and then let’s say you wanted that orange hexagon on top of it, you could just take this image, right-click on it and you can send it to the back and now we have this ridiculous orange hexagon thing in front of a background image of a city.

But at least you can see the orange hexagon. So you can use these elements in a number of different ways. There are obviously different lines, shapes, graphics, photos, videos. But if you wanted to come in here and let’s just say you wanted to look for a logo, I clicked in the space and I already had the LinkedIn logo search for, because I’ve done that in the past, so let’s just go ahead and search for it now.

Now we have all these different versions of the LinkedIn logo that I can pull in here. A number of them are for free, so I can just take this in, and now the LinkedIn logo is part of whatever this Instagram story is that I’ve created.

You don’t have to rely only on the components that Canva has available, you can use your own uploads, which I’m not going to click into, because there’s going to be a lot of client-specific stuff in there that I’d have to blur out. But you can upload your own images, and then the functionality is the same.

They will show up in here off to the left, and you’ll be able to drag and drop them into your ad by itself. You can then add a number of different text elements, you can start off with a simple heading, subheading, or just a little bit of body text.

Or you can use all of these different goofy combinations of fonts and text and different color schemes depending on what you’re trying to do, so if you’re trying to put all this on sale and just drag and drop, we can then customize the color of it so maybe it stands out a little bit more. There, perfectly horrendous looking.

If you’re looking for anything specific at any point, all you have to do is search for the text. You can also search for different backgrounds that Canva has available, there’s a number that have been recently used, I’m going to go ahead and add a page just so I stop adjusting that huge mess that I’ve made on the last one.

Let’s say we just wanted to run with this one, just click and it automatically adds. It if at any point you change your mind, all you have to do is come over here, click the next one, and the entire background of whatever you’ve created will change based on the different image or gradient or pattern you’ve chosen.

So there’s a lot of different options that you can choose from here. Again, this is one of the biggest benefits to using Canva, is that it has all of these preset options available. So if you wanted to do something in space, you don’t have to go find that image it’s already in here, it’s already available for use and it’s easy to customize.

The last thing we have over here off to the left that I’m going to talk about are logos, and very similar to the uploads, this is where you would upload any of the logos that you would use for your different client accounts or your own business.

Again, I’m not going to click into that because all I’ll have to do is blur it out, and all the functionality is effectively the same of everything that we have here.

So now one more thing that I want to show you before I close out this video of these terrible designs, is that one thing that I always run into is that I create an ad that I’m going to use in one specific placement.

So we’re going to use just this only slightly uglier version of the ad up at the top that I create for an Instagram story. But let’s say I also want to use it for all the different placements around the Google display network. The problem is not all templates that are created in Canva for each individual size are created for all of the sizes.

So I currently have one for an Instagram story, but they probably don’t have one for the 300 by 250 dimensions that I would use on the Google display network. So in another tab, what I’m going to do is head back to my Canva home page and rather than choosing a template, what I want to do is come over here to custom size.

You can create a custom-size Canva design for whatever design you want just by adding in the width and the height of whatever components you want. As you can see down here at the bottom, I already have 300 by 250 created because I used one of those.

So I’m going to click on this and it popped me into an entirely new builder that has the dimensions that I want. You can tell that this one from the previous one, the dimensions are quite different.

So if I hop back into that original design, you’ll remember that there are a lot of different ad components that are in here. Each time I hover over it, it highlights different pieces. So my little hack for this, and I really do hate using the word hack, but you know, it is what it is.

Is if you come out here all the way to the left and you click, and then you drag over the entire design, you’ll see that it highlighted all of the different components that are there and let go, everything is highlighted. You can just click copy, however, you do that on your computer, then you hover back over into your other design.

Click on the space and click paste, and now all of those different elements are in this new design, and you don’t have to try and recreate it or find it in the template or do anything like that. Now I’m sure you’re probably saying yes, all those design elements are in here but they’re ugly.

Well, I got news for you, that other design had dimensions of what was it 1080 by 1920, this one’s 300 by 250. No matter what you do, it’s going to be ugly to start, you’re going to have to customize it. But at least now all the elements are in here.

So you can just pull this one up to the top, start to pull it this way, you can bring the text over here, you can make the text a lot bigger if you want to, maybe not that big, and then you can customize it to fit into the new space that you have.

Whenever you’re done putting together your design, and hopefully, you have something that looks much better than this, and actually, just for the sake of making this look a little nicer in the video, we’ll go back to this one.

So whenever you’re ready to download your design, you can just come over here up to the top, click download. You then get to choose whatever file type you want, I’m pretty much going to leave it on PNG, because it’s pretty high quality.

You can decide the size, so you can make it bigger if you want to, you can do a number of different things, and then you can choose the different pages you want. So obviously page 3 is just an image of space, page 2 is whatever abomination I made, and page 1 is a slightly less abomination.

So if I wanted to download all of the pages, I could just click the checkbox here. But if I wanted to download just one of the creatives, I can choose that and then click done and then download. Now, I have this ad creative downloaded in a PNG format that I can use to upload to any of the different platforms however I want and utilize it on all of my ad creative.

Very simple, something that looks marginally professional and it only took me a little bit to do it. It only took me about three minutes to make this thing look worse than the template when I first downloaded it.

As I mentioned at the top, I do not have time to go through all of the awesome things that Canva has available, but hopefully, I’ve given you at least some insights into how to find templates for the different creative sizes that you need, and then showed you enough about how the builder works, so you feel very confident getting in and using it. As I mentioned a number of times throughout the video, there are free and paid plans.

To close out, I’m just going to leave you on the screen to show you the differences here. So the free-forever has a number of different things available, lots of templates, lots of designs, graphics, images, you get five gigabytes of cloud storage. You can have some members to your team and you can collaborate.

The pro plan is what we have, and it has a number of different capabilities to make the platform just that much more user-friendly, and that much more powerful, especially for small teams. You get everything that the free plan has, but then you also get a lot of the stock photos, more templates, you get a number of different brand kits, which is really helpful when it comes down to building lots of different creatives for lots of different clients.

You can save a library of all of their custom brand colors so that you don’t have to always go in, look up the hex codes and add them in every time you create a new design. They’re just saved in Canva, and you can click from one brand to the other extremely easily, it’s really helpful.

You can also customize images a little bit better by removing the background, you can resize things. You get a lot more storage and you can actually schedule posts from Canva.

So right now it’s got the price up here, it’s 120 bucks per year, it’s also as low as $13 a month for up to five people. It’s very affordable, especially for the value that you get out of it. If you can charge people for doing their creative, this could be a really big return on that investment for you.

You can get a free trial of the pro platform or you can just use free forever. But if you do check out Canva pro, I would love for you to use our affiliate link. It is partner.canva.com/paidmediapros, we’ll have it in the show notes down below. But every time you sign up for Canva pro using our affiliate link, we get a kickback and it makes it that much easier for us to keep creating these videos and keep bringing you different tools like this or showing you how to use the platforms.

But even if you don’t use the pro plan, Canva free has lots of different capabilities and can make it so much easier for you to start designing and putting together a lot better creative for your clients, and really make a good first impression on their target audience, and get better performance out of your campaigns.

Written by Michelle Morgan