It’s no secret that Canva has become a valuable tool for individuals, businesses, and organizations looking to design a large range of assets without the necessity for expensive design software. Its exceptional user-friendly interface makes it a beneficial tool for those without any advanced design skills.
Since our last Canva blog, 6 Reasons You Should Be Using Canva Pro to Make Your Social Media Content, Canva has been hard at work developing countless new features, including the Video Editor and Animation Tool. With Canva, you can create social media graphics, ads, ebooks, and now you can create videos, animations, and websites.
While a well-designed static ad can get your audience’s attention, video and animation generate a much higher engagement rate and performance across social media. We’re happy to share some reasons why you should use Canva’s Video Editor and Animation Tools to start uplevelling your social media ad campaigns.
Limitless Creativity that Stands out From the Rest
An animated clip captures the user’s attention in a fraction of a second and delivers your message 60,000 times faster than text. Viewers today don’t want to look at an ordinary static graphic, they prefer watching videos or animations that tell compelling stories. In fact, data shows that people are spending more time watching videos online than ever before. With videos and animations, people’s attention is captured instantly, and they are able to digest visuals miraculously faster than words.
By designing animated or video ads, you have unlimited freedom in how you craft them. Canva’s animation styles, transitions, free assets (such as graphics, photography, footage, and fonts) along with a compelling color palette, help share your story or message to your audience in a much more impactful way. Animation and video also allow for more flexibility when it comes to telling your story. When crafting an animated ad, for example, you are able to convey longer or more complex ideas easily by breaking them up into segments.
Simplicity
When it comes to static graphics, it’s important to follow the ‘less is more’ rule. You may have experienced a time when a client wanted to squeeze too much text onto a small square ad. This is a surefire way to overwhelm the graphic and the viewer; but with video and animation, you are able to convey longer or more complex ideas easily by breaking them up so that it’s easier for the viewer to digest.
Perhaps you don’t have any branded video footage, but you have a decent library of branded photography. With Canva’s Video Editor, you’re still able to create animated ads by creating a slideshow from photos you already own. This is still a great way to create a more immersive experience like animation or video when video footage isn’t available. Slideshow-style animated ads also work great if you need to reach folks with slower connections as it uses much less data than videos.
Great Value for the Money
Believe it or not, Canva Pro offers a lot of the same services the more high-end and expensive design programs have for almost half the price.
Some top reasons why Canva Pro is also worth the money is because:
- You have access to more than 60 million stock photos, videos and elements and more than 5,000 premium fonts (with the ability to upload your own!).
- Access to countless pre-designed animated templates to help get you started.
- Offers an unlimited amount of folders to help keep everything organized.
- Collaboration with team members.
Fast and Efficient
Not only do you get a lot for your money, but using Canva Pro can actually save you time when it comes to sourcing elements such as photos, videos, or illustrations separately. Everything you need to build animations or videos are already offered to you directly within Canva.
With the launch of Canva Pro’s Magic features, Canva also helps cut your design time in half.
Here are some of our favorite features that help you design quickly and efficiently in Canva Pro:
- Magic Shortcut. By clicking your backslash key (/), Canva gives you quick access to a range of frequently used elements, such as adding text, logos, shapes, tables, etc.
- Background Remover. With the click of a button, Canva will automatically detect what needs to be removed in the background. This is a Canva Pro feature that we use extensively at JB Media and it’s especially useful for creating social media graphics.
- Magic Resizing and Quick Create. If you need to adapt your design to fit specific dimensions like social stories or a print flyer, you can easily adapt your design to fit any format quickly. More recently, Canva started offering a feature called Quick Create, which allows you to create designs for multiple formats simultaneously, showing you your design in different formats all in one place.
- Advanced Search. Within the editor you can narrow down your search to find exactly what you are looking for. You can filter your search by color, static, animation, orientation, or transparent background PNGs.
Now that we’ve shared with you some of our favorite features and secrets in Canva Pro, it’s time for you to try it out for yourself. Need help getting started in Canva for your next social media campaign? We would love to hear from you.
