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Putting brand through the business: how Canva is removing friction

Facebook’s Zero Friction Future interview series, reveals how omnipresent design platform, Canva, has created a business “railtrack” to reduce internal friction for organisations to keep up with the exponential demand for quality visual assets. 

People-focused marketers are well aware of how unforgiving today’s customers are when the purchasing journey isn’t completely seamless, and often these same points of friction hamper productivity within organisations, as well.

Australian businesses lost out on $43.4bn1 because of friction in the customer journey in 2018, according to Boston Consulting Group analysis, and a recent study of more than 200 CMOs by Forbes Insights2 saw efficiency, customer experience and technology listed as the top three issues marketers face today.

Clearly, delivering more seamless experiences for customers and staff is a high priority for many businesses, which is why Facebook has created tools such as Instagram Shopping, the business collaboration tool, Workplace by Facebook, and opened up Messenger for brands to allow easier communication with customers.

As part of a commitment to helping spotlight how to overcome these barriers, Facebook is highlighting best-practice examples of businesses which are leading the way in tackling such problems head on.

This includes the Zero Friction Future interview series in which global futurist, Anders Sörman-Nilsson, speaks to CEOs and CMOs from Australian businesses about  the innovative ways they have ironed out both customer and business friction.

A recent interview with CEO and co-founder of Canva, Melanie Perkins, shows how making branded design as easy and accessible as possible can increase productivity, decrease turnaround times, eliminate potential PR disasters and bring out the creative genius in employees company-wide.

“In an age where personalisation and emotional connection is vital to reach and retain customers, marketers simply have less time to put out more messages. When their workplace user experience is good, and branding is easy, they can place more focus on the content of those messages,” Sörman-Nilsson says.

Canva, which has gone from startup to billion-dollar design powerhouse since 2012, and currently houses 700 employees, has been long known for bringing its fast, easy design platform to the world; and is now taking this same ease of use to marketing teams through its business platform, Canva for Enterprise, which enables the quick creation of beautiful – and correctly branded – content.

See this interview, and get more resources to help start removing friction from your business processes, here.

“To me design is actually about communicating ideas,” Perkins says. “And so, with Canva, we wanted to enable everybody to take their idea and communicate it easily, and simply have no friction between those two points.

“A design team is often there having to do design for the entire organisation, and they are often quite a small team with way too many demands. With Canva for Enterprise, the design team is able to get so much more leverage by helping everyone in the company achieve their goals much more rapidly.”

Perkins explains how the product enables everybody, from employees to franchisees to agencies, to work within design “railtracks”, with locked design templates ensuring they have all the assets – such as fonts, images, layouts – they need to create an effective on-point design. Brand managers can then use the software to approve designs before sharing them among teams.

Sörman-Nilsson describes Canva as a “unicorn” and points out that the “unmatchable UX” means employees using it at home, will struggle to bring their best creative game on inferior software in the workplace.

“The ubiquity of the software also allows for greater global collaboration with external and international partners,” Perkins says. “It's really exciting to see this, and to enable people to have software that enables them to create templates the entire company can use.”

With CMOs under pressure to move into new technology such as AI, VR and AR, the stream of content and multitude of adaptations grows exponentially. But from an ROI perspective, a solid branding identity and the ability to churn out vast quantities of enticing digital content on the existing well-used platforms should probably take precedence.

A 2019 survey of 190 marketing influencers on Digital Marketing Strategies by Ascend23 revealed “increasing customer engagement” was seen as the most challenging barrier to success, followed closely by “improving result measurability”.

So rather than maintaining the heavy load currently placed on overworked design teams, it makes sense to enable staff across teams company-wide to produce and reproduce on-brand visual ideas and share them.

Sörman-Nilsson also explains how Canva for Enterprise enables greater measurement of results when these designs are pushed out on social media such as Facebook and Instagram. “Digital tools are enabling us to essentially digitally democratise the design mindset and enable a new era of design,” he says.

See this interview, and get more resources to help start removing friction from your business, here.


Sources:

  • Boston Consulting Group Data Analysis, Mar 2018; Exchange rate used as $1 USD = $1.49 AUD from XE.com, Sep 2019
  •  “The Modern CMO” Report by Forbes Insights and The Trade Desk, 2018
  • “2019 Digital Marketing Strategies” Report by Ascend2, Oct 2018

 

 

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