Canva Is Going After Enterprises & Agencies With New Collaboration Tools

Canva, beloved by freelancers and educators, has enterprises and agencies in its crosshairs for the next stage of its growth.

The company announced a range of new AI and collaboration tools that will make it a far more serious proposition and rival to the likes of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of tools.

Speaking to B&T, Canva’s chief marketing officer, Zach Kitschke, explained that while its Canva Create event overlapped with the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, it was not “intentional.”

“We had our first Canva Create six months ago in September and we had such an incredible response. Following that event, we launched the Work Suite, and we’ve set out to do it again.”

However, while the business had previously leaned into its community of creators to create “virality” about its product with users “creating content and sharing their excitement about new features,” the next stage of growth will require a level of departure.

“We just rolled out our latest campaign in the US and that really showcases the Canva Visual Suite in all its capacity. The interesting thing for Canva is that we really grew up as a consumer product. In many people’s minds, they love and use us for a specific use case. It might be social media content, or the kids using it at school or the invitations for an event,” said Kitschke.

“But over the last few years, the products have just evolved so much and we hear time and time again that people haven’t realised the breadth of what they can do and, when they do realise, it changes the game for their workflow.”

At Canva Create, the company announced a raft of new features that would broaden that repertoire even further.

A new Brand Kit feature lets users create a Brand Kit with logos, colours, fonts, icons, imagery, graphics, and brand guidelines. All the assets will be stored in Canva, meaning employees will never have to scramble around for the right assets.

Similarly, a Magic Replace tool uses machine learning to let teams instantly update their brand assets across the whole company. We’ve tried this out already and it certainly seems very useful.

Pre-loaded brand templates can let staff quickly make on-brand visual content. Brand folders, meanwhile, can keep assets and projects organised. Brand guidelines can be automatically and contextually surfaced within the editor — so creative directors can ensure no one deviates from their beloved brand.

Brand controls let admins limit fonts and colours from the editor, while approval workflows can mandate that all designs are reviewed and approved before being published.

“We hear time and time again — particularly from creative teams that they spent all this time crafting a brand but the handover point is still this 200-page PDF brand board that the rest of the organisation struggles with,” explained Kitschke.

“With the Brand Hub, we are empowering creatives to set up a living, breathing version of the brand book with colours, fonts, logos, and guidelines all in one place.”

Of course, that’s not to say that enterprises and agencies have not been using Canva.

“There are over 2 million teams using Canva for brand management and things like that,” said Kitschke.

“Everyone from Zoom, who adopted Canva during the pandemic and had their creative team roll it out to help with their teams creating content, through to Marriott Hotels, Reddit, and Expedia with their rebrand. There has been this adoption by brands, so it’s more about telling that story. The latest campaign shows teams using our products and highlighting some of those teams-focused features and functionality.”

However, there is a fly in the ointment. Canva’s success to date has been remarkable, which CEO Melanie Perkins gladly reminded us about. The company is expecting 1.5 million people to join Canva Create in offices around the world and from their computers at home. In fact, it even managed to add an extra ten million users in the last 30 days.

But, targeting agencies and enterprises will require convincing these large businesses, with hard-nosed accountants, institutional inertia, and existing systems will not be as easy as spruiking to freelancers.

“It’s a really important part of how we’ve been thinking about building products. I spent about six weeks in the States at the beginning of the year, spending a lot of time with my peers — other CMOs, chief creative officers, agencies, as well,” said Kitschke.

“With Brand Hub, we’re allowing you to bring in all your brand assets. You can import your existing file formats in Photoshop, Illustrator, PowerPoint, even PDFs and it will convert them instantly into a Canva format.

“Something I hear from agencies a lot is that it’s not just their own preference for tools, but they’re actually needing to use different tools with different clients. One client might be on Google Slides, another might be on PowerPoint or Keynote, or even on Canva. The important thing for those agencies is that there is this interoperability.”

And, while many of Canva’s new features are based on AI and machine learning, the company is steadfastly refusing to jump on the bandwagon. Instead of AI for AI’s sake, it is still focused on making sure users know that the tools are, above all, useful.

“With new technologies, we always view them through the lens of what it enables us to do for our community to make the design process easier. We’re really conscious that people don’t come to Canva to use AI. They come to Canva to achieve a goal, whether it’s delivering an amazing class or winning new business with a presentation or putting on an amazing event,” said Kitschke.