In our daily lives, we often feel the need for several kinds of graphic materials. Especially with the increasing trend of showcasing lifestyles on social media, the demand for photo editing tools and different attractive templates is higher than ever. Other than personal needs, professional needs are also there, for example, an attractive logo for your business or an informative CV on a well-structured template for your next job.
Now, being untrained in graphic design, which is most of us, imagine doing all these things on traditional software like Adobe or Corel. What will happen? While these softwares have their own benefits, they are not actually meant for laymen. Either it will take a lot of time for you to understand the complex editing tools, or you will give up and call up an expert friend to rescue you. Besides, most features of these software can only be used after purchasing a subscription.
In the early 2000s, Melanie Perkins identified this problem while teaching graphic design to students. She understood that while there is a huge demand for graphic materials, the field is highly restricted for professionals. At the same time, she also identified the absence (gap) of a platform that will democratize creative expression without requiring a lot of learning or expense. Hence, Canva was born with an initial investment of $3 million.
What is the Status of Canva Now?
Founded in 2013, in only ten years Canva has successfully acquired 125 million monthly active users in over 190 countries and the current net worth of the company is $39 billion. Canva has reported that its annualized revenue generation is about $1.7 billion US dollars with a growth rate of 21%. These are some impressive stats of Canva that every startup dreams of achieving.
But how did Canva achieve this magnificent feat of being a global giant in the graphic design industry from a small Australian startup?
Being a startup ourselves, we definitely want to know Canva’s method to success, so we dig deeper to understand Canva’s business strategies. And whatever we unearthed is presented in this review.
Read ahead.
Freemium Model: A Brilliant Move
“Give and it will be given to you.”
This biblical verse worked perfectly for Canva when it launched with the freemium model. What is it? We are familiar with the word ‘premium’ which means that you have to lighten your pocket to purchase attractive and useful features or tools on other design platforms. Canva took the opposite direction by offering their core design functionalities for free, along with paid features. This rapidly acquired users across professions, skill-levels and geographies. Canva’s optimized both the free and paid tiers to align tightly with their varied target user base’s priorities. Non-designers prized simplicity and convenience, while professionals valued sophisticated tools and capabilities more.
This huge user base then acted as a funnel for converting free users to paying subscribers for premium features like photo editing, custom brand templates and presentation tools.
Canva Community: Driving Loyalty
The Canva Design Circle is an online community platform that allows users to showcase work, follow each other, share design tips and provide support. Features like user profiles, notifications for new followers, the ability to like and comment work, and join groups facilitates meaningful interactions between Canva users. This has created vibrant spaces for users to connect, collaborate and learn from each other.
These community interactions have tangible business impacts for Canva. Engaged users drive viral marketing by recommending Canva to others leading to higher referral sign-ups. Most importantly, the relationships formed within Canva’s community initiatives fosters a strong attachment to the brand itself. As users invest time interacting with fellow Canva users, they begin identifying personally with the platform, its culture and its vision. This brand advocacy shows up powerfully on social media and organically amplifies positive messaging about Canva’s tools and capabilities.
This mix of social bonding, peer support and prestige makes Canva users intensely loyal brand ambassadors. By proactively nurturing community engagement, Canva’s has built an army of fans that drive growth more powerfully than any traditional ad or marketing campaign.
Educational Initiatives: Fostering User Retention
Democratizing design by empowering non-designers has been a foundational pillar of Canva’s mission, with their suite of educational offerings playing a key role. Through blogs, videos, tutorials and webinars, Canva ensures that anyone can leverage their tools to communicate visually. By building users’ core visual literacy, Canva enables even complete beginners to navigate basics like custom graphics, presentations and photo editing. On the flip side for experienced designers, classes on leveraging Canva for tasks like social media marketing, infographics and portfolios maximizes their productivity with the tools.
This focus on education-driven empowerment fuels greater user independence, ownership and engagement with the platform. By investing in their community’s design fluency, Canva sees higher user retention as well as conversions to paid accounts for more functionality.
Additionally, the knowledge sharing helps forge an emotional connection built on trust and goodwill. Canva moves beyond being just another software provider to being seen as an ally invested in user interests. This drives brand preference and loyalty especially among non-designers who appreciate Canva’s democratization mission.
International Expansion: Hybrid ‘Glocalization’ Approach
Key to Canva’s ascent as a global design platform powerhouse has been rapid overseas expansion across both developed and emerging markets. But entering radically different cultural contexts posed marketing challenges that needed localized strategies tailored for individual market needs.
For Western countries like the UK and Europe, Canva emphasized individual empowerment messaging that resonated with more independent-minded audiences. But in collective cultures like India and China, community-oriented branding highlighted how Canva helps users make their compatriots proud through great design.
There were also product and pricing strategies adapted to local economic realities. For example, offering student discounts for campus ambassadors in India helped seed adoption in price-sensitive youth demographics. While in China, WeChat integration and partnerships with tech giants like Alibaba and Baidu provided access to their expansive built-in user bases.
However, Canva’s most successful global growth driver has been facilitation of organic, community-led localization. Users across non-English-speaking countries have led the creation of localized interfaces by volunteering translations of menus, tutorials and blogs. This helped Canva feel less foreign especially in countries like France which actively protect language purity.
Allowing community-sourced adaptations aligned perfectly with Canva’s branding as an equalizing, borderless design platform for all. This hybrid ‘glocalization’ approach balancing global messaging with locally optimized touchpoints continues powering their international ascent.
Partnership and Integration
Vital to Canva’s expanding ecosystem have been mutually-beneficial integrations with other major platforms like Google Workspace, Dropbox, Getty Images, Salesforce and many more.
Canva’s relationships have shown to be advantageous to all parties concerned. Businesses who work with Canva may take advantage of its design tools to produce visually stunning content that appeals to and engages their target audience. Conversely, by incorporating Canva’s design tools into their current platforms, Canva’s partners may provide a more extensive range of services to their clients.
For example, Hubspot users may create and distribute visually appealing content straight from the Hubspot platform thanks to Canva’s integration with the platform. Similar to this, Pandadoc users can generate and submit proposals, contracts, and other documents with eye-catching graphics thanks to Canva’s interface with Pandadoc.
Canva’s partnership with Google allows seamless access to Canva directly from Gmail, Docs and Google Slides enabling easy imports of existing content into fresh Canva-powered designs. Similarly, the Dropbox hookup facilitates retrieving files and saving creations to cloud storage without exiting Canva. The Getty Images and Salesforce deals respectively provide direct access to photo/video assets and customer data within Canva workflows. This amplifies creative possibilities and productivity without disruptive context-switching between apps.
Canva’s partnerships have been instrumental in its global growth by enabling it to expand its reach and offer a more comprehensive suite of services to its users. With Canva still in aggressive growth mode, an expanding alliance network that harmonizes capabilities for end-to-end visual communication needs will continue fueling adoption. With so much design and branding work involving multiple moving parts, Canva’s partnerships philosophy is key to dominating the future of visual creativity.
Conclusion
Canva’s success story is a testament to the power of a user-centric approach. By prioritizing user needs and fostering a vibrant community, Canva has democratized design and become a global leader in the graphic design industry. Also notable are the company’s international expansion, integration, and partnership strategies. Canva’s story is a guideline for startups on how being user-centric can reap enormous benefits.
That’s all for now. We are going to post more such exciting case studies in the coming days. Stay tuned and use our comment section for your queries.
